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).
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