Embrace, Extend, and Exploit: Meta's plan for ActivityPub, Mastodon and the fediverse - eviltoast

What’s Meta up to?

  1. Embrace ActivityPub, , Mastodon, and the fediverse

  2. Extend ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the fediverse with a very-usable app that provides additional functionality (initially the ability to follow everybody you’re following on Instagram, and to communicate with all Threads users) that isn’t available to the rest of the fediverse – as well over time providing additional services and introducing incompatibilities and non-standard improvements to the protocol

  3. Exploit ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the fediverse by utilizing them for profit – and also using them selfishly for Meta’s own ends

Since the fediverse is so much smaller than Threads, the most obvious ways of exploiting it – such as stealing market share by getting people currently in the fediverse to move to Threads – aren’t going to work. But exploitation is one of Meta’s core competences, and once you start to look at it with that lens, it’s easy to see some of the ways even their initial announcement and tiny first steps are exploiting the fediverse: making Threads feel like a more compelling platform, and reshaping regulation. Longer term, it’s a great opportunity for Meta to explore – and maybe invest in – shifting their business model to decentralized surveillance capitalism.

  • thenexusofprivacy@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    4·
    11 months ago

    On “influencer”, I don’t think we’re going to convince each other. I’ve sometimes described professors as influencers – Dan Gillmor and Scott Galloway leap to mind.

    I also don’t think many of those people would agree that they “strongly support Meta.”

    That’s true! Meta’s got such a deservedly bad reputation that very few want to see themselves as supporting Meta! And I agree that they’re supporting federation with Meta despite their real misgivings about the company, and they’re doing it because they see it as in the fediverse’s best interests. But still, Meta’s saying “we want to embrace the fediverse” and they’re saying “this is a good thing” and telling people that concerns are overstated … that’s supporting Meta.

    If the Alex Jones server decides to terrorize a bunch of families, how can they claim to not have an association? How would they not have pressure to defederate or cancel their hosting?

    The legal responsibilities and pressures are different for a service provider or infrastructure provider than for a social network. They’ll get pressure, and Threads (a social network) might defederate, but I wouldn’t expect them to cancel their services or hosting. Organizations like EFF argue that instrastructure providers should stay out of policing content – even for content like Kiwifarms. I should probably discuss this in more detail (or maybe do a separate post on this).

    They can track everything they do because they control their servers; they can’t track us because we control ours.

    If you’re on a server that federates with Meta and haven’t blocked Meta, then most things you do can potentially be federated to Meta at which point it’ll be tracked even if they aren’t using any Meta services

    Whether we federate or not also has no impact on their ability to do any of the Meta-Fediverse stuff. We can’t run up and smack the ActivityPub out of their hands and be like, “No! Bad Meta!” ;)

    That last statement is true. Still, in an alternatie universe where fediverse influencers said “we don’t want you” and the vast majority of instances chose not to federate then it would be similar to the Gab situation “Meta wanted to come to the fediverse, we said no we don’t want hate groups and genocide-enablers here, so they’re doing their own thing” with the addition of “they’re also calling it the fediverse but don’t fall for it”. But we’re not in that universe.