how to block meta from mastodon

https://mastodon.moule.world/@MOULE/110586193055950459

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Threads being in the Fediverse is a plus for me, not a negative. It means I could follow regular people and friends who would never in a million years join places like Mastodon or Lemmy while I still get the benefits of being on those platforms, all while being shielded from Meta’s ads and data harvesting. The only issue is I don’t actually believe Zuck will go through with it. They’ll either never federate or severely limit it if they do.
Mastodon themselves have put out a post outlining how this will affect them (it won’t) and how EEE is not a threat. If Meta does eventually opt out of ActivityPub then cool. It’s not like that’s why Mastodon users were there in the first place.
- Embrace, extend and destroy is a known, well established, concept. Microsoft was quite open about how this is to be done.
  It has already happened to established decentralised networks. See here!
  Maybe it won't happen to Mastodon, maybe they have the masterminds who can counter it. But it is imo pretty clear that this is what Meta plans to do.
  
  Read their privacy policy. They already admitted they will scrape info from 3rd party users/communities which interact with their users.
  This is not a good thing.
  
  They can scrape info already. Anyone can set up their own private instance, federate with others, and scrape info from there, and I'd be shocked if Meta wasn't already doing that. Besides the threads app collecting more data from the people that use the app, they can only collect data that is easily accessible from everyone else regardless of whether threads is federated or not
  
  I get why people don’t want anything from Meta around stuff they use. They’re obviously awful. I just don’t think that even 5% of Fediverse users are going to ditch for Threads if Meta defederates. They were here before Meta and I can promise you not a single person on earth is signing up for Mastodon because it will federate with Threads only to have the rug pulled out from under them. This is a small niche community and that will not change with or without Meta. The people that Meta could siphon with EEE are already in their ecosystem.
  
  I swear some of y'all just get off on doomsaying.
  
  Do you think Facebook wants to get involved because they're excited about making the fediverse a better place?
  
  No, they want to train AI models. They don't give a shit about taking over ActivityPub.
  
  Why would they need threads to train AI models?
  
  They don't need to take it over if they have enough unwitting users / communities / instances associating with their content & users, perhaps. Maybe they don't care about a smaller competitor if they can just scrape all the data anyway.
  
  I don't really see an argument for "extinguish" on that article. It looks like just "embrace, expand, unembrace." I can think of a few reasons how meta could degrade the quality of the metaverse, but the example of xmpp doesn't quite smell right - activitupub is mature (even if I disagree with lot of the core specs), and the fediverse is much more about "eventual consistency" instead of real-time chats where both side have to be online at the same time.
  I don't really see an argument where Google drew people away from xmpp - the author themself said that nobody cared about the few xmpp users, so it's not like Google was drawing long-time xmpp users away.
  I'd love to hear other opinions on that article.
- Mastodon the non-profit is all but compromised.
  The guy in charge is essentially in cahoots with Meta and is under an NDA from them.
  It doesn’t take more than 2 seconds of thinking to see how empty the words are that Mastodon is not at risk.
  Threads federates with Mastodon instances
  Threads uses its massive engineering resources to implement proprietary functionality that’s incompatible with Mastodon instances
  A non-trivial number of Mastodon users jump over to Threads, this is the first wave of people that leave Mastodon
  Threads drops support for federation and silos itself off
  The majority of the remainder of people on Mastodon jump over to Threads because they want to be able to continue to interact with the people that jumped over to Threads and/or because they want to be able to continue to interact with normies now that they’re used to that
  Mastodon is effectively dead, safe for a select few that stick to their guns
  3 and 5 will happen in a cascading manner, the more people switch to Threads, the more others will also want to switch.
- Omg please get yourself educated. Really scary to know people like you exist.
  
  The post has been put out by the people that made Mastodon. Why should anyone trust you over them when you provide 0 arguments against them.
  Embrace Extend Extinguish was always a Microsoft strategy and one they have been forced to abandon over the years. Their attitude changed towards open source because it doesn't work! I think you might be the one who is lacking in knowledge or "education" here.
  
  ?
  
  What's your question? Microsoft invented and then abandoned the EEE strategy because the strategy dosen't work! Open source never went away no matter what they did.
  
  Open source doesnt work? Would love to see a source on that one alone. Almost sounds like you have an agenda to sell.
  
  I think you misinterpreted what they said. They meant "Their attitude changed towards open source because [Embrace, Extend, Extinguish] doesn't work"
  
  That's exactly what I meant! Did I fail to write it clearly or is their reading comprehension no good?
  
  The sentence itself is a little ambiguous but it's nothing major, it's easy enough to get the message from context
  
  I had to read it twice because I misinterpreted it the same way.
  Their attitude changed towards open source because it doesn’t work!
  That "it" could be interpreted either as 'open source' or 'EEE' from the previous sentence.

525 comments