The same technical thing, yes. The key difference really is whether or not a notoriously exploitative corporation is behind.
Comment on Discourse, the free forum platform, is now joining the Fediverse.
FaceDeer@kbin.social 9 months agoIt's funny seeing how different a reaction people have to the same basic thing happening.
halm@leminal.space 9 months ago
masterspace@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
Except that since federating is a technical action we can look at, we can all of course see that it give Meta access to nothing that they couldn’t have scraped publicly.
halm@leminal.space 9 months ago
Sure, if that’s your only concern — and disregarding that it’s a minority who would likely have the time, diligence and knowhow to actually confirm that you’re right — but Meta’s interest in directly leaked or scraped data is probably secondary to embrace-extend-extinguish alternatives to their services. Discourse doesn’t exactly have that motive.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Discourse is 100% open source. Meta is basically 0% open source. Big, big difference.
FaceDeer@kbin.social 9 months ago
You are clearly just on the hate train that's currently gripping these threads and don't know much about Meta. They contribute a great deal to open source. Of particular note in the past year or so are the Llama large language models, which essentially did for large language models what StabilityAI did for generative art - they broke the dominance of big closed-source companies like OpenAI and Anthropic to get the open-source LLM movement rolling.
It remains to be seen whether they'll play nicely with ActivityPub or not, but it is far from a foregone conclusion.
x1gma@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It’s not a hate train, it’s being cautious. And do you really think that Meta is open sourcing because of their passion for FOSS and standing by those values? They’ve taken an internal framework they’ve build, open source it so that they can advertise how open and great they are on the page you linked, and after it gains traction (which it will, since it’s used by Meta it must be good /s) and can reduce their own internal efforts to a minimum, since the community will contribute. Open source may be a passion for the developers of Meta, but the company Meta does not give a single flying fuck about FOSS or the Fediverse.
FaceDeer@kbin.social 9 months ago
The fact that FlyingSquid declared Meta to be "0% open source" when in fact Meta has been a major contributor to open source suggests that they're simply saying whatever bad things they can think of saying about Meta, not bothering to ground those things in any real facts. That's presumably because right now everyone is dumping on Meta and so comments that say bad things about Meta get upvoted without being checked (and comments that says anything as tepid as "maybe Meta is not completely awful" garners downvotes and homophobic attacks, ask me how I know). That's the hate train I'm talking about.
The motivation of why Meta does what it does doesn't change what they're doing. It's entirely possible for a big giant evil corporation to see benefit in playing nice with an open source ecosystem. My position all along has been to wait and see what they're going to do before instantly leaping to fragment the Fediverse against them.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
Like half of the internet (including lemmy’s clients and server applications) run on open source code and infrastructure that Meta built and maintains.
The company obviously cares about making money, as all companies do, but the reality of our world is that most good usable software is written by for-profit corporations, that’s not an argument against using it, that’s an argument to develop other sources for funding software development.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
There’s literally no difference from a Lemmy user’s perspective. It does not matter to us whether someone browses Lemmy from Sync (a closed source Lemmy app) or an open source one.
This is a nonsense distinction to make.