The thing that saddens me the most about the whole fedi/meta drama is a thing I can't prove, but that I think is likely because I've worked in these kinds of tech companies.
The notion that Meta is looking to embrace/extend/extinguish the fediverse is laughable. The entire fedi userbase is a rounding error for Meta. They arent looking to take down the fediverse, they're trying to take down TWITTER.
They want the celebs and journalists back. Take advantage of Twitter's tarnished reputation.
I can virtually guarantee that "let's join the fediverse!" wasn't Mark Zuckerberg's idea.
It was probably some engineer that likes the fediverse concept, who had this long-shot idea. Everyone said the top brass would never go for it, but they put together a slide deck and presented federation as a powerful tool to take down Twitter together.
And against all odds, the executive team went for it.
That engineer probably became the lead for the whole effort to federate. Reached out to some big admins to ask ActivityPub questions. Wanted to show mockups to ask the experts if ActivityPub could support their designs, so an NDA was standard.
That engineer stuck their neck out to solve their employer's business need while also supporting open tech.
Put their reputation on the line to do what they thought was good for fedi and bring millions of users.
The response must be humiliating.
Again, can't prove this. Maybe it's exactly as the detractors say, Meta just wants to crush the fediverse.
But having been in the industry as long as I have I can virtually guarantee that's not what happened, and that it's far more likely an employee or a team went to bat for this place and we made them look like fucking idiots.
@ablackcatstail @noondlyt @rodhilton You all realize you're just talking about humanity, right? Individuals can be wonderful. Families can be wonderful. Small businesses and small communities can mostly be wonderful. But some humans are broken, and any enterprise that gets large enough to be impactful and efficient will include some broken individuals, who skew it.
That's true of Facebook. That's true of the Fediverse. That's true of our governments. That's true of your high school. It's not the tech. It's the humanity.
@rodhilton Maybe that's possible, but honestly I can't get too worked up about it. It's like feeling miffed that some employees of a tobacco company invented a new type of cigarette that's less deadly only to have doors slammed in their faces with a big FU when reaching out to proponents of clean living.
Anyone working at Meta operates under a compromised ethical framework. Sorrynotsorry.
(For the record, I'm not in the day 1 defed camp. But I also have virtually zero trust in anything Meta.)
@jaredwhite @rodhilton This. Meta has facilitated genocide, political discord and crime around the world. Don't care if they don't technically want to destroy a platform, they are still one of the world's worst corporations with sketchy leadership.
I had to unfollow now because all I'm seeing is a bunch of SV-types saying this is good for the platform and I just look back at the last 20 years of tech and go "no"
@cl Agreed.
And you are totally right, @rodhilton , It takes someone who cares about the fediverse to make that proposition in the first place. And your storyline is probably mostly true. But Meta is too big, and not a startup anymore, to not have also analysed and figured out that they can let go the ActivityPub part at anytime if their product takes off. And that’s what most people fear around here. Just like GChat let go XMPP when it did not fit their product vision anymore.
@rodhilton I expect the idea from the individual engineer was embraced also as a demonstration of openness while several important competition cases are pending in the US and EU.
Meta doesn’t need to “embrace and extend” to massively dominate the Fediverse, they just need minimally competent product management (which the company has in spades). Terrible search, no quoting, bad UX… Instagram is going to be 95% of the Fediverse in a couple of months just based upon usability and shared identity.
@msbellows
That's a nice way of naming people that have a different opinion, being critical about corporations, and citing historical EEE events regarding another communication protocol.
@rodhilton
“I can't prove this theory, but those who don't agree, citing standard and historically proven corporate behavior are the «detractors».”
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/detractor#English
> detractor (plural detractors)
>
> A person who belittles the worth of another person or cause.
That's a fun way of naming critics.
Fediverse being Facebook's “rounding error” makes just easier to nip us in the bud.
One needs to learn quickly that corporations are not your friends.
When they come to Fedi they come as representatives of their employer, and we *DO NOT* want to have anything with them. To use a nerdy analogy, a friendly face from the Galactic Empire gets to your small planet community with promises of prosperity, but you very well know what they've done elsewhere and what they want to do here. Do you worry about hurting the feelings of that person when you say no to them? Not quite the same as even FB hasn't gone as bad, but similar enough.
@rodhilton You're right.
Meta isn't out to destroy the fediverse, per say. They are looking to capture the Twitter pie.
This process has nothing to do with people, emotions, etc. It's driven by monetization.
Corporate will steer changes with that mindset. Like a bulldozer over a field of flowers.
@rodhilton From my experience in big tech, it rings true. My sympathy for whoever's trying to arrange this is tempered by:
1. Them not recognising that secretive NDA'd meetings with big instance admins would play very badly with Fedi, and find some way to adapt.
2. If the project went ahead, at some point engineer decisions would be replaced by leadership decisions, nothing engineers had promised would be binding, and Fun Times would ensue (maybe, but too often).
@rodhilton This may indeed be the case. But the embrace- extend-extinguish pattern might still emerge. For-profit enterprises will always tend to act to maximize their short-term. If something can be exploited, a for-profit enterprise will generally exploit it.
This is a reason for caution. Meta has a demonstrated history of exploitive behavior, which makes this an even bigger issue for concern.
The poor engineer doesn't need to have a bad motive for this to be a problem.
@rodhilton
So an engineer working for a company with associations to murder, torture and genocide is humiliated by the negative response of folk who aren't keen on being more closely associated with the company whose repeated gross negligence facilitated murder, torture and genocide?
This humiliation is a good thing.
Right?
when individuals act as representatives of large corporations it is actively manipulative to pretend that rejecting their employer is a personal insult. when i represented twitter open source at scaladays and people raised concerns about how twitter largely developed their own scala stack without reference to the rest of the scala community, i listened to them and understood that they were speaking to the real fear of the organization i represented and didn't take it personally. in fact, i stepped up to the challenge and learned a lot from doing so, and gave extremely useful feedback to twitter afterwards. hold corporations accountable and don't fall for smol bean rhetoric just because they present the face of an individual https://mastodon.social/@rodhilton/110613469075600643
@rodhilton When you work for the Borg, you should have enough self awareness to know people aren't going to greet your appearance like you're Santa Claus.
Name anything Meta has ever played nice with. One other site they "took interest in" that they didn't either destroy or absorb.
* React
* PyTorch
* rocksdb
* Hack / hhvm (used by Slack)
* watchman
* buck
* Hermes
* FBOSS
* phabricator
* docusaurus
* flow
* jest
* GraphQL
* Thrift
* zstd
I understand not trusting Meta or even seeing the company as evil but the level of disconnection from reality I'm seeing sometimes is staggering.
@mivox Well FWIW one of them is React, which is the very frontend component framework that the entire Mastodon web UI is written in.
Facebook built it and released it open source, and now Mastodon is built on it.
@rodhilton Nice! I wasn’t aware of that.
Still don’t trust them as far as I could throw Mark Zuckerberg tho.
@mivox yeah, understandable. That's why I don't use any Meta shit, I think the company sucks.
But I also am aware of the fact that while there are some very bizarre and inaccurate examples of Facebook's hostility toward open technologies (XMPP), there are many many examples of them playing very nice with open tech.
They very well may have ill intent. I'm just saying, based on what I'm seeing here, I think there's a more likely explanation and it's probably internal advocacy.
@rodhilton @mivox Of the items on the list I'm familiar with:
- hhvm/hack is an example of EEE against PHP that fractured the community and corporate support of the language. Prime example of what will happen to ActivityPub.
- React defaults are a debt-encouraging way to write UI but it's already "too big to fail". https://chrlschn.medium.com/thoughts-on-react-vs-vue-vs-everything-else-in-2023-e4e50e526049
- GraphQL is a great idea but the popular implementations are "my way or the highway" and only things they find useful get through committee.
@rodhilton I agree with you, but I do understand people's concern over Meta coming into the fediverse.
On the flip side, I see Meta or other big players scraping fediverse for NLP data instead of paying Reddit for API access.
@rodhilton someone "putting their reputation on the line" based on the unknown behavior of a bunch of independent actors outside their corporate hierarchy is not socially skilled enough to be a good senior engineer. In this scenario, suitable self-protective behavior would be to preface your pitch with a lot of cautions; better, find a VP to back your plan with full understanding of the low chance of success.
Being temporarily embarrassed is a long way from "losing your reputation".
if the engineer thought they would be welcome where people went to get away from them and their colleagues then they are very bad at judging their own role on the Internet.
It's the perfect illustration of the "are you two friends" meme.
@rodhilton Loving your "virtual guarantees". Now send money.
You're a fucking narcissist, man.
You might be an ok engineer, but you are fucking dark and emotionally stunted.
Do a therapy.
@putnamca Jesus Christ, I'm not asking for money or followers or attention or anything.
Based on seeing how things like this tend to go down in tech companies, I think I have a good idea of what happened internally. So I posted it. That's all.
Calm the fuck down, you look like an unhinged lunatic.
Rod Hilton
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