cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/181146
I am assuming many of you have heard about the potential of Meta creating an ActivityPub enabled client (TheVerge, PCMag etc. have made articles). I was just wondering what people’s thoughts are on this, and if it came down to it should instances in the fediverse defederate from it considering it could be a case of Embrace, extend, extinguish.
There’s a DefederateMeta magazine at [email protected] if you’re interested, which includes an anti-meta pact on cryptpad with the responses viewable on a seperate website if you care to see which instance admins have agreed.
I’m just curious what my fellow sh.it.heads think of this development in the fediverse, any input is appreciated!
Reposting at the request of can, within the context of c/agora should this instance defederate from any future Meta activity pub enabled clients? From my understanding it is more so a Twitter-clone and I’d argue a more severe problem for Kbin / Mastodon, but it is still worth discussing here.
I’m not sure? I went to the magazine and read through the magazine and the gist of the arguments for defederaton are basically
1 - it’s Meta. They’re a privacy nightmare, actively abuse their users and (some of their) employees, and are playing an active role in the enshitification of the Internet. I’m relatively new to the fediverse, to what extent does federation open up non-users of the Meta instance to their tracking? I suspect it’s quite a bit, but what’s stopping these big companies from scraping fediverse data already?
2 - Meta platforms have moderation issues, abuse, hate speech, and incitement of violence is a problem on their existing platforms, and a similar cheap approach to moderation will occur with their fediverse attempts as well. I have reasons to be a bit more familiar with Meta’s moderation but can’t really discuss because I’m not sure my NDA has expired yet… it’s not an ideal situation and everyone already knows that. But this instance is currently federated with instances that embody the same awful shit Facebook is currently known for, and an argument in Facebook’s favor is that their platform isn’t explicitly encouraging that kind of nastiness even if they use algorithmic methods to ultimately end up in the same place.
Meta getting into the fediverse presents an opportunity for some good communities to show some small positive sliver of what exists elsewhere in the fediverse and could be a way of gaining users that otherwise wouldn’t have seen what exists here. But, while I see some upsides to federating with the Meta instance, ultimately I don’t think the opportunity presented here to grow the fediverse is worth Meta’s inevitable exploitation of the users and community as a whole.