What’s Meta up to?
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Embrace ActivityPub, , Mastodon, and the fediverse
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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
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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.
Fair! Good and bad depends on your perspective and how successful Meta is. It’s only the last bit about “using selfishly for Meta’s own ends” that I see as inherently bad. In general though I’ve writen elsewhere that I think it’s a great opportunity for the fediverse – I talked about about why in In Chaos There Is Opportunity and probably will say more in a later post in this series.
I’d say that the vast majority of economic actors - both companies like Meta and individual people - are generally acting in a selfish manner. It’s one of the great successes of modern market economies that most of the time that selfishness can be harnessed to serve the public good in various ways, so I’d want to see more detail about what exactly they’re doing before calling it bad.
I’ve certainly never said I trust Meta, just that I don’t think they’re the maniacal evil overlords many of these discussions are portraying them as.
OK, so, if you don’t trust Meta, and think they’re generally acting in a selfish manner, why do you think that they’ll freely let people move from Threads to the fedierse and make it easy to take all their followers?
Or phrased somewhat differently: it’s clearly good from their perspective to say that people can move their followers. Do you think it’s also always better for them to also let people easily move all their followers (which Meta is able to monetize while on Threads) to some other instance (where it’s harder for Meta to monetize them)? If there are situations where it’s not better from Meta’s perspective, why do you think they’ll make it easy – or even allow it?
I don’t expect anything in particular from them. My position all throughout all of this is that we simply shouldn’t be committing to defederate from Threads preemptively before they’ve even had a chance to show what they’re going to actually do.
There are plenty of situations where companies “open up” in ways that may not seem to be immediately in their self-interest but that actually work out to their benefit when you consider larger strategic goals or even just the good will it gets them. Meta just so happens to be very active in developing and releasing important open-source projects, for example their release of the LLaMA AI models basically sparked the same flourishing of open source large language model development that StabilityAI’s release of Stable Diffusion did for the art generators. Maybe you can come up with ulterior motives for all that, but the end result was still a positive one for the open source community. The same could happen with Threads and the Fediverse.
Sure, Meta – and Google, and Microsoft – is good about funding open-source projects when it suits their interest. Given where they are relative to Open AI and Google, releasing LLaMA as open source made a lot of sense for them. If they decide to seriously invest in fediverse compatibiilty they might well do something like release an open source client toolkit that would provide full functionality on Threads, whatever subset of Threads functionality Mastodon and maybe a couple of other platforms suppport, and has adaptors so that the community can support other platforms. Right now there isn’t a good solution (nobody uses the AP C2S standard, Mastodon’s API is the defacto standard but there are compatibility problems and quirks) so it benefits the community. And, it would have support for Threads functionality that other platforms don’t support, so it benefits Meta more than everybody else.
But we were specifically talking about why they’d make it easy for people to move away from Threads to other platforms. Do you think that’s in their business interest?