So, recently some fediverse admins (mostly Mastodon) and the founder of Mastodon, Eugen Rochko (Gargron), where contacted by Meta/Facebook for an NDA meeting. We know nothing about it, but we’re pretty sure that it was about this project92 thing that Meta/Facebook is creating to “compete” with Twitter.
So a lot of Mastodon admins already singed a pact to immediately block any Meta/Facebook activity in the fediverse as soon as it comes up. My Mastodon instance, fosstodon.org hasn’t singed that pact and I’m pretty worried.
The following image is an screenshot of Gargron and dansup (creator of Pixelfed) talking about this. These posts were deleted, even from the wayback machine.
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Nobody in their right mind trusts Meta. What they call a “meeting” is nothing more than an unpaid consultation. They want to pick brains for free. That’s all.
What do the invitees get out of it? Some carefully chosen information that may not even be true, which (thanks to the NDA) they won’t be able to talk about anyway? A mediocre lunch? A demonstration of Meta’s “awe-inspiring” metaverse technology? Please.
On the other hand, you could attend the meeting and offer nothing of value, thus wasting meta’s time and energy and getting a free lunch. Honestly might not be worth it tho, since you’d be wasting your time.
A free lunch in exchange for an hour of bullshitting? Seems like a fair trade.
I’m too busy for that to be worth my time, but I understand I’m in a place of significant privilege. Then again, if it was like zoom I could just leave it on in the background and mostly ignore it probably.
Was gonna write a long-ass comment about this, but I think I can be concise in this case: Fuck Meta.
To me, the introduction of Meta to the fediverse means exposing everyone to a large poorly moderated community that would ruin the current culture of the fediverse. The best way for people to protect themselves from the inevitable onslaught of hate/prejudice/threats, the kind that’s typically found on Facebook but somehow “not against community guidelines”, is to preemptively block the upcoming instance. As for the NDAs, they are a great way to sow distrust within our own instances and try to tear us apart.
Only my personal opinion. Seems very odd that they would sign an NDA. The deal is that when two companies meet it is more common that both companies will say that they do not want to exchange confidential information. There might be exceptions to that… but generally one should always say NO. Then only consider if there is a very good reason.
Other thing I would say is that NDAs have a scope. So you cannot really evaluate the NDA unless you read the document and know the scope. Could have been very limited scope.
“Then only consider if there is a very good reason.”
Like money?
No, that would not be a good reason for me. Generally I would want to discuss everything you could without an NDA. Keep in mind most of the time receiving confidential information is more of a concern then disclosing it. If I then determined I need an NDA, then maybe it is better to have a JDA (Joint Development Agreement) that specifies how jointly developed IP is going to be handled. I am speaking very generally.
In this context maybe the concern would have been business plans not patentable IP for example so maybe they wanted an NDA solely restricted to the business plans of the company and maybe it could be worded very narrowly. Not sure how I would react to that. It would have to be very tightly worded and passed in front of my attorney.
I agree, only crackpots who are afraid of having their unoriginal ideas stolen ask for an NDA for a meeting.
The only thing I can think of is that META is afraid of people finding out how desperately they are trying to stay relevant.
The other reason as someone else pointed out that might be going on at the meeting is a $ amount for a contract of some sort. Companies often want to such business agreements confidential, especially the $ amounts.
I don’t know that it’s much of a reason to panic.
I expect they’ll defederate themselves when they move to ActivityPub in order to make it look like it’s not “part of some larger network”, a lot like how TruthSocial is basically a Mastodon instance.
Obviously, we don’t know much about what was said or signed, but I really doubt it’s anything super concerning.
This reminds me a bit of when people discover who contributes a significant amount of code to the Linux kernel. Google, Microsoft, Intel, etc.
As much as I hate Facebook, they’re not dumb when it comes to software. React has significant adoption and Zstd is a great compression algorithm, which they also developed in-house.
And while they weren’t involved, the lead designer of Btrfs worked on a lot of it while he was at Facebook (I think they now also use it as their primary filesystem, I don’t remember).
Basically, relax. Everything’s going to be fine.
There’s no reason for Meta to use ActivityPub and then immediately defederate. They’re trying to build a Twitter competitor, and they know they can’t with an empty service.
ActivityPub gives them access to content immediately. And they’re clearly meeting with large instance owners in order to ensure they won’t just block them. They don’t need the small sites to be on board, just the ones with 100s of thousands of users.
Once they have drawn a large enough number of prominent Twitter users and a good following of normies, they can take or leave the rest of the network.
Maybe there may well need to be a financial relationship tool. The major instances will have costs associated with Facebook users if federation happened. They could simply say, you pay your way we will not block you.
One issue with the Fediverse is someone has to pay. All the users coming from Reddit right now. They should be donating to their sites to cover the huge influx. It costs money.
I would hate that enough to switch instances over it, I think. That meeting could be over anything from being about tracking users across sites, to an offer to pay the admins to stay federated with some Facebook ActivityPub project, to asking the admins to add sponsored posts or comments, to a request for free advice from the admins about the fediverse, to trying to recruit the admins to go work on some other Facebook project. I don’t know. But I can’t imagine this ever being a good thing, when it comes to that company - I don’t touch anything they run. And putting an NDA on just an initial meeting is sketchy as heck - even unenforceable NDA’s are used to threaten people all the time (see: Weinstein, etc).
I’m on mastodon.social, and considering where to move now
So am I. I don’t want to be a part of any instance that federates with Meta. Do you know where I can find a list of pact members?
Sounds troubling. But not all of their actions turn out to be completely nefarious, and this could represent a genuine effort to contribute to the next generation of infrastructure. The emerging network protocol appears to offer an opportunity for both non-profit and commercial ventures.
I’m not particularly interested in anything that Meta/Facebook has ever created. Everything that this company has made or touched has been horrible/dangerous/terrible for everyone and I don’t think that this isn’t the case. Also that article that you linked is behind a paywall ._.
I get this is the fediverse and we’re supposed to hate big tech and all, but this “everything Facebook has done is evil” is objectively wrong and such a Reddit take. Facebook’s biggest problem has always been the people that use their products spreading hate and misinformation and their lack of moderation at their current scale, a problem that every single social media has hit, including the fediverse (i.e. Beehaw defederating with lemmy.world). And honestly, with governments refusing to take a heavy stance on regulating misinformation should it really be up to tech companies on what can and can’t be shared on their platforms? Then there’s data leaks like Cambridge Analytica, but that was a ticking time bomb, because data privacy back then wasn’t a concern anywhere. I’ve worked in the data industry for a decade now and it was the fuckin wild west back then lol.
And then there’s the good shit they’ve actually done. The article you replied to (not behind a paywall for me for some reason?) talks about how they open sourced their LLM AI for research purposes. Their data center designed were open sourced to help other data centers hit net zero carbon emissions (they’re a huge contributor to the Open Compute Project). They’ve open sourced a ton of tools/languages as well.
WhatsApp is still fully end to end encrypted messaging and they’re pushing the same on messenger now (their WhatsApp site even has a whole section for local law enforcement telling them they can’t provide message data, a huge plus for Americans given recent abortion regulations).
Their targeted advertising has rightfully gotten a lot of scrutiny, but there’s a lot of misinformation behind it, like “Facebook is listening to my calls” and “Facebook is reading my message data”, which they’ve denied and there’s no actual evidence of. I have family with small businesses that wouldn’t have made it through the pandemic without their advertising platform.
I don’t think that they have any place in the fediverse, honestly I’d be surprised if they wanted in on it anyways, but in my mind they aren’t any more evil than any other corporation and the “Facebook is straight evil” attitude is just an attempt for Redditors to feel superior about their social media corporation choice.
If I were to guess this meeting was probably a job offer if anything lol.
Edit: Lol scratch that last bit, looks like Meta is coming to the fediversee - https://reb00ted.org/tech/20230310-meta-activitypub/
Facebook’s biggest problem has always been the people that use their products spreading hate and misinformation
Facebook’s algo drives this. It’s a choice that they’ve amplified this content.
The article you replied to (not behind a paywall for me for some reason?) talks about how they open sourced their LLM AI for research purposes.
Can’t comment much on this one, so I won’t.
WhatsApp is still fully end to end encrypted
still because wasn’t it like that when they bought it?
they’re pushing the same on messenger now
Now, as in, they didn’t design it that way to begin with because it wasn’t the profitable thing to do. They have to compete with iMessage, and further, they gain just by being able to tell every cop shop “sorry can’t do it bro.”
Their targeted advertising has rightfully gotten a lot of scrutiny, but there’s a lot of misinformation behind it, like “Facebook is listening to my calls” and “Facebook is reading my message data”, which they’ve denied and there’s no actual evidence of. I have family with small businesses that wouldn’t have made it through the pandemic without their advertising platform.
Glad your family made it. Unfortunately, though, this is the masses not understanding how technology these days really works. They don’t have to read your messages or listen to your calls because they’re doing that all over the web and through their own users. The truth is more nefarious because for most people “listening to my calls” is scrutable, while adding tracking cookies across the web or computing social graphs based on your contact info being shared without your consent by a few of your friends, or doing some ML on every photo shared is not.
I don’t think that they have any place in the fediverse, honestly I’d be surprised if they wanted in on it anyways
Agreed.
If I were to guess this meeting was probably a job offer if anything lol.
Disagree. Fediverse and it’s growth as it stands now is not good for Facebook, so they’re trying to head it off at the pass. I’d be willing to bet this meeting was a feeler for them and I hope Eugen and others are smart enough of to say basically nothing, and they’re continuing the grand tradition of embrace, extend, extinguish.
Is Meta evil? No. They’re probably not a standard deviation away from any other org in terms of how many are “evil” but their incentives today all align to a worse outcome for humanity. It’s kinda worse - it’s a collection of incredibly smart people compartmentalized enough from the “evil” the org does. Actually, don’t know that I would say “evil” so much as “sociopathic.”
Meta should get no passes, and be met with absolute scrutiny related to the fediverse.
Keep in mind XMPP had similar sorts of activity back when chat apps were the rage, and in the end the protocol was added to Google Talk (now dead), AIM (now removed), Facebook (now removed), and Skype (now removed). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP#Non-native_deployments
I suspect existing orgs will want to contribute just as long as it takes to steal users and build a garden, that they can then wall off.
The Silicon Valley way of doing things is “growth at any cost”. Of course Meta wants in on what might turn out to be the next big thing. Of course they want to use money and power to dominate the protocol, insert all sorts of monetization, and ruin the whole thing. And when it doesn’t work out because they’ve done the same dumb shit that already ruined Facebook and Reddit the protocol will have been destroyed and rendered useless. Meta goes back to Facebook and Instagram while the entire Fediverse project becomes defunct.
This is the history of these companies. Thankfully “fediverse” is not something Meta can just outright buy and then destroy, but they can still throw their weight around with cash and the enshittification will quickly ensue. The Fediverse needs to resist. It’s hard to say no to money, but VC capital is what is destroying the internet. We need to do this differently if we want it to succeed.
