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What's Beehaw's opinion on Facebook doing NDAed meetings with fedi admins/devs? (fedipact.online)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by d4r1us_drk@beehaw.org to c/support@beehaw.org

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So, recently some fediverse admins (mostly Mastodon) and the founder of Mastodon, Eugen Rochko (Gargron), where contacted by Meta/Facebook for an NDA meeting. We know nothing about it, but we're pretty sure that it was about this project92 thing that Meta/Facebook is creating to "compete" with Twitter.

So a lot of Mastodon admins already singed a pact to immediately block any Meta/Facebook activity in the fediverse as soon as it comes up. My Mastodon instance, fosstodon.org hasn't singed that pact and I'm pretty worried.

The following image is an screenshot of Gargron and dansup (creator of Pixelfed) talking about this. These posts were deleted, even from the wayback machine.

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[–] furrowsofar@beehaw.org 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Only my personal opinion. Seems very odd that they would sign an NDA. The deal is that when two companies meet it is more common that both companies will say that they do not want to exchange confidential information. There might be exceptions to that... but generally one should always say NO. Then only consider if there is a very good reason.

Other thing I would say is that NDAs have a scope. So you cannot really evaluate the NDA unless you read the document and know the scope. Could have been very limited scope.

[–] TheLastOfHisName@beehaw.org 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

"Then only consider if there is a very good reason."

Like money?

[–] furrowsofar@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No, that would not be a good reason for me. Generally I would want to discuss everything you could without an NDA. Keep in mind most of the time receiving confidential information is more of a concern then disclosing it. If I then determined I need an NDA, then maybe it is better to have a JDA (Joint Development Agreement) that specifies how jointly developed IP is going to be handled. I am speaking very generally.

In this context maybe the concern would have been business plans not patentable IP for example so maybe they wanted an NDA solely restricted to the business plans of the company and maybe it could be worded very narrowly. Not sure how I would react to that. It would have to be very tightly worded and passed in front of my attorney.

[–] SkepticElliptic@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I agree, only crackpots who are afraid of having their unoriginal ideas stolen ask for an NDA for a meeting.

The only thing I can think of is that META is afraid of people finding out how desperately they are trying to stay relevant.

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[–] Kernel@beehaw.org 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Sounds troubling. But not all of their actions turn out to be completely nefarious, and this could represent a genuine effort to contribute to the next generation of infrastructure. The emerging network protocol appears to offer an opportunity for both non-profit and commercial ventures.

[–] d4r1us_drk@beehaw.org 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm not particularly interested in anything that Meta/Facebook has ever created. Everything that this company has made or touched has been horrible/dangerous/terrible for everyone and I don't think that this isn't the case. Also that article that you linked is behind a paywall ._.

[–] Kernel@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And that's probably the wiser assessment, given their other activities. Here's the relevant part of that NYT article.

But Meta said it saw no reason to keep its code to itself. The growing secrecy at Google and OpenAI is a “huge mistake,” Dr. LeCun said, and a “really bad take on what is happening.” […]

“Do you want every A.I. system to be under the control of a couple of powerful American companies?” he asked. […] Meta’s open-source approach to A.I. is not novel. The history of technology is littered with battles between open source and proprietary, or closed, systems.

[–] d4r1us_drk@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago

Meta open sourcing their AI is great and hypocritical at the same time. Like yes we agree that AI shouldn't be controlled by a couple of powerful American companies, but we still need to have full control over the algorithm that literally manipulates users internationally on a daily basis.

[–] Steeve@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I get this is the fediverse and we're supposed to hate big tech and all, but this "everything Facebook has done is evil" is objectively wrong and such a Reddit take. Facebook's biggest problem has always been the people that use their products spreading hate and misinformation and their lack of moderation at their current scale, a problem that every single social media has hit, including the fediverse (i.e. Beehaw defederating with lemmy.world). And honestly, with governments refusing to take a heavy stance on regulating misinformation should it really be up to tech companies on what can and can't be shared on their platforms? Then there's data leaks like Cambridge Analytica, but that was a ticking time bomb, because data privacy back then wasn't a concern anywhere. I've worked in the data industry for a decade now and it was the fuckin wild west back then lol.

And then there's the good shit they've actually done. The article you replied to (not behind a paywall for me for some reason?) talks about how they open sourced their LLM AI for research purposes. Their data center designed were open sourced to help other data centers hit net zero carbon emissions (they're a huge contributor to the Open Compute Project). They've open sourced a ton of tools/languages as well.

WhatsApp is still fully end to end encrypted messaging and they're pushing the same on messenger now (their WhatsApp site even has a whole section for local law enforcement telling them they can't provide message data, a huge plus for Americans given recent abortion regulations).

Their targeted advertising has rightfully gotten a lot of scrutiny, but there's a lot of misinformation behind it, like "Facebook is listening to my calls" and "Facebook is reading my message data", which they've denied and there's no actual evidence of. I have family with small businesses that wouldn't have made it through the pandemic without their advertising platform.

I don't think that they have any place in the fediverse, honestly I'd be surprised if they wanted in on it anyways, but in my mind they aren't any more evil than any other corporation and the "Facebook is straight evil" attitude is just an attempt for Redditors to feel superior about their social media corporation choice.

If I were to guess this meeting was probably a job offer if anything lol.

Edit: Lol scratch that last bit, looks like Meta is coming to the fediversee - https://beehaw.org/post/636282

[–] PopOfAfrica@lemmy.one 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Correct, they are no more evil than any other corporation...

Which still makes them incredibly evil.

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[–] whofearsthenight@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Facebook’s biggest problem has always been the people that use their products spreading hate and misinformation

Facebook's algo drives this. It's a choice that they've amplified this content.

The article you replied to (not behind a paywall for me for some reason?) talks about how they open sourced their LLM AI for research purposes.

Can't comment much on this one, so I won't.

WhatsApp is still fully end to end encrypted

still because wasn't it like that when they bought it?

they’re pushing the same on messenger now

Now, as in, they didn't design it that way to begin with because it wasn't the profitable thing to do. They have to compete with iMessage, and further, they gain just by being able to tell every cop shop "sorry can't do it bro."

Their targeted advertising has rightfully gotten a lot of scrutiny, but there’s a lot of misinformation behind it, like “Facebook is listening to my calls” and “Facebook is reading my message data”, which they’ve denied and there’s no actual evidence of. I have family with small businesses that wouldn’t have made it through the pandemic without their advertising platform.

Glad your family made it. Unfortunately, though, this is the masses not understanding how technology these days really works. They don't have to read your messages or listen to your calls because they're doing that all over the web and through their own users. The truth is more nefarious because for most people "listening to my calls" is scrutable, while adding tracking cookies across the web or computing social graphs based on your contact info being shared without your consent by a few of your friends, or doing some ML on every photo shared is not.

I don’t think that they have any place in the fediverse, honestly I’d be surprised if they wanted in on it anyways

Agreed.

If I were to guess this meeting was probably a job offer if anything lol.

Disagree. Fediverse and it's growth as it stands now is not good for Facebook, so they're trying to head it off at the pass. I'd be willing to bet this meeting was a feeler for them and I hope Eugen and others are smart enough of to say basically nothing, and they're continuing the grand tradition of embrace, extend, extinguish.

Is Meta evil? No. They're probably not a standard deviation away from any other org in terms of how many are "evil" but their incentives today all align to a worse outcome for humanity. It's kinda worse - it's a collection of incredibly smart people compartmentalized enough from the "evil" the org does. Actually, don't know that I would say "evil" so much as "sociopathic."

Meta should get no passes, and be met with absolute scrutiny related to the fediverse.

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[–] soundasleep@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Keep in mind XMPP had similar sorts of activity back when chat apps were the rage, and in the end the protocol was added to Google Talk (now dead), AIM (now removed), Facebook (now removed), and Skype (now removed). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP#Non-native_deployments

I suspect existing orgs will want to contribute just as long as it takes to steal users and build a garden, that they can then wall off.

[–] polygon@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The Silicon Valley way of doing things is "growth at any cost". Of course Meta wants in on what might turn out to be the next big thing. Of course they want to use money and power to dominate the protocol, insert all sorts of monetization, and ruin the whole thing. And when it doesn't work out because they've done the same dumb shit that already ruined Facebook and Reddit the protocol will have been destroyed and rendered useless. Meta goes back to Facebook and Instagram while the entire Fediverse project becomes defunct.

This is the history of these companies. Thankfully "fediverse" is not something Meta can just outright buy and then destroy, but they can still throw their weight around with cash and the enshittification will quickly ensue. The Fediverse needs to resist. It's hard to say no to money, but VC capital is what is destroying the internet. We need to do this differently if we want it to succeed.

[–] TheBaldness@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You left out the part where they crawl the entire fediverse and hoover up data on everybody in it.

[–] furrowsofar@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You should assume that has and is happening. Pretty much everything is public.

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[–] furrowsofar@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

Yes. I was thinking the same thing. XMPP is a great example. They could have all federated, but then they chose not to. This will be the exact plan presumably.

[–] killick@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

I see you have been paying attention. Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, so I would say your prediction is right.

[–] comicallycluttered@beehaw.org 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I don't know that it's much of a reason to panic.

I expect they'll defederate themselves when they move to ActivityPub in order to make it look like it's not "part of some larger network", a lot like how TruthSocial is basically a Mastodon instance.

Obviously, we don't know much about what was said or signed, but I really doubt it's anything super concerning.

This reminds me a bit of when people discover who contributes a significant amount of code to the Linux kernel. Google, Microsoft, Intel, etc.

As much as I hate Facebook, they're not dumb when it comes to software. React has significant adoption and Zstd is a great compression algorithm, which they also developed in-house.

And while they weren't involved, the lead designer of Btrfs worked on a lot of it while he was at Facebook (I think they now also use it as their primary filesystem, I don't remember).

Basically, relax. Everything's going to be fine.

[–] Kichae@kbin.social 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's no reason for Meta to use ActivityPub and then immediately defederate. They're trying to build a Twitter competitor, and they know they can't with an empty service.

ActivityPub gives them access to content immediately. And they're clearly meeting with large instance owners in order to ensure they won't just block them. They don't need the small sites to be on board, just the ones with 100s of thousands of users.

Once they have drawn a large enough number of prominent Twitter users and a good following of normies, they can take or leave the rest of the network.

[–] furrowsofar@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Maybe there may well need to be a financial relationship tool. The major instances will have costs associated with Facebook users if federation happened. They could simply say, you pay your way we will not block you.

One issue with the Fediverse is someone has to pay. All the users coming from Reddit right now. They should be donating to their sites to cover the huge influx. It costs money.

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[–] d4r1us_drk@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago

I didn't knew that TruthSocial had anything to do with ActivityPub. Thanks for pointing that out. Let's just hope that they will defederate themselves...

[–] HappyMeatbag@beehaw.org 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Nobody in their right mind trusts Meta. What they call a “meeting” is nothing more than an unpaid consultation. They want to pick brains for free. That’s all.

What do the invitees get out of it? Some carefully chosen information that may not even be true, which (thanks to the NDA) they won’t be able to talk about anyway? A mediocre lunch? A demonstration of Meta’s awe-inspiring metaverse technology? Please.

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[–] Lowbird@beehaw.org 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I would hate that enough to switch instances over it, I think. That meeting could be over anything from being about tracking users across sites, to an offer to pay the admins to stay federated with some Facebook ActivityPub project, to asking the admins to add sponsored posts or comments, to a request for free advice from the admins about the fediverse, to trying to recruit the admins to go work on some other Facebook project. I don't know. But I can't imagine this ever being a good thing, when it comes to that company - I don't touch anything they run. And putting an NDA on just an initial meeting is sketchy as heck - even unenforceable NDA's are used to threaten people all the time (see: Weinstein, etc).

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[–] uzay@beehaw.org 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Here's the creator of pixelfed saying he won't work with Meta, and I believe his pixelfed instance also signed the pact.

https://mastodon.social/@dansup/110567561923047973

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[–] d4r1us_drk@beehaw.org 10 points 1 year ago

Here's another post for more info

[–] jherazob@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago

Update: Supernaut directly stated that he hasn't been contacted or attended a meeting, and went further to set up a page to visualize instances entering the Anti-Meta Fedipact

[–] worfamerryman@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It’s ok that fosstodon didn’t sign the pact. We literally do not know anything about it.

If it is pretty harmless, then let the user decide if they want that blocked.

If it’s terrible and you want to be on a platform that blocks it for all users, then just migrate your account.

[–] d4r1us_drk@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think that it would be a wiser decision to block the Meta platform anyway, because it will have a lot of traffic and it will overload other smaller instances (If I'm not mistaken). I agree with you that this is harmless for the time being, but an NDA is still a bad sign. I like Fosstodon, so I won't move to any other instance for now.

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[–] altz3r0@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They only really need mastodon.social to be on board, as their brand itself can do the rest to compete with twitter, so this discussion is kinda of moot.

I personally don't like it for mastodon, that will definitely lower the standards and bring a lot of advertising wether we like it or not. For other fediverse communities however, I think this is a good thing. It will be much easier to bring the people we want to it once the fediverse is more "popularized".

[–] SkepticElliptic@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago

They won't moderate properly. They don't moderate products they have now. It's going to attract so much spam, scammers, botting, account harvesting, and everything else that ruins online communities.

The only thing I can see working is if they simply make it simple to set up and host instances. Even then, they'll dig their claws into it and mess it up.

They can't even make the most popular reselling platforms in the world work properly.

[–] miracleorange@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago

Definitely a weird occurrence. Also not sure if that NDA would even be enforceable depending on the content of the meeting, but I'm not a lawyer or even close to it.

I do see Eugen's point that knowing is better than not knowing---doesn't mean that he supports it---though dansup's response doesn't exactly inspire confidence in me.

[–] Skrounge@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

I'm here to get away from meta and the like. Please don't let them in.

[–] lixus98@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As long as it doesn't affect established platforms and services like pixelfed I don't really care what Meta does.

[–] TheBaldness@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You don't care if they hoover up all your data even when you're not on their platform?

[–] furrowsofar@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Everyone can see all your posts now. They are all public.

[–] TheBaldness@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Yes but AFAIK they're not being systematically ingested by Meta. I assume that's their goal here.

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[–] lixus98@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

I do, but the same could be applied to every bad actor on the fediverse, all your info of your profile is free for everyone to sell

[–] onyx@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't really know much about NDA's but giving the benefit of the doubt, and considering the size of Facebook. It could just be them trying to cover their own asses with an NDA.
Imagine an enthusiastic Facebook developer joining the conversation with the Mastodon dev and slipping up on some other in-house project out of excitement. An NDA would probably cover that sort of thing? Just speculating at this point :)
Idk.., for now I'll wait it out and see what comes of it.

[–] d4r1us_drk@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago

That's also a possibility, maybe they don't want anything about Project92 to be disclosed at the moment. I'm still worried.

[–] Thalyssa@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

Oh fuck no.

[–] MoonRocketeer@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

~~Not very happy to hear this. The whole point behind all of these movements is to move away from what was wrong with social media: centralization, selling our data, etc etc. If this is a deal that gives them money in exchange of our data or to start implementing targeted ads, I'll probably just end up quitting social media altogether.~~

I'm not sure I understand what's going on exactly, so a lot of this is just what my immediate reaction is after reading this.

Edit: I misread. So they had an NDA meeting with Meta and are now blocking Meta activity in the Fediverse?

[–] d4r1us_drk@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Meta is creating a platform similar to Mastodon and Twitter, using Activity Pub. They also plan to integrate this platform with Instagram. This is what Project92 is about. That's why they're contacting Mastodon/Pixelfed andmins and developers.

[–] MoonRocketeer@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

Ah, I see thank you. I've been out of the loop so I guess I'll take a step back and see where all of this lands.

[–] d4r1us_drk@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Some people that weren't contacted by Meta are singing this pact to block Meta's Project92 as soon it comes up in the Fediverse. We know little about the ones that were contacted.

[–] d4r1us_drk@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

And looks likr the meeting has already happened.

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[–] diamond@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

I would get downvoted to oblivion if people can downvote me, but I think people are really overreacting w/ the Meta stuff. I already ranted about it a bit on my blog article, but the gist of it is:

Nothing has even happened yet. There's no "Meta instance" federating right now, and even if there is, you and your community has the power to just... block them off when it happens! The code is open, the community is yours, and you can do whatever you want, but your actions so far have involved attacking and harassing this person off the Fediverse, something that they contributed so much towards!

All the reaction that I've seen are just preemptive "get off my turf" reaction. It makes me annoyed that people are just going along with this mob.

[–] koezie@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

To me, the introduction of Meta to the fediverse means exposing everyone to a large poorly moderated community that would ruin the current culture of the fediverse. The best way for people to protect themselves from the inevitable onslaught of hate/prejudice/threats, the kind that’s typically found on Facebook but somehow “not against community guidelines”, is to preemptively block the upcoming instance. As for the NDAs, they are a great way to sow distrust within our own instances and try to tear us apart.

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