this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2024
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predicted? they're facebook, they are not predicted to be bad, they ARE bad.
lets learn from history and not be deer in the headlights
It’s often advantageous to prevent catastrophe before it occurs rather than clean up the mess once it happens.
The mess left by a "catastrophe" often consists of rubble and blood, not some internet comment
What the social media algorithms did to teenagers are for sure a catastrophe involving blood. Suicide went up 48%. 131% for girls.
Jonathan haidt have a public repository of all research on the subject.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/teen-childhood-smartphone-use-mental-health-effects/677722/
https://jonathanhaidt.com/reviews/
You mean being instrumental in facilitating a genocide in Myanmar of the Rohingya people isn't sufficient?
Bringing the Marcos name back to the Phillipines, while minor by comparison, is also an issue with repercussions potentially lasting generations.
The thousands of extra-legal killings that were the direct result of the election of Duterte as president (who was AFAIK elected with direct help from Cambridge Analytica and a vile social media campaign on Facebook) is also nothing to scoff at.
But I think the Rohingya genocide is way more insideous, because Facebook knew that their platform was being used for direct encitement of violence and coordination of progroms and chose to ignore it because they thought Myanmar would be a lucrative market and wanted to consolidate their monopoly power there.
Yes but enough about your mother.
Why cover your nuts when you can just let somebody kick you there repeatedly?
In this analogy, they haven't kicked your nuts.
Where have you been living the last 20 years? Facebook is a repeated offender.
Sure they have, over and over and over, just not in this neighborhood yet. Folks were either too young to witness or just weren't paying attention to the decades of anti-consumer bullshit from this company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook#Criticisms_and_controversies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawsuits_involving_Meta_Platforms
Here's a couple recent individual ones:
https://theintercept.com/2024/03/26/meta-gaza-censorship-warren-sanders/
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/03/netflix-ad-spend-led-to-facebook-dm-access-end-of-facebook-streaming-biz-lawsuit/
They have been very nearly the worst example of an awful tech company for their entire existence. They will exploit the fediverse to the maximum extent they can, and we should not be voluntarily accompanying them.
Not to stir the pot, but at one point Zuck was an idealist. Circa 2008? When interviewed by a news corporation about privacy concerns he said, and I quote, "It's your data. You own your data." At the time, he hadn't monetized with anything more than ads, and I think he truly believed it.
A short few years later he saw the opportunity to become a multi-billionaire and probably decided ethics and idealism is for poor people. Much the same as Reddit, Google, Apple, etc. Do you remember? Those of us who lived through it remember.
One day, the largest Lemmy instances may be no different. Time will tell.
Slight difference is that Zuck has had control from the start, whereas other companies might have had "don't be evil" leadership that was… optimized away for financial reasons.
Not that it really matters nowadays. Just an observation.
I don't really see the point of this comment.
If so, I don't really care how nice and kind Zuck was when he was a freshman in college. I care about what he has done since then, and leading up to now.
I don't even get that idea, so I am guessing that can't be it.
I lived through using 8" floppies, so yes, I remember.
Which of those are open source projects that anyone can fork and/or run their own instance of at any time, providing a place for people to seamlessly transition from Reddit, Google, or Apple if they don't like what those companies do with their platform? The comparison you are trying to make falls apart immediately.
Take it at face value. The comment is a historical correction and gentle reminder that we only have one chance to prevent data from walking out the door, regardless of how friendly the platform is. Once your data is out, it's out. Guard it well.
Is FaceBook detrimental now? Yes it is, unquestionably.
Was it always? No, it wasn't.
Should we de-federate? Absolutely. Yesterday and retroactively, if possible.
Reddit. Once upon a time.
Ah, 8" floppies. Good memories. And bad. "Please read that... Why aren't you reading it? If you're not going to read it, spit it out... Let go. Now try again. Why is it blank? It wasn't blank after I wrote to it. Why did you wipe it? Damn." It was the best of times.
I was so excited when 3 1/2" introduced attached switchable write protection. The peak of convenience.
Did you already forget the shit Facebook keeps doing? Repeatedly.
Facebook has and it's doing plenty bad. At this point, assuming this time they will be good is too much of wishful thinking.
Still I would let the instances decide. Seems a bit counter spirit to try to force them. Even as a user your can block them (there are two that a lot of users are blocking already...)
Its probably good to federate so that Threads users can leanr about alternatives and migrate to a better instance on the fediverse
Just to be clear, threads can federate with an instance that is not defeated with them, and in this case threads users can see all the Lemmy content, but not the other way around.
So this means that we can just keep posting anti Facebook content all the time and they will serve it to their users or will have to be blocking it.
The more I think about it, the worse it seems for threats to federate.
What's the number of Threads users compared to Lemmy? If the number of Threads users greatly outweigh the number of Lemmy users, then we'd simply be drowned out by all the Threads posts. That's part one of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
Extend adds functionality to Threads that Lemmy either can't support or won't support for a while due to development time. People migrate to Threads because Lemmy is "missing" functionality. Plus, though I'm not clear on the exact legal specifications, proprietary code can be added to open-source code, and the proprietary code would be copyrighted. In other words, Lemmy devs would have to figure out a way to interact with and mimic Threads' proprietary code using open-source code.
Extinguish is when Threads' support of Lemmy is eventually dropped. The users left on Lemmy have suddenly lost a huge amount of content, and they're left with fewer users than before Threads enabled federation.
Right, so that means when someone on Threads is complaining about Threads, Lemmy users can't chime-in and say "uhh, just register on here and thats not an issue, guy"
Well, meta plans to federate with at least some instances... Right? Else their users won't be able to speak either.
cough
Haven't done anything to the Fedivese yet.
"the mass murderer have killed multiple people in Spain and Italy, but we can't just assume he will do the same thing in France"
Sure, but this is Mastodon, not murders. Much lower stakes.
if the stakes are so low then blocking them is as low-stakes as not, so why make a fuss about it?
Oh? I missed where Meta had done bad things to previous Fediverses.
Like XMPP?
Not Meta.
Facebook allowed connecting with XMPP clients for a while and then cut off that access. While they were not the main offender compared to Google, they still did nothing but leech off the XMPP ecosystem until they decided it wasn't in their interest any longer.
I'm failing to see what's wrong about this. They used XMPP and then stopped? That seems to be exactly what people angry about Threads federation want Meta to do with ActivityPub.
The point is that at no point in time where they actually interested in supporting the XMPP federation. It was only a short term tool for them to capture some audience that it would not have otherwise.
Well sure MS-13 may be a brutal trafficking gang known for extreme violence, but they haven't done anything to ME yet.
I think this comment chain is going in a circle while everyone actually agrees with the underlying point.
It might be true that they aren't ACTIVELY being malicious currently. It's also true that they have a horrible history, and they will likely be actively malicious in the future.
(I say 'might' because I seem to recall them being malicious towards the fediverse with secret meetings with admins, but I didn't follow up on that)
like this?
Wasn't the original post amended to state it wasn't intentional but rather a bug?
"bug"
So wasn’t Google when they killed XMPP.
like this?
Thought of this immediately as well
if only Facebook had started in 2004 and not 2024 we might have some historical evidence about how the company handles moderation or community safety or protecting user data or..
if only threads wasn't launching literally today and we knew if they'd enthusiastically welcome hate accounts like Libs of Tiktok https://www.mediamatters.org/libs-tiktok/timeline-impact-libs-tiktok-told-through-educators-health-care-providers-librarians
The thing is, Meta does not care about community safety, or moderation, or protecting user data. (Fun fact: they don’t have a data protection agreement, but a data usage agreement.) All they care about is how they can get the most money out of something. Killing off things left and right of their path.
The question is not IF Meta kills the Fediverse but only WHEN they do it.
Ounce of prevention > pound of cure; or in Meta's case, imperial fucktonne of cure.
It's Facebook dude. To put it in Lemmy friendly terms, they're not different entities in the way that Linux and Windows are. They're different entities in the same way that Windows and Xbox are. It's not technically the same thing but it's the same people calling the shots. Expecting something different is only going to leave you disappointed.
I’m voting for Trump because he hasn’t done anything bad as a second term president.
They have done a lot of bad, not with threads, but with any other app. A wait and see approach to Facebook at this point is insanity.