What reason could Zuckerberg and Meta possibly have for wanting to create a federated social media site?

I think they want to destroy it. They don't want us to have freedom away from their data collection and ad bombardments.

Best way to do so is to get in. Some one posted an article about what they want to do.

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

This is why Mete wants in.

There a post suggesting that it's a EU law they are trying to avoid. It states that if a platform is large and a gatekeeper for information, then certain laws will apply. But by being in the fediverse that information is accessible by not-meta platforms, so the laws won't apply (they will argue).

I fully believe it has to do with moderation and wanting to offload the costs of moderation. Moderation is expensive and requires whole teams, but if they just direct that federated instances need to comply with Meta's moderation standards, suddenly they're not directly responsible (or legally liable) for that stuff. It also has to do with ads - once Meta becomes dominant, they can say "we will serve federated ads and you have to deal with it or defederate from us."

@Hyrulian@lemmy.world I suspect it is to whitewash the fact that they are walled gardens

"look! we are activitypub-interoperable. it is not our fault everybody wants to use our service instead of mastodon!"

I think new laws in Europe have something to do with it. EU is trying to force the big platforms to interoperate. Facebook/Meta is of course one of the most targeted. So I think their thought is by signing on to the existing fediverse, they can say hey we are playing nice no need to regulate us further

I think that Meta is trying to beat Twitter on microblogging. Using ActivityPub, like Lemmy and Mastodon, is just a fast and convenient way to start up quickly. The Fediverse will suffer with Thread invasion, as "colateral damage".

Disagree with a lot of the stances here.

Meta has been hit hard by a series of failures over the last decade.

Continually missing first place, the company has broadly pivoted towards more open partnership in order to boost their offerings.

For example, their LLM weights being released to researchers when the product was clearly behind OpenAI and even Google.

Playing nice with federated networks fits into this.

Meta is betting that open platforms do well enough to corner a non-insignificant part of the market and are hoping to leverage compatibility with it in order to protect and differentiate their fledgling product from competition.

None of this means they aren't still going to try to siphon every detail they can to maximize ad revenue for users.

But they aren't trying to kill or sabotage the fediverse (which they rightfully don't seriously see as competition in itself). They are hoping it is successful enough that it helps give them an edge against walled garden networks backed by competitors' money.

In general, expect to see more openness from Meta in the coming years for much of what they do. They finally realized they aren't Apple and can't get away with siloing their products within the market.

Ploum makes a very interesting point on his blog: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

They talk about examples like Google Chat being XMPP, becoming very big, changing the standards that look like other XMPP users/clients are subpar and then killing "federation" but no one complains because everyone uses their product, so it's not a big disruption.

While I don't think this is it, because Facebook is huge and ActivityPub isn't (XMPP was the most used protocol then), this happened and can't be ignored.

Microsoft pioneered (or maybe popularized, not sure) embrace, extend, extinguish. I’m sure this is a version of that.

What are they after: Money Are they going to try and infiltrate it: Obviously Are they trying to monetize it: Obviously It doesn't add up: To them it does I feel like most people...: I've got some bad news for you

The same thing cancer always does: To spread and ruin.

I've been trying to figure this out myself. The best I can come up with is that Meta wants to increase their user base as fast as possible and this is one way of doing it.

Another thought I had is that they could be thinking of getting Twitter to add ActivityPub, and then federating with Twitter. Meta could then claim all users can use their platform.

Honestly? Zuckerberg has always had an obsession with the next step as it relates to how people use the internet. He has a track record of trying to catch lightning in a bottle again and getting struck by lightning instead, to the detriment of his own company.

Just look at the Metaverse, he got obsessed with a relatively new technologies (vr and blockchain) and wasted billions of dollars chasing the same high he once got when Facebook took over.

Maybe he sees money in the fediverse, but i think Zuckerberg is just getting excited about a new technology like the rest of us. Unlike the rest of us however, he will likely end up spending billions of dollars continuing to chase that high that he got from Facebook.

Another thought is that they're not trying to kill Mastodon, they're trying to kill Twitter.

Mastodon has a bit of a community already, so by implementing ActivityPub, Meta can make its platform seem bigger than it is by pulling in Mastodon content. Gives it another edge over Twitter.

Best case scenario is Threads sees ActivityPub as just the cost of doing business. That way, even people who won't use your platform are still interacting with it. Downside, people on your platform can leave for a federated alternative and not miss out on any content. Not sure if that downside makes up for the potential gains.

I think the default approach needs to be defederate first unless Meta shows actual interest in developing the fediverse with good intentions. If Threads become the majority provider of content to the fediverse and then we defederate, we lose all that content. It could lead to Mastodon, Lemmy, and Kbin withering and dying as everyone goes where the content is.

Slightly sarcastic response: "What's this federation thing? IDK but Facebook has it. I guess I don't need to go anywhere. Thanks Zuck!"

My take is they see federated protocols as a threat, but they can't compete directly with them. The next best thing they can do implement them to try and keep people in their walled garden. Even if it means punching some windows into those walls. However, they won't implement the full protocol, only a subset. They may not even implement them correctly. Causing problems for anyone on the outside. Basically providing a support yet inferior experience for anyone still in the walled garden.

Those people will be none the wiser too. The average person doesn't understand technology or protocols. As far as they know, they're still be in Facebook.

I think Zuck looked at the hosting bills and thought: "How do I get the suckers to host their own data while allowing me to control and harvest it?"

Federation is the future of social media.

I know it, you know it, the original Twitter team knows it, and Meta knows it too.

Over time I think this will become increasingly clear to everyone, and as a new social network pops up every couple of months and social media becomes more fragmented, it will only become more important that people are able to communicate with each other across networks. Even the average normie out there who hasn't joined the Fediverse yet because they think it's "too complicated" or "don't want to join something with servers", is starting to look at services like BlueSky, Threads and Tumblr (which have all made some level of commitment to federation) and slowly beginning to understand the value of being able to follow people on completely different networks.

I guess what I'm getting at is that Meta and BlueSky know that social media fragmentation and federation are not only on the horizon, but here today. Meta, Twitter and TikTok would be perfectly happy to have things continue as is, with them being the center of the centralized social media universe. But the biggest collective fear of every big tech company is sleeping on paradigm shifts caused by new, disruptive technology (like ActivityPub), and thus being dethroned by some new players.

I'd argue that the fact that Meta, one of the biggest and most powerful tech companies in the world, is now planning on adopting ActivityPub is a sign that the Fediverse is winning.

They make money off the posts. If they suck in federated posts, they can monetize them.

They want your data. That’s it.

Take a look back to when facebook chat and google chat where using an open protocol, but once their users counts got high enough they cut that part off.

It helps keep users on their platform.. They hope users setup or keep accounts on their instance / platform then just cut off the other stuff at some point.

I think it's all about moderation and content management.

Before Musk, the greatest challenge facing Twitter was content moderation. There's all this legal but annoying content you do not want to host, but if you block people from your platform you're suddenly limiting free speech and there's an outrage and suddenly you're in even deeper shit.

The fediverse solves this very elegantly - throwing you off my platform is not the same as cutting you off from the public sphere the platform is part of. So Meta can be stricter in their content management than Twitter was, and possibly avoid the free speech critiques that Twitter faced.

It's already kind of visible in how the Threads developers are emphasising how they're trying to make Threads a "friendlier" space than Twitter.

Free data.

Maybe a technical infrastructure shortcut, a credibility boost with certain tech-literate folks, and a sop to (mostly EU) regulators about embracing (hmmm... and THEN what?) existing open standards. It could be all of them, but I am betting on mostly #3, like "See? Mastodon and ActivityPub exist so this is no different than when Google launched Gmail!"

The only reasonable explanation is to destroy it and eliminate future competition. Zuckerberg himself said it's better to buy a company than compete with it. He can't buy the Fediverse because it's FOSS and community driven, but it's vulnerable to "embrace, extent, extinguish". There's nothing built in to keep that from happening.

They don't have to own the fediverse, they can just charge for access to it. People who are happy with a superficial view, will pay with their data to have a window.

I think it’s some sort of insurance or backup plan in case their platforms eventually die out.

You’re thinking about it to hard.

The are using the a/p code because why not? Also because it’s been around a while and that might be useful when competitors start suing.

Threads instantly will become the de facto fediverse client. If they federate for even a month, and then defed, nearly everyone from any other instance will want to move to threads to maintain that access.

There are lots of potential reason that vary from terrible to neutral. I can't imagine what's going on in Zuck's brain, thankfully, so I don't know if this is terrifying, or just a way to follow my racist aunt on Mastodon. Either way I don't exactly trust Facebook though, so I'd rather err on the side of caution and just defederate for now and see how it turns out.

Lower infrastructure and maintenance costs. It fits the current scene of all tech companies suddenly getting paranoid and chasing immediate profits.

It might be a way around IP. They are threatened of being sued by Twitter.