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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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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.