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Discourse, the free forum platform, is now joining the Fediverse.
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this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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Discourse is 100% open source. Meta is basically 0% open source. Big, big difference.
There's literally no difference from a Lemmy user's perspective. It does not matter to us whether someone browses Lemmy from Sync (a closed source Lemmy app) or an open source one.
This is a nonsense distinction to make.
You are clearly just on the hate train that's currently gripping these threads and don't know much about Meta. They contribute a great deal to open source. Of particular note in the past year or so are the Llama large language models, which essentially did for large language models what StabilityAI did for generative art - they broke the dominance of big closed-source companies like OpenAI and Anthropic to get the open-source LLM movement rolling.
It remains to be seen whether they'll play nicely with ActivityPub or not, but it is far from a foregone conclusion.
It's not a hate train, it's being cautious. And do you really think that Meta is open sourcing because of their passion for FOSS and standing by those values? They've taken an internal framework they've build, open source it so that they can advertise how open and great they are on the page you linked, and after it gains traction (which it will, since it's used by Meta it must be good /s) they can reduce their own internal efforts to a minimum, since the community will contribute. Open source may be a passion for the developers of Meta, but the company Meta does not give a single flying fuck about FOSS or the Fediverse.
Like half of the internet (including lemmy's clients and server applications) run on open source code and infrastructure that Meta built and maintains.
The company obviously cares about making money, as all companies do, but the reality of our world is that most good usable software is written by for-profit corporations, that's not an argument against using it, that's an argument to develop other sources for funding software development.
Meta built and maintains a few web frameworks. That's great. They also build and maintain a propaganda network that's happy to work in accord with abusive governments, for profit. Which of these is a greater moral weight? I'm not gonna overlook the latter because react is comfy.
The irony of this being said on a Lemmy instance is amusing. Are you aware of the political leanings of the Lemmy devs and of some of the larger Lemmy instances' original communities of users? The Fediverse as a whole is managing to diversify away from that, but it just goes to show how good things can come from bad actors.
I am! and the difference is that lemmy doesn't seem designed to convert people to Marxist-Leninism, while Facebook seems designed to agitate and suppress meaningful discourse while simultaneously entrenching consumerism even more than ever. Mark Zuckerberg is one of those Roman Guys, you know, them, but I don't think that the propaganda I referred to was in service of convincing everyone that Julius Caesar was rad. Mostly, these things are larger than their founders. And Facebook is still a propaganda network designed to convince people that if they leave, they'll lose touch with all their friends.
Meta has React, RocksDB and pytorch, and a few other "niche" frameworks and tools. "Half of the internet [...] run[ning] on open source code and infrastructure that Meta built and maintains" is a big, big exaggeration. Also maintainance is done by the OSS community for big parts, and I'm really curious what open source infrastructure Meta is running.
I'm not saying Meta has no relevance in OSS, but I can hardly think of an open source org that does open source purely for its own benefit. React helps them shape the web in the way Meta wants it, their ML stuff is important for their own internal needs (ads, BI, and the whole social networking, etc.), their AR/VR/XR contributions are for the Quest, and KI/LLM since they need it themselves instead of relying/partnering with OpenAI. Meta (the company) absolutely does not stand by the principles of open source, no matter how much you want to sugarcoat it.
The fact that FlyingSquid declared Meta to be "0% open source" when in fact Meta has been a major contributor to open source suggests that they're simply saying whatever bad things they can think of saying about Meta, not bothering to ground those things in any real facts. That's presumably because right now everyone is dumping on Meta and so comments that say bad things about Meta get upvoted without being checked (and comments that says anything as tepid as "maybe Meta is not completely awful" garners downvotes and homophobic attacks, ask me how I know). That's the hate train I'm talking about.
The motivation of why Meta does what it does doesn't change what they're doing. It's entirely possible for a big giant evil corporation to see benefit in playing nice with an open source ecosystem. My position all along has been to wait and see what they're going to do before instantly leaping to fragment the Fediverse against them.
Their motivation is more important than what they're doing. But right now their motivation is to compete with Twitter. The Fediverse is no threat to them because it's tiny.
https://www.threads.net/@mosseri/post/C051TLnud8U
There's your playing nice. They want to feed on ActivityPub data, while only contributing in a per-user opt-in selection. It's a joke, and both their motivation and what they are doing is absolutely fucked. It's another cog in their data ingestion machine that they can keep fucking around with, again.
I really can not comprehend why anyone would give this advance of trust to Meta, when all signs are showing you to bail.
So the big fear that existing Fediverse communities will be overrun with Threads content is moot? That seems to be the main concern people have.
I don't see what the problem with them reading ActivityPub data is. That's what it's for. These communities are not private and there was never any need for Threads to integrate ActivityPub for them to "ingest" the content from them.
The problem is not them reading data, but that Threads will take Fediverse content, and display it on Threads. In the opposite direction, Fediverse will only see the select few user content that do actually opt-in, and let's be honest here, most users won't know what the Fediverse is, except for again the few people that are on both platforms. This is absolutely not "playing nice" as you've put it before, and purely parasitic and, again, purely a greed decision by Meta. I don't really know why you are shilling so hard trying to excuse absolutely unexcusable behavior.
I'm not shilling. As I've said repeatedly, I don't like Meta. But I just don't see what problem this is. Sitting here on kbin.social, how does it affect me if someone over on Meta is seeing my posts and comments?
Before you talked about the Fediverse as a whole, now from a single user perspective.
IMO it affects the Fediverse as a whole by abusing it. The whole idea is an open network, where instances can federate with each other to bilaterally share information and create a seemingly single platform. This is not the case with the planned Threads integration, because they explicitly plan to feed on the content, but hiding sharing their own content behind an (for most of their userbase) obscure opt-in.
From a single user perspective it doesn't affect you directly. But it affects the platform you are part of with malicious intent.
I am not against Threads joining the Fediverse, and I do actually think it would be great for the growth of the Fediverse if actual big players join, and if it brings content that I personally do not like to see, I can use the tools available (e.g. blocking user/communities/instances) to hide it. But only if they plan on joining as a "regular instance" like any other - but Meta does not intent doing so, since they have chosen the opt-in with obvious intent of simply gaining additional content on their walled platform for their own gain.
The Fediverse is made up of individual users. If Threads isn't broadcasting its content out to other instances, how does it affect anyone out there on those other instances? They'll never see a thing. I used a single example user (myself) simply to illustrate that.