Comment on Embrace, Extend, and Exploit: Meta's plan for ActivityPub, Mastodon and the fediverse
FaceDeer@kbin.social 9 months ago
None of those things sounds inherently bad to me.
Comment on Embrace, Extend, and Exploit: Meta's plan for ActivityPub, Mastodon and the fediverse
FaceDeer@kbin.social 9 months ago
None of those things sounds inherently bad to me.
thenexusofprivacy@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Fair! Good and bad depends on your perspective and how successful Meta is. It’s only the last bit about “using selfishly for Meta’s own ends” that I see as inherently bad. In general though I’ve writen elsewhere that I think it’s a great opportunity for the fediverse – I talked about about why in In Chaos There Is Opportunity and probably will say more in a later post in this series.
FaceDeer@kbin.social 9 months ago
I'd say that the vast majority of economic actors - both companies like Meta and individual people - are generally acting in a selfish manner. It's one of the great successes of modern market economies that most of the time that selfishness can be harnessed to serve the public good in various ways, so I'd want to see more detail about what exactly they're doing before calling it bad.
I've certainly never said I trust Meta, just that I don't think they're the maniacal evil overlords many of these discussions are portraying them as.
thenexusofprivacy@lemmy.world 9 months ago
OK, so, if you don’t trust Meta, and think they’re generally acting in a selfish manner, why do you think that they’ll freely let people move from Threads to the fedierse and make it easy to take all their followers?
Or phrased somewhat differently: it’s clearly good from their perspective to say that people can move their followers. Do you think it’s also always better for them to also let people easily move all their followers (which Meta is able to monetize while on Threads) to some other instance (where it’s harder for Meta to monetize them)? If there are situations where it’s not better from Meta’s perspective, why do you think they’ll make it easy – or even allow it?
FaceDeer@kbin.social 9 months ago
I don't expect anything in particular from them. My position all throughout all of this is that we simply shouldn't be committing to defederate from Threads preemptively before they've even had a chance to show what they're going to actually do.
There are plenty of situations where companies "open up" in ways that may not seem to be immediately in their self-interest but that actually work out to their benefit when you consider larger strategic goals or even just the good will it gets them. Meta just so happens to be very active in developing and releasing important open-source projects, for example their release of the LLaMA AI models basically sparked the same flourishing of open source large language model development that StabilityAI's release of Stable Diffusion did for the art generators. Maybe you can come up with ulterior motives for all that, but the end result was still a positive one for the open source community. The same could happen with Threads and the Fediverse.