Wow so in your view anyone who just says “I think this isn’t a big deal and it’ll be fine” has been paid off?

Regardless of the fact that’s something with absolutely no evidence?

And you’re supposed to be the rational one here?

Some people on this thread have lost their damn minds.

OK, I’ve read that link and it still doesn’t really explain how exactly Meta intends to monetise other peoples’ posts - “collect data from and monetise”, how exactly are they going to monetise other peoples’ posts on other instances, when they have no ability to e.g. serve ads to those people?

I mean, it is just one bad actor.

If you look at it in these terms, you understand that Facebook has an interest in making sure that ActivityPub doesn’t too large without Facebook having a say in it.

I don’t think that ActivityPub is having any present difficulty keeping itself niche without Facebook’s help - fedi has a total active user base of something like 2million, it’s very literally a rounding error on Meta’s user numbers. If there’s a battle here, Facebook is already winning.

But that wasn’t my point. It’s not that I think that Facebook or Google cannot scrape Fediverse platforms/instances, it’s that even if they do, they cannot serve targeted ads based on our activity here.

This is another one of those things where Meta’s claimed motivations for this don’t seem to stack up.

How exactly are Meta supposed to serve “targeted ads” to me, @bloonface, if I am on finecity.social and not [whatever Meta’s instance is]?

If I don’t have an account on their service, and never visit their website, they have no opportunity to put a tracking cookie on my computer, no opportunity to serve an ad to me (other than directly messaging me, behaviour which would absolutely get them defedded instantly by anyone who is even close to being on the fence about their presence), no link between my finecity.social account and any Meta accounts I may have… what benefit do they obtain from this?

Bluntly - how is this dastardly plan of theirs actually physically supposed to work?

A lot of people seem to have ascribed omnipotent powers to Meta far beyond what they are actually technically capable of. They can’t deliver you a tracking cookie or make your instance display a banner ad to you through ActivityPub, ffs.

For some reason, your link doesn’t work.

The second part of your comment doesn’t answer my question, nor would “they want our data!!!” explain why Meta would want or need to create an instance in order to get it, or how the “data” (what data? Your posts? The ones that ActivityPub syndicates to hundreds of other servers automatically? Do you know exactly which servers your posts are on at the moment?) of other users on other fedi instances could somehow be “monetised” by them.

God thank you, I swear some people fail to realise just how ActivityPub federation works!

Post something on fedi and you lose effective control over it; for all intents and purposes, it’s out there on hundreds of different servers who don’t have to respect your deletion requests, and it’s never coming back.

And to be perfectly honest, I’m more comfortable with Meta archiving all my shitposts than, I dunno, all the nazis.

I don’t want Facebook to have access to my account information, posts and comments.

I hate to break it to you, but the very nature of the fediverse (as a distributed network where posts and account information automatically get distributed to hundreds if not thousands of independent servers you may or may not be aware of, that do not necessarily have to honour your deletion requests) means that it would be absolutely trivial for either Facebook or any other random bad actor you could think of to have access to all of that, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.

This is an example I’ve given a few times, but if Meta were really just wanting to suck down data for the evulz (why they would do this I have absolutely no idea because it’s not like they could use that data for anything), they don’t need to start an instance amid a blaze of publicity. They could just go on Mastodon.social, sign up for a no-name account, grab an API key and suck down the contents of the fediverse in real time and that’s the end of it. The fediverse is not private and its very nature means that control over one’s own data is not quite as secure as ActivityPub advocates would like to pretend.

While they at first would adopt open standards and protocols, what stops them from creating proprietary extensions and using those and its dominance and resources to make it difficult for users to switch to other platforms in the Fediverse?

Nothing, which should probably raise concerns around how good a standard ActivityPub actually is if all it takes to drive a truck through its intent is one bad actor.

Once Meta gets their foot in the door, I guarantee they will try to bully the fediverse into doing things their way. Hard pass for me.

Can you give any reasonable by means in which they could do this and succeed?

So much of this stuff just sounds like infeasible conspiracy theories. If, hypothetically, Meta did do such a thing (somehow, still not clear how or frankly why?) all that it would mean is that anyone who disagreed could defederate from Meta, or would be defederated from Meta… which given half the servers in existence seem to want to defed them up front anyway, doesn’t seem to make any odds.

It’s all just very confusing hearing about these lurid ideas for things Meta could do with the fediverse that simply don’t make a lick of sense either in terms of motivation or implementation.

It was already bad enough indulging racist/sexist/transphobic shitheads with platforms just so they could have “polite debates” (that they didn’t actually care about, they just wanted pulpits); having a place specifically for them to come and have more debates they don’t actually care about was an especially stupid idea.

That’s not just a Reddit thing, it’s an Internet thing.

Americans absolutely dominate the English-speaking Internet.

But then the population of the US is greater than the population of Australia, the UK, New Zealand and Canada combined, twice over.

OnlyFans in general is a complete fucking racket. Most “creators”, who are young and often vulnerable people, make nothing or next to nothing from subs, even while taking on risks they may not know about or be able to mitigate them if they do know about them.

The world would actually be better without it.

I think that’s a little unfair, speaking as a fedi admin.

There are certainly instances that like to block any instance that doesn’t match its admins’ precise ideological priors (i.e. “X on Y server of 10,000 people is a ‘cop’ through some loose definition… COP!!! BAN!!! BAN THE WHOLE THING!!!” - has literally happened). I don’t agree with them or their methods.

But honestly they’re relatively small and few, and safely ignorable by the people on the big instances, who by and large will only block places that simply won’t moderate away their users’ hate speech or harassment.

Same way how on Reddit you can easily go a million years without having to interact with the weird uber-tankies or the racists, you can quite easily join Mastodon.social or any other reasonably well-moderated instance and let the whole fediblock discourse just pass you by.