How do we feel about Meta joining the Fediverse?

🚨 DANGER! 🚨

…That about sums up my feelings on this subject.

They are free to set up an instance. Not sure who would federate with them.

Bribes

Judging from their past and all the bad actions they have done in the past, bad for democracy, privacy, minorities and marginalised people and how openly they have a far/extreme-right bias. Well I feel extremely negative about them joining in. They were also part of destruction of another open/federated protocol in the past: they played big part in destroying XMPP/Jabber messaging. So I am afraid they will do their usual embrace, extend, and extinguish thing and their surveillance capitalist thing and yeah. no good. Best to block their instances outright.

They're trojan horse. We can't stop them from creating their own servers, but we can choose to defederate them. Up with the Anti-Meta Defederation Pact

Lmao want nothing to do with them. One of the reasons I’m here is to escape these dogshit corpos

They see the fediverse trend gain9ng steam with the rise of Mastodon and go "Oh sheit we need to be on that for $$$". Proceed to embrace, extend, enshittify, and extinguish. Its nothing but Zuckerberg's gasping breaths to try and stay relevant as his company begins the very slow, but inevitable, backslide into technological irrelevance.

I will be leaving and/or blocking any instance that chooses to federate with anything related to Meta. They are antithetical to the entire foundation of the metaverse and they ruin everything they touch.

It's the old Microsoft strategy again - Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

They deserve a good boot up the arse before they put one up our's.

I didn’t know they’d joined. Do you have a source for this?

Hasn't happened yet. But there's articles stating it's in the works. Gimmie a sec and I'll edit and add here.

Edit: here ya go https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/11/meta_twitter_rival/

People are being really hypocritical.

You want a free open source social network. But when people you dont like join it, you hate it. That is not how it works, its not how FREE in FOSS works.

Meta can join, they can do whatever they want. It literally the point of this social network. If you dont like it, then go to a social network that is not FOSS, but is heavily moderated, because that is what most of you really want.

"Freedom" can be used to justify lots of really bad stuff. Meta has too much money to be trusted, they WILL fuck the Fediverse up eventually for more profit on the first chance they get (and people with lots of money always get those chances).

And it's not just about morality and the fucked up stuff that's happened on Meta, Iike the Cambridge Analytica scandal. I stopped using Facebook years ago because of the low quality of the content being posted there. And last week I logged back in to sell some stuff and oh boy, the content managed to get even worse.

I don't want growth just for the sake of growth. We don't need big corporations getting involved.

Pros:

my friends join
larger community = more content
meta funding would likely contribute to fediverse growth and improvements
any instance can defederate them from said instance, which would mitigate almost every con

Cons:

Meta is evil and wants all your information to profile you and sell to other companies for profit

For myself, I'm not a fan either. But I think it could be a very good thing for the fediverse (still not a fan of that word) --- which, as I understand it, is all about choice: the ability to easily access content across the fediverse, with the ability to ignore it just as easily.

If it ends up breeding toxicity, then I'll block any subs, and possibly the whole instance†. And if it gets really bad, I'll just find a lemmy/mastodon/whatever instance that has defederated from them.

† Sounds like this maybe isn't possible yet, but is being looked at https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2397

FYI: There is already a pact among some Fediverse operators to block any instance controlled by Meta.

Is that necessary though? I feel like we should let them join. If they do something malicious, then we can block them. IMO, it doesn't make sense to just preemptively block them for no real reason.
- They've demontrated their evil nature in the past, promoting divisive and inciteful material and anything to drive engagement for the sake of advertiser dollars. I don't think we need to wait for them to do it again in the Fediverse. Better to head that shit off right up front.
- Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Microsoft did it before, we shouldn't let Meta do it now.
- It is wholly necessary. They will start massive data mining operations if they join, harming users of all instances.

To me it sounds like they are trying to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish the fediverse. I wouldn't doubt if at first they adopted it with all the standards then started doing proprietary crap

I think we should let them consume Fediverse content but not create it.

If Meta proposes to let Instagram users follow people on Mastodon or whatever, that seems like a reasonable compromise - they get to keep people on their feeds viewing ads and we get more reach - but they shouldn't have the power to leave and take a large % of Fediverse content with them; if you want to make a post, you need to do so from a non-Meta-controlled instance in a non-Meta-controlled app.

Screw meta.

I hate the fact that for a large number of people, this will be how they will be introduced to the fediverse and their view of it will be tainted by Meta. I also dread seeing Meta spam in my federated timeline. And I also fear Meta building its own proprietary features on top of the ActivityPub protocol, making the content generated with them incompatible with independent clients, and allowing Zuck to spread his monopoly to the fediverse as well.