🖤 ANTI-META FEDI PACT 🖤
fedipact.online

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.

  • darius_drake@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
    23·
    1 year ago

    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.orgEnglish
      9·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • darius_drake@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
        41·
        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.

      • whofearsthenight@beehaw.orgEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        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.