70
@panos@calckey.social on the Fediverse & Meta's Threads
(calckey.social)
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
So, on one hand, yes. absolutely agreed, on all counts.
On the other hand, the point of social media is to engage with people. What if your mom has an account on meta's new activitypub platform? Is the interoperability of these platforms not also a huge feature? What if I want to follow my mom on mastodon when she's on facebook whatever, but not give meta my data? These all work best when we can protect ourselves and engage responsibly, and defederation/blocking at a server level, while a WONDERFUL emergency button, also rejects a lot of the funcitonality and beauty of the fediverse. And I think there's probably room to find a middle ground that protects users well while still letting them have that sort of engagement?
Mom doesn't necessarily have to be on Meta. If she wants her son to engage with her on a platform, she can be on kbin, lemmy or any other FOSS alternative once it reaches maturity.
Not being tied to a giant corporation should not mean "obscure" or "unusable for normal people".
People figured out email, they can figure out the fediverse, it just needs time.
Two things--
My point is that we need time and patience, not interfacing with Meta. Whether they use ActivityPub or something proprietary shouldn't matter to us and I'm not convinced matters at all in this context.
Meta already didn't wait - they have Facebook, Instagram etc. There's Twitter. We already exist in a space with big competitors, and somehow it works. Inviting them to our space sounds risky (risk of centralization, ads, bots, rage bait for engagement...).
If our thing is better, more wholesome, with less ads and bots, it's going to attract the people we want on our platform, regardless of whether or not we federate with Meta.
Plus, as was already said, fediverse success should not be measured by how many people use it. If enough do to produce good content and engage with, that's great on its own :) Small communities have benefits.
Gmail happened because they were giving away email for free, below cost, so that they could use their customers' data.
That isn't legal any more in the post GDPR EU.
Then text with your mom. Why does everyone always have to connect through every social media platform at once?
Edit: IF you want to be on an instance that doesn't federate with Meta. If you want to have access to meta's stuff then go to an instance that does federate with them obv.
I'm just posing a hypothetical here to show that, while yes I don't want meta getting any of their hands on my data, centralized social media is so much more than the company that runs it, and granularity of control over stuff like that (if such a thing were possible) would only be a benefit.