Stay the fuck away
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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I'm trying to get away from Facebook and meta. I'd rather they weren't remotely near me at all
Exactly my thoughts, I don’t trust meta or zucky’s leadership, their motives will always be profit over everything else
we shouldnt let them in. they would have done decentralized service years ago if there was money in it for them. They either want us to stop or try to seize control in only way that can -> by worming in.
We must have zero-tolerance for corporations or we might as well just give up.
We must have zero-tolerance for corporations or we might as well just give up.
As long as servers cost money to run, corporations will need to be involved.
At a fundamental level, it's either
a) run by donations as a non profit, but as we've seen from wikipedia it will be a constant struggle to have enough money to last indefinitely (especially since Reddit / kbin / lemmy cost a lot more to run than Wikipedia)
b) run by subscriptions, which will greatly limit growth, reach, search engine optimization, etc.
c) run by advertising in which case corporate ad networks (like the kind that Meta runs) will need to be involved or
d) have instances that are government run / paid for, but it would be difficult to accomplish on a global scale and may come with restrictions that not everyone is happy with
It sucks but those are pretty much the only four options for running a digital community that requires paid servers and hosting space. Either corporations or some large government organization are going to have to be involved.
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They're trojan horse. We can't stop them from creating their own servers, but we can choose to defederate them. Up with the Anti-Meta Defederation Pact
People are being really hypocritical.
You want a free open source social network. But when people you dont like join it, you hate it. That is not how it works, its not how FREE in FOSS works.
Meta can join, they can do whatever they want. It literally the point of this social network. If you dont like it, then go to a social network that is not FOSS, but is heavily moderated, because that is what most of you really want.
"Freedom" can be used to justify lots of really bad stuff. Meta has too much money to be trusted, they WILL fuck the Fediverse up eventually for more profit on the first chance they get (and people with lots of money always get those chances).
And it's not just about morality and the fucked up stuff that's happened on Meta, Iike the Cambridge Analytica scandal. I stopped using Facebook years ago because of the low quality of the content being posted there. And last week I logged back in to sell some stuff and oh boy, the content managed to get even worse.
I don't want growth just for the sake of growth. We don't need big corporations getting involved.
Nope. Just nope. It'll be the death of the Fediverse.
I mean everyone could just not federate with them, right?
keep corporations OUT
Nope. Money will buy blood.
Meta is a corporation with a really horrible track record
and even if they didn't, it's still a corporation; it only cares for profit
I have very negative opinions on them joining
We would be opening the door to allow a large corporation to do what they've done with open source for a while. They'll privatize the public commons.
But all this work [GPL licensing] was ridiculed. Microsoft, through Github, Google and Apple pushed for MIT/BSD licensed software as the open source standard. This allowed them to use open source components within their proprietary closed products. They managed to make thousands of free software developers work freely for them. And they even received praise because, sometimes, they would hire one of those developers (like it was a "favour" to the community while it is simply business-wise to hire smart people working on critical components of your infrastructure instead of letting them work for free). The whole Google Summer of Code, for which I was a mentor multiple years, is just a cheap way to get unpaid volunteers mentor their future free or cheap workforce.
Our freedoms were taken away by proprietary software which is mostly coded by ourselves. For free. We spent our free time developing, debugging, testing software before handing them to corporations that we rever, hoping to maybe get a job offer or a small sponsorship from them. Without Non-copyleft Open Source, there would be no proprietary MacOS, OSX nor Android. There would be no Facebook, no Amazon. We created all the components of Frankenstein’s creature and handed them to the evil professor.
This article is actually pretty great.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-19-more-rms.html
And for emphasis:
We created all the components of Frankenstein’s creature and handed them to the evil professor.
That's a great piece - thanks!
I think we should let them consume Fediverse content but not create it.
If Meta proposes to let Instagram users follow people on Mastodon or whatever, that seems like a reasonable compromise - they get to keep people on their feeds viewing ads and we get more reach - but they shouldn't have the power to leave and take a large % of Fediverse content with them; if you want to make a post, you need to do so from a non-Meta-controlled instance in a non-Meta-controlled app.
Makes no difference to me. Those who believe they have privacy just because Meta and others don't yet have their own instance are mistaken.
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I did my senior college paper on the fuckery that Facebook and Meta has caused and how harmful their data collection has been to American society. I will stop using any services that are bought up by Fuckerberg.
I do not want them in the fediverse and will not tolerate them for a second. The moment they form an instance is the moment I block their instance.
Fuck. Meta.
Corporations already joined the federated internet when they adopted the web.
Even if they wanted to, they can't take over the entire fediverse, that's the point.
That's what they said about the Web back in the 90s and early 00s. Back then we all said "companies can't take over the entire Web. If they tried something, anyone could just make their own site." But they didn't need to prevent others from making a competitor site; they just needed to make theirs take up a big enough piece of the pie. Now look at what at we have to deal with with the Web as it is today...
All they need is to make their own instance, and then get it big enough, and it'd be virtually no different than more traditional websites. Sure, anyone can make their own instances or communities, but without the hardware to prop up thousands to millions of users there's no way anyone could compete with a company-sponsored instance past a certain threshold of critical mass.
And they still have not taken over the web. There's plenty of places online that are not under corporate control, look at any piracy site for example, or even 4chan. People willingly choose to use corporate services, but those corporate services are not the only places to go.
Technically true, but the majority of people are not that technically savvy nor interested in seeking out comparatively obscure platforms. Most people on the Web go onto corporate platforms or corporate - sponsored platforms. That also means that even a lot of the people who would normally seek out more comparatively obscure or out-of-the-way platforms are forced by dint of practicality just to keep in contact with friends and family, a lá Facebook Messenger.
As I said, they don't need to take over the whole web to domimate the web, just a large enough piece of the pie. Sure, it may be only 99%, but practically speaking that 1% won't functionally exist for the vast majority of people, even to those who would otherwise seek it out.
I view them embracing federation as a good thing.
I also view it as important for the instances I wish to follow to never federate with them.
But is it even possible for a mega corporation to embrace federation? Isn't that essentially a contradiction in terms?
It's the kind of embrace a boa constrictor wants to have with a rabbit. The answer always needs to be no.
Screw meta.
A major company seeing the competitive advantage of joining the fediverse is a great development. I don't expect Meta to act in good faith, but it's an accomplishment nonetheless.