For anyone who lacks the advanced level of age I mean experience some of us have, you should read this Wikipedia page on Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish
I guarantee this is the goal of Meta joining the fediverse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
@simplenomad @joshbressers "Meta has never, ever, ever prioritized the privacy and safety of users over profit at any point in their history and has frequently embraced new tech only to force people into their implementation and then cut off support for other implementations but I'm sure this time will be different!"
/s
@emberquill @simplenomad @joshbressers like somehow getting ads on the feed for my current mastodon account? wouldn't be any different than muting or blocking the irrelevant posters in the hashtags I follow, since there's no way they'd be able to do actual sponsored posts, as far as my understanding of Mastodon goes.
Or so you mean using what i post on mastodon to serve ads to me elsewhere? Because again, they already can do that and I have extensions and methods to circumvent that.
@trekman10 @simplenomad @joshbressers There are many things they could do. Most of them would immediately out them as trying to kill or seriously twist the Fediverse but I'm always suspicious of large companies entering environments where there doesn't seem to be a market for them. After all, how does Meta plan to profit from entering the Fediverse? Until I know the answer to that question, I'm suspicious by default.
They're developing their own application, not just a Meta-branded Mastodon instance. They can inject all sorts of garbage into the federated timeline. They can decide not to allow federation for posts they don't like, or repeatedly boost posts they *do* like. They could use any username on their instance or create new ones on the fly to circumvent user-level blocking. They could send out ads disguised as posts from users you follow.
A lot of the way Fediverse servers behave is based on trust in admins and an agreement to not abuse the system. I don't *trust* Meta.
@emberquill @simplenomad @joshbressers since it's their own fediverse-enabled client with #ActivityPub, anything they add to their version wouldn't get transferred to non-#Project92 platforms.
Any such ad or spam accounts can be blocked. Also, the same holds true for many instances. I'm not saying it'll be fine, but I'm also thinking that there will be people who'll first use the fediverse through this and can be swayed away from Meta when they follow non-Meta accounts
@trekman10 @simplenomad @joshbressers Perhaps, but you're underestimating what can be done within the standards of ActivityPub without the constraints of a specific implementation like Mastodon. I already know of at least a couple ways they could justify (or even try to hide) pushing ads to other instances. When you own the whole instance, evading anything short of a site-wide block would be easy. Disguising ads as posts wouldn't be hard either. Hiding those ads from people you don't want to see them, even the user that you sent the ad from, wouldn't be terribly difficult.
I know it all sounds like doomsaying and "what ifs" but at this point I'm not willing to give any Big Social company the benefit of the doubt. They've repeatedly and consistently shown a willingness to screw over their users to benefit shareholders, and when they federate with the wider Fediverse, we all become their users, whether we like it or not.
Josh Bressers
Simple Nomad
emberquill 
Trek