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Embrace, Extend, and Exploit: Meta's plan for ActivityPub, Mastodon and the fediverse
(privacy.thenexus.today)
this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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I am optimistic about Meta's investment in the Fediverse. If you don't believe the Fediverse can survive the embrace of big tech, I don't think you believe in it at all. You don't want an open web, you just want to be the one in control. The goal of a decentralized internet - in my opinion - is to separate content from service. And if you believe that is the future, then you have to accept that companies are going to build new services that will try to monetize that content. But the beauty of that paradigm is you get to choose the service that works best for you without sacrificing access to the people or media you're interested in. And really, it's not much different from say, Google, being able to monetize Chrome because it can access your website. I mean... yeah, but that's kind of the point?
Yes, it is about control. Companies like meta with near infinite resources made their money by exploiting the ever living fuck out of data the vast majority of people to this day do not understand to have any value at all despite the evidence of not just one but multiple trillion dollar companies existing soley due to the exploitation of this kind of data.
I am done with being sold to, having my data harvested, being gaslit, being spied on, seeing these companies avoid the shit out of any consequences for their actions, etc.
Ooh, but it is open, if they wanted to scrape the data they just could! Yes, and it would be fucking illegal under frameworks like the Gdpr. If they join the system though? Wells then they have a legal basis again yo just keep tracking you. Not only that, they avoid further sanctioning by being able up show that they work on interoperability, without investing anything at all, simply by exploiting Foss software.
Ooh, but individuals can block instances, no need to defederate on an instance level! Sure and most people won't know about it or how to do it or just not care enough and get to enjoy being abused by these companies yet again in a space specifically chosen for not being that.
Oh, I don't see a way they could possibly exploit this or extinguish it! Cool. I bet their lawyers, psychologists, experts in every field imagineable that has anything to do with using data and driving engagement are exactly as stumped about it as a random user out here. Bet they couldn't possibly have a plan because we don't see one.
Anyone who has even an ounce of trust that meta and all these other exploiters will not find a way to ruin activitypub, has not paid attention in the last 20 years of internet service development.
Activitypub as a technology will survive this. The fediverse as an alternative to these utter monsters of companies might very well not.
The problem is that in its current state, there are inherent flaws which a corporation can abuse to destroy what to a lot of people on it consider to be the purpose of federated social media, which is lack of corporate control.
Consider that a company with the resources of meta could create hundreds of thousands of instances across all federated social media to the degree that you cannot tell what they own and what they don't until it is a statistical likelihood that your account is on a corporation controlled instance.
Consider that existing instances which are privately owned and operated could sell their instance to a corporation and no one would necessarily be any the wiser.
So you are right, in its current form, I do not believe in federated social media for the future, because it has no preventative measures to avoid such a thing outside of hosting your own personal instance, which a lot of people do not have the resources to do.
If I don't believe the fediverse can survive the embrace of big tech, I don't believe in the fediverse? What? Makes absolutely no sense.
Meta doesn't want to separate content from service. They want to lock users into their own services using their enormous wealth and marketing. It's the opposite of the open web you are talking about. They will be compatible with the fediverse to influence it and try to control it, by adding features you can only get if you are on their platform. Their goal is to make most people prefer the Meta version of the fediverse.
Why is this a bad thing? This is the system working as intended: a company forced to make a service people want, rather than just taking users for granted. You resist enshittification because you're not being held hostage through access to content, so the company is forced to make the service good. And this will attract other companies to produce competing services.
And besides, most people already prefer the Meta version... they already have the user advantage. There's already way more users locked in their services than there is on the rest of the Fediverse.
It’s not that we don’t believe in it. It’s that we literally went through this already. And now we expect meta to be more magnanimous than google?
Fool me once and all that. I was with you at one point but after Reddit’s bullshit this past summer the glass broke for me. I don’t need 1 billion people here. I’m perfectly content with a small corner of the internet. No control necessary.
I just want to say I completely agree with you. If we want to withstand the companies at the helm of the Internet right now, we have to make it impossible for them to extinguish us. I think that's what we've essentially done with ActivityPub, and frankly I don't see any way they can try to take us down by normal means.
I mean, what are they gonna do? Pull the VERY loyal people from kbin.social or Lemmy.world into Threads? Or the people from Mastodon?
It's safe to say the people who have been here 5 months (or even more!) are not really keen on using Facebook 2.0, and we aren't really the demographic they're targeting. We also aren't exactly the biggest demographic, with the Fediverse being a couple million people afaik.
I think if anything we have the most to GAIN from federation. People will know about our little public ad-free corner of the Internet. It's downright silly to throw up pitchforks just because "Meta bad" because - at the end of the day - HOW will they destroy the Fediverse?
The playbook is like this: first leech off the community and good will spirit of highly active content creators on the fediverse. Those are only 1% of the total user number, but they have most of the attention of the others and thus drive advertisement revenue.
They will try to lure them over if they can, but otherwise benefit from advertising to remote followers from their platform. Once Threads is basically synonymous with Fediverse as far as normal users are concerned, make it increasingly difficult to stay off Threads for the content creators as well.
At that point AP is dead as a dodo, even if technically still existing.
No. What they will do is follow the activity pub protocol, then make their own tweaks that all the other instances are supposed to follow (despite being closed off tweaks), or we are no longer interacting with them. Eventually our open source standard is overshadowed by their new partially proprietary standard, they have 95% of the users and more functionality so they have no reason to leave, and we are the ones who are doing it wrong. Then we are extinguished and they begin the process of enshitification/extracting every cent possible.
i.e. embrace, extend, extinguish.
Yes thank you as I never see this being mentioned around here. I believe the last monthly active users was 300k? While it's not nothing, meta doesn't give any shit about a one time acquisition of 300k users who don't want to use their platform.
We aren't even "worth" extinguishing right now. These decisions are being made at a level far above us. We just don't know why yet. I'm expecting them to use ActivityPub as a tie in for Threads/Insta/FB.
Because an open, federated network is an existential threat to them if it ever reaches mainstream popularity.
You can't make a lot of money from advertisement to grandma sharing pictures of the grandkids as Meta is realizing on their Facebook service with an aging demographic.
They got the "valuable" livestyle and fashion advertisement market pretty much covered with Instagram, but out side of that the "valuable" demographic of content creators were on Twitter.
Threads is about capturing that demographic, and a lot of them fled Twitter to the Fediverse.
Total number of users matter little if you don't have creators other users find interesting to follow. The shere numbers Meta still has, but it doesn't have much cloud with the quality content creators.
Many others are optimistic as well. In general I think Meta's arrival will be positive for the fediverse (and I just edited the post to make that clearer). In any case I think the fediverse will clearly survive.