this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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Ah so unrelated to Facebook. Good
It's funny seeing how different a reaction people have to the same basic thing happening.
Discourse is 100% open source. Meta is basically 0% open source. Big, big difference.
There's literally no difference from a Lemmy user's perspective. It does not matter to us whether someone browses Lemmy from Sync (a closed source Lemmy app) or an open source one.
This is a nonsense distinction to make.
You are clearly just on the hate train that's currently gripping these threads and don't know much about Meta. They contribute a great deal to open source. Of particular note in the past year or so are the Llama large language models, which essentially did for large language models what StabilityAI did for generative art - they broke the dominance of big closed-source companies like OpenAI and Anthropic to get the open-source LLM movement rolling.
It remains to be seen whether they'll play nicely with ActivityPub or not, but it is far from a foregone conclusion.
It's not a hate train, it's being cautious. And do you really think that Meta is open sourcing because of their passion for FOSS and standing by those values? They've taken an internal framework they've build, open source it so that they can advertise how open and great they are on the page you linked, and after it gains traction (which it will, since it's used by Meta it must be good /s) they can reduce their own internal efforts to a minimum, since the community will contribute. Open source may be a passion for the developers of Meta, but the company Meta does not give a single flying fuck about FOSS or the Fediverse.
The fact that FlyingSquid declared Meta to be "0% open source" when in fact Meta has been a major contributor to open source suggests that they're simply saying whatever bad things they can think of saying about Meta, not bothering to ground those things in any real facts. That's presumably because right now everyone is dumping on Meta and so comments that say bad things about Meta get upvoted without being checked (and comments that says anything as tepid as "maybe Meta is not completely awful" garners downvotes and homophobic attacks, ask me how I know). That's the hate train I'm talking about.
The motivation of why Meta does what it does doesn't change what they're doing. It's entirely possible for a big giant evil corporation to see benefit in playing nice with an open source ecosystem. My position all along has been to wait and see what they're going to do before instantly leaping to fragment the Fediverse against them.
Their motivation is more important than what they're doing. But right now their motivation is to compete with Twitter. The Fediverse is no threat to them because it's tiny.
Like half of the internet (including lemmy's clients and server applications) run on open source code and infrastructure that Meta built and maintains.
The company obviously cares about making money, as all companies do, but the reality of our world is that most good usable software is written by for-profit corporations, that's not an argument against using it, that's an argument to develop other sources for funding software development.
Meta built and maintains a few web frameworks. That's great. They also build and maintain a propaganda network that's happy to work in accord with abusive governments, for profit. Which of these is a greater moral weight? I'm not gonna overlook the latter because react is comfy.
The irony of this being said on a Lemmy instance is amusing. Are you aware of the political leanings of the Lemmy devs and of some of the larger Lemmy instances' original communities of users? The Fediverse as a whole is managing to diversify away from that, but it just goes to show how good things can come from bad actors.
I am! and the difference is that lemmy doesn't seem designed to convert people to Marxist-Leninism, while Facebook seems designed to agitate and suppress meaningful discourse while simultaneously entrenching consumerism even more than ever. Mark Zuckerberg is one of those Roman Guys, you know, them, but I don't think that the propaganda I referred to was in service of convincing everyone that Julius Caesar was rad. Mostly, these things are larger than their founders. And Facebook is still a propaganda network designed to convince people that if they leave, they'll lose touch with all their friends.
Meta has React, RocksDB and pytorch, and a few other "niche" frameworks and tools. "Half of the internet [...] run[ning] on open source code and infrastructure that Meta built and maintains" is a big, big exaggeration. Also maintainance is done by the OSS community for big parts, and I'm really curious what open source infrastructure Meta is running.
I'm not saying Meta has no relevance in OSS, but I can hardly think of an open source org that does open source purely for its own benefit. React helps them shape the web in the way Meta wants it, their ML stuff is important for their own internal needs (ads, BI, and the whole social networking, etc.), their AR/VR/XR contributions are for the Quest, and KI/LLM since they need it themselves instead of relying/partnering with OpenAI. Meta (the company) absolutely does not stand by the principles of open source, no matter how much you want to sugarcoat it.
The same technical thing, yes. The key difference really is whether or not a notoriously exploitative corporation is behind.
Except that since federating is a technical action we can look at, and examine technically, we can all of course see that it gives Meta access to nothing that they couldn't have scraped publicly.
Sure, if that's your only concern — and disregarding that it's a minority who would likely have the time, diligence and knowhow to actually confirm that you're right — but Meta's interest in directly leaked or scraped data is probably secondary to embrace-extend-extinguish alternatives to their services. Discourse doesn't exactly have that motive.