this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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Fediverse

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A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.

Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".

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Embrace, Extend, and Exploit: Meta's plan for ActivityPub, Mastodon and the fediverse (privacy.thenexus.today)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/9799372

What's Meta up to?

  1. Embrace ActivityPub, , Mastodon, and the fediverse

  2. Extend ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the fediverse with a very-usable app that provides additional functionality (initially the ability to follow everybody you're following on Instagram, and to communicate with all Threads users) that isn't available to the rest of the fediverse – as well over time providing additional services and introducing incompatibilities and non-standard improvements to the protocol

  3. Exploit ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the fediverse by utilizing them for profit – and also using them selfishly for Meta's own ends

Since the fediverse is so much smaller than Threads, the most obvious ways of exploiting it – such as stealing market share by getting people currently in the fediverse to move to Threads – aren't going to work. But exploitation is one of Meta's core competences, and once you start to look at it with that lens, it's easy to see some of the ways even their initial announcement and tiny first steps are exploiting the fediverse: making Threads feel like a more compelling platform, and reshaping regulation. Longer term, it's a great opportunity for Meta to explore – and maybe invest in – shifting their business model to decentralized surveillance capitalism.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago

The problem is that in its current state, there are inherent flaws which a corporation can abuse to destroy what to a lot of people on it consider to be the purpose of federated social media, which is lack of corporate control.

Consider that a company with the resources of meta could create hundreds of thousands of instances across all federated social media to the degree that you cannot tell what they own and what they don't until it is a statistical likelihood that your account is on a corporation controlled instance.

Consider that existing instances which are privately owned and operated could sell their instance to a corporation and no one would necessarily be any the wiser.

So you are right, in its current form, I do not believe in federated social media for the future, because it has no preventative measures to avoid such a thing outside of hosting your own personal instance, which a lot of people do not have the resources to do.