No, I'm just not willfully blind to the fact that social networks are only valuable when people use them. Reddit wasn't great because it was a niche forum with a handful of decentralized tech enthusiasts, Reddit was great because it was a big non-gatekeeping umbrella that welcomed everyone.
masterspace
Everyone keeps talking in analogies like "playing their game" because if you said "we gain nothing by getting a ton of free content from Threads users" it would sound ridiculous.
You haven't articulated a problem, let alone described how this particular solution solves it. Meta building a better version of your platform that siphons away users is a problem regardless of whether or not you federate with them / regardless of whether their platform is even built to support activitypub. Federation has no bearing on that one way or another.
The only thing naiive is the people in here thinking that defederating from Meta accomplishes anything whatsoever.
Oh boo hoo, meta's instance is shinier than ours, doesn't that mean users will leave? Yeah, look around, they already will and are leaving for Meta's platforms, they have more users on Threads in 24hrs than the Fediverse has had in it's entire life.
Nothing about defederating changes that.
Signing an NDA to talk about an unreleased product is not predatory, it's standard practice for virtually any business (especially the kind inviting random people off the internet to see them). Many jobs require you to sign NDAs just to go through the interview process.
There is nothing gained by not going to the meeting with Meta, if they want to launch their Twitter clone they are more than capable of doing that regardless of whether or not this guy takes a meeting to hear them out. All he's done is learned less about what they plan on doing leaving him less capable of taking the best course of action, and if you trust him to make the right decision then that's objectively a bad thing.
Such bravery coming from someone who sounds oh so employed.
That's standard practice if you're going to be talking about an unreleased product.
This is not a proper talk by meta that you could just "hear them out". They explicitly said off the record and confidential, there's no reason for that if it's something innocuous.
They plan on showing demos of their product to them or talking about potential features it might have. Boom, they require an NDA.
I don't think you understand how the professional world works or how common NDAs are. I've signed NDAs while going through interview processes at FAANG and other large companies just so that we can talk freely about projects I might work on. Especially for a company like Facebook where everything they do will get about a dozen news articles written, they're going to make you sign an NDA for any conversation about an unreleased product.
Having a larger market = having a larger network = greater network effects for content
Having Meta join with Mastodon might actually sway people off twitter and into the fediverse where it will be easier to migrate over to a different instance.
It's foolish not to hear them out, you accomplish nothing. This isn't some silicon valley episode where he has some arkane secrets that meta engineers couldn't figure out that he might leak. Meeting with them is zero risk and he would gain more information on what they're planning.
In this case the American and Canadian coast guard spent resources trying to save people after they got into danger, and it sounds like the Greek coast guard might have spent resources keeping desperate people in danger until hundreds drowned.
The tragedy in Greece is an endictment of the Greek coast guard and western countries attitudes towards the developing world and refugees in general, but just because more people's houses are on fire elsewhere doesn't mean you shouldn't put out your own.
Meta is more likely to pull people away from Twitter than Mastodon is, and having all of Twitter be run with ActivityPub / open to federation is a good thing.
Yup. People gonna have to move.
Remember when people said that climate change would cost us trillions of dollars? This is why.