No, this feels like a massive corporation with massive marketing and market research departments succinctly breaking down a concept that most on the fediverse nerd out too much to do.

I shouldn't have doubted Apple's campaign for minimalism > functionality

Lmao at you complaining about toxicity when you're toxically judging and gatekeeping 2 Billion people.

In Apple's case it's a subtle encouragement to buy their watch.

I'm pretty sure it's just to cut costs / complexity / part counts in lower end phones, and higher end phones will use an always on display.

Though worth noting that the Nothing Phone 1 & 2 include pretty snazzy LEDs on the back that are used for notifications amongst other things.

Now, there are single sign-on (SSO) possibilities, but for them to be universally accessible across the Fediverse, you either need to impose them on 20,000 admins across two dozen software implementations, or you need them all to a) agree to support SSO, and b) agree to support the same SSO options.

Yeah, this is the real crux of the issue and is a large unsolved problem. We simply have no standardized system for decentralized identity verification.

SSO works as a way of maintaining identity across the fediverse, but that's not really federating identity so much as it's getting all instance to offload identity verification to various central services.

I believe I heard Microsoft had a research project in the area of decentralized identity verification but I don't know if it went anywhere or how suitable it would be.

I think what they mean is identity that is coupled to them the person and not whichever instance they choose to sign in on.

The fediverse not dying has yet to be proven.

Everyone on here keeps acting like they're in a position of power and the fediverse is destined for success, but here's the thing, it still sucks compared to the content that's on Reddit and FB/IG, because there's still a tiny fraction the number of users. The fediverse is only going to be the great place to have a conversation about stuff if people use it, and everyone rushing to cut off a massive source of funding / users / content while the fediverse is still trying to compete against Reddit et al seems like a huge mistake.

I think the spirit of the OPs comment is that it is the style of conversations, atmosphere and culture that each of them foster what makes them somewhat different.

If you want to organize discussion around topics, model it after reddit, where you subscribe to topics.

If you want to organize discussion around people, model it after twitter, where you subscribe to people.

Kbin and lemmy do a good job of modelling things after reddit, where you subscribe to topics. The decentralized nature just adds another layer of community duplication, but that was already a problem with reddit (r/gaming and r/games) and isn't that big a deal since all are subscribable from your preferred instance as long as it's federated with everyone.

The problem with Mastodon though is that it wants to model itself after Twitter where you subscribe to people, but unlike with topics, having duplicate copies of people is a real problem since it makes it hard to trust that you're actually subscribing to the right person and not a spam account. That is an extremely real problem that Mastodon tried to side step by pivoting to following topics, but at it's core the mastodon/twitter UX is not formatted for that, it's formatted for following people in real time and Mastodon seems like it has ignored that and is trying to insist that it's it's own thing that no one actually wants. Organizing discussion based around servers is not a user helpful format, it's exposing unwanted technical implementation details to the user in a way that only a tech nerd could ever love.

If you have to write a long ass post telling users that they're using your software wrong, then you wrote bad software.

Don't want people to think it's supposed to be Twitter? Don't model the entire UX after Twitter.

This is not a proper talk by meta that you could just "hear them out". They explicitly said off the record and confidential, there's no reason for that if it's something innocuous.

They plan on showing demos of their product to them or talking about potential features it might have. Boom, they require an NDA.

I don't think you understand how the professional world works or how common NDAs are. I've signed NDAs while going through interview processes at FAANG and other large companies just so that we can talk freely about projects I might work on. Especially for a company like Facebook where everything they do will get about a dozen news articles written, they're going to make you sign an NDA for any conversation about an unreleased product.

Having a larger market = having a larger network = greater network effects for content

Having Meta join with Mastodon might actually sway people off twitter and into the fediverse where it will be easier to migrate over to a different instance.

It's foolish not to hear them out, you accomplish nothing. This isn't some silicon valley episode where he has some arkane secrets that meta engineers couldn't figure out that he might leak. Meeting with them is zero risk and he would gain more information on what they're planning.