https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

this article here gives a pretty good rundown of the likely intent of any sort of federated integration with any meta product, with examples of the same thing happening twice before with other technologies.

supporting it puts them in a position to “help” it… as they “help” they implement new closed source features… then drop support.

much of the growth that would occur during the “support/help” phase would be on their proprietary iteration and would not benefit the fediverse.

the trajectory would likely be co-opting the fediverse, obscuring their service from the fediverse, while building their services behind closed doors, and then dropping support.

they’re recognizing the fediverse as a reasonable competitor, and this is a move intended to kill it.

for real, i’m not here because of convenience. it’s pretty inconvenient, actually.

i willingly give enough away to corporate overlords as it is… this is one of the occasions where i choose to not… despite the inconvenience.

UPDATE: Those rumours have been confirmed as at least one Mastodon admin, kev, from fosstodon.org, has been contacted to take part in an off-the-record meeting with Meta. He had the best possible reaction: he refused politely and, most importantly, published the email to be transparent with its users. Thanks kev!

kev should’ve accepted the meeting to see if they could infer the intent…

woahhh, i never stopped using old.reddit. it’s a far superior content delivery scheme to anything they came up with after.

thanks for sharing that one.

or, just don’t join threads.

I think there’s a balancing point where people in positions to exercise political will would use data to inform their decisions… I feel like that was probably the objective.

so far i think that process is going to be a bit of a barrier for the average user… so many logins. i understand that decentralization carries this burden, but i’m not sure it’s worth it for me personally, and i think i may be slightly more inclined that the average user to jump through those hoops. we shall see.

I always thought there was some merit to it, like, indicative of someone’s history in engagement on a platform, no?

I get that it becomes less and less meaningful as people farm it, but there is there no balancing point?

i wouldn’t go that far, but i think it is like policing and government where the people who would be best suited for the job are usually the type who wouldn’t really want to do it.

that’s pretty embarrassing. they should’ve opened the flood gates and walked away. i modded a /r/technology for a minute and there was just so much backroom bickering about moderation philosophy applied to every borderline spam case. idk why anyone would want to engage in that constantly.