this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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How do they benefit from it though? 🤔
They benefit by being able to say to regulators, especially in the EU, that they aren't a monopoly that locks people into their ecosystem. They avoid expensive legal battles, fines, and possibly being forced to open their other, more lucrative silos. These are lesser benefits, but they also get cred for doing something cool, get to position themselves as a better alternative to Twitter, and might get to say that they beat Bluesky to full federation.
That's reasonable although I believe it's just not how they do things. This feature lets their users to move to ad-free mastodon instances including those that signed fedi-pact. And it will be available in a few clicks in their app (I suppose it will).
I also think they're more interested in Bluesky.
Their last EU fine was $1.3 billion. That's change-how-you-do-things money. The EU is getting more serious about tech regulation. It also made Apple add RCS support, which they swore they'd never do.
I don't think that's possible. You have to be federated. Suspended servers can't connect at all so there's no way to transfer followers or set a redirect. It's not something you can just choose to not respect - suspension is something done to untrustworthy servers so requiring them to honor it would completely break it immediately. If they signed the fedi pact and didn't act, that's not really on Meta.
Still possible with intermediary but yeah, that's much less convenient. Well, I hope that's true. Unfortunately, even if they really have done this because of EU they still may try to monetize non-Threads users.
If they use a Mastodon intermediary, there's a 30-day cool down. If they use their own, they'd have to expose the IP to do it so it would be discovered. I don't see how it would benefit them to do that. If they did, that's some sketchy, bad faith shit and they'd be universally fediblocked pretty quick.
I also don't think they can monetize non-threads users because they can't send them ads. It would be difficult to connect you to a Meta account to serve ads to because they only have your user name, profile pic, server IP, and server domain name. In most cases it'd be impossible. You're pretty well protected because Mastodon servers treat all remote servers as untrustworthy and don't give them any info.
Facebook already creates "shadow profiles" for people not on Facebook and stores data about them. This means Meta won't directly monetize the fediverse, but use the data available for their ad business anyway. (Maybe even connect other accounts through posts, but I don't know how well this works with the info and amount of a users posts.)
Nothing stopping them from doing it now, anyone posting to the fediverse has to accept that their posts can and probably will be used to train someone elses LLM. It's public afterall.
[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/768652/what-are-facebook-shadow-profiles-and-should-you-be-worried/
idk, the primary motivator is probably PR, but there is a chance that there's still a trace, a glimmer of empathy and excitement for innovation, hidden way down somewhere in that human.
Don't count on it, though.
They could go a bluesky route and build their own protocol so they could have more control over it. I don't think non-techy people would care about federation to be honest.
Fair point, but they also have to please the EU, which won't buy them creating a new protocol with two existing ones gaining major traction, of which one is w3c standard.
e: typo
Great, so he is already talking about how to extend activityPub? He says that like this function will be a one way street. This is literally what many here are talking about.
He's literally talking about the ability to migrate accounts, or the very least export your data. Which is a feature on many platforms of Fediverse. There's no "extend" whatsoever
If I understand correctly he's talking about the ability to export your account data and then import it to another compatible fedi server. Other software (mastodon, latest version of lemmy, etc) also do it on a client side, so I don't think any changes to AP will be necessary.
What is concerning is his wording about "to leave threads". Consider that whatever saying in this interview is carefully laid out beforehand. What reason is there for a corporation that is living of it's users to just so casually let them leave like they please with everything that is giving value to Meta? He is not talking about wanting the users to leave threads, but to be able to migrate either direction. Who is going to win that fight in the end? The corporation who's solely goal is to win or the free and open community that is so tolerant that it invites the beast it fled from?
Yep, that's really concerning. Is it possible for export account function to inject some kind of ID to continue spying on a user even after they've leaved Threads (even on a non-federated instance)?
May be the whole plan is to kill ActivityPub or they want all the data to train AI or target ads.
https://beehaw.org/post/719121