There is literally no benefit for us allowing them to integrate with any of our explicitly non-corporate platforms
Source?
But there is a huge (and in their eyes profitable) benefit for them.
Again, source? "If there weren’t, they wouldn’t try. " is a bit weird, when the reason is so painfully obvious and relates to EU regulation and wanting to pre-empt any issues by showing interoperability and an open protocol. If you know of profit-based use cases beyond that, do share the sources please.
pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
What are the benefits?
Carighan@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Of providing sources? Generally that whatever argument you’re making cannot be trivially discarded because it is based on unproven assumptions and hypothesis. That doesn’t mean the argument is making a wrong point, rather that the argument is invalid as an argument.
That is to say, defederation might be the right conclusion, but as OP hints at, not for the reasons commonly stated around Lemmy or Mastodon because those make assumptions about what Meta is doing, why they are doing it, and more importantly, how being defederated affects them.
pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
What are the benefits of letting Meta stay federated?
Carighan@lemmy.world 9 months ago
This is a dangerous type of question as it implies we need a reason to add federation. Instead of being federated being the default state, hence the question would be about benefits of defederation.
And like I said above, it’s not like there isn’t potential benefits to that. But it’s important to keep in mind that not only might we be misinterpreting why Meta is adding federation (I’ll stick to my explanation, it’s not about the actual federation it’s about pre-empting regulation) we might end up making their use-case stronger (“we tried to add interoperability, no one else was interested, so that’s why we aren’t doing it” might be a valid excuse to lawmakers).
On a bigger-than-just-meta picture, it’s also important to keep in mind that should the concept of federation take off, Meta will not be the only commercial company pushing into federated applications, especially if lawmakers start pushing into that direction in the EU. In other words, defederating Meta would merely delay the inevitable, and it might be less of a waste of time to focus on how to ensure the protocol itself works against bad faith actors gaining too much power - which, might I add, can also exist on a smaller scale. If you only got 100 users, a 90 user instance controls 90% of the federated space, and can just as well exert pressure onto the protocol itself, we just trust instance owners to not do that right now, in particular the really big ones.
Again, note that I do not list benefits. Like I said, that’s the wrong direction to inquire in.