this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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Ok, so hold the fuck up for a second - most of what you said makes sense, but then you anthropomorphised a massive company that has more influence on global politics than most governments, and could be fairly blamed for mental health issues globally
Facebook is, and was, evil. They do not have morals, they have metrics. Their metrics have not changed.
They invented doomscrolling, intentionally - this wasn't something they stumbled upon, they did unethical psychological experiments on users.
For example, they shadow banned users. They made it so no one could see their posts, just to see what feelings of isolation would do to engagement... Luckily it didn't increase engagement. They created invisible echo chambers and artificial controversy, which did work, and is now common practice for social media
Facebook has created some of the greatest open source software in existence. React and pytorch are two that I use frequently. They were first made while the company was actively experimenting with the power to manipulate democracy
Facebook has some of the best engineers, and does a ton of great open source work. They also have some of the most amoral people in positions of authority.
They're not the same people - the teams who do AI research at Facebook? Great people doing great work
The people who do social media at Facebook? Never trust them. They have a PR problem and are treading lightly.
They want to mine the fediverse for information on users. I don't think this is an EEE plan... But I think that every time this arm of the company finds themselves in a position of control, they ask "how can we leverage this?"
All great points, maybe my view of Meta as a single entity isn't a good way to think about them. I wasn't aware of their open source work outside of LLMs so that is interesting. Your right on with your assessment of what they've done in the social media space. I disagree on the point that they want to mine fidiverse user data, just because I don't think they need to do all this work to integrate threads into activitypub to do that, there are easier ways. But I think your right to be skeptical of Metas intentions.
On the other hand, big companies adopting Activitypub could be a great thing for the fediverse. So risks and benefits. I'll keep my neutrality for now. But you make a good argument.
Of course they're doing it to mine user data - their primary business model is to run platforms to collect user data. They then sell user data both directly and by running the second largest targeted ad network.
Their public stance they made when renaming themselves meta is "we found out social networks have a lifecycle, and we want to get ahead of the curve and create/capture the platforms people are moving to"
There's plenty more to say about Facebook and big companies entering the fediverse but I kinda feel like anyone who is reading this understands the issue to a significant extent