Most people who use social media disagree, and unfortunately for you, it's their opinions that matter most as to whether they use a given social media platform.
I don't really care to follow celebrities and athletes either, but I recognise at least that I am in a minority.
That statement is refreshingly sane. Really sick of the amount of heat over this situation and the lack of light.
Yeah, I'm "defending" Facebook by pointing out that people keep letting 2 + 2 = 57845789478945 and that many of the "risks" being talked about are simply imaginary, technically impossible and/or do not require Meta to start an instance to materialise.
The technical details rather matter when people are coming up with random nonsense and/or don't actually seem to understand the nature of the platform they're coming to the defence of.
I don't trust Meta. I don't like Meta. That doesn't mean I need to also accept as true random confabulations about people being paid off and data being scraped for ends that don't make any sense. There's been a whole heap of heat around this subject and basically no light.
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.
Their following press releases would probably spin a very different narrative about immature tech and privacy concerns.
What else do you expect them to do? Say "oh yeah I guess a bunch of guys on fedi say we are arseholes, so we must be"?
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.
My view is if they did do that last thing, we'd be in exactly the same place as we were when we started - with "fediverse" as a tiny niche social network mainly populated by nerds, off to the side of all the others.
I think people have kind of failed to keep a sense of scale here - fedi has something like 2million active users, Facebook has a thousand times as many. We are quite literally a rounding error.