Lets put aside all the glowing conspiracy nonsense shall we? Its crying wolf to the point that when there is something legitimately concerning people will be tired of you claiming that everyone and everything is somehow a CIA plot with hairbrained "evidence"..
>Threads in Europe delayThis is just as simple as that the EU has at least a handful of of privacy and data use regulations that aren't present in the US. Everyone heard that whole Threads connected to Instagram accounts et.. thing here in the US? Well in EU they have to prove that the info is silo'd and there are more declarations and and that probably a lot of the "retention" and data mining stuff that Zucc wants to do and is free to do in the US, cannot be done without jumping through more hoops in Europe.
>>20865>>20866Its all basically just Zucc trying to take advantage of Musk's mistakes and get another type of social media user into their walled garden. This is why connecting it to all the other Meta apps is important and also they're trying to leverage another form of "engagement" which can be monetized. Honestly, if it wasn't for Musk doing crazy shit very public with Twitter I imagine they would have taken on a TikTok alternative first.
>Fediverse stuff>>20867Though I like the picture and think its well made, I think it gives Meta too much power. Certainly be wary of their behavior, but there are other things to consider.
>>20869I don't think this is accurate, assuming there some single speech controlling project globally. There are a number of different interests that cross over or make use of resources at different times but its not as though there's some giant cabal with one intent all sitting at a table. A lot of it is simple to explain by normal capitalism doing capitalism profit seeking.
The Fediverse has its own issues we'll get to that later, but it isn't as though even if a corporate entity had a large footing on the fediverse it would necessarily alter the behavior of any other servers or communities.
>>20870I think you're missing a critical point - though Gmail and Hotmail showed op with (especially Gmail) offering huge amounts of storage, features etc.. that most other mail services of the time did not in exchange for (originally very limited - there was a time when gmail had a single adwords block at the top of it that read from your current email and that was it! So if you got a mail from your wife saying to buy dog food, you'd get an ad from best places to buy dog food etc) data mining at a time when things were far more anonymous and generic . However, none of this prevented users from going elsewhere , running their own mail services, taking advantage of other mail hosts all without losing compatibility with users on the big names ; the power of decentralized federation working as it should.
>P2PThe problem is that P2P just doesn't work very well for social media because of discoverability issues. Trying to get around that either requires intense bootstrapping (which usually depends on a handful of hosts), extremely long waits and at times significant metadata leakage, or just only communicating with known connections. THere are benefits with P2P, but something equivalent to "social media" where you may want to make connections through the platform/protocol with those you don't already know and a lot of the messages are broadcast in public as far as possible. Decentralized specifically Federation is pretty much the best solution for this use case when the other options are either centralization (easiest with all its downsides) or distributed/P2P (with the issues described above and not really suited to this use case)
>>20871>>20875>FediverseWhile its good to be concerned about the power of a large actor,, its important to be realistic both about what they can and can't do both a technical and operational sense. As I described above, pure distributed P2P isn't generally suitable for what we call "social media", so if there is to be a successor to a whole generation of users who have grown up expecting social media sorts of interactions its either going to be another centralized platform i nthe same way Facebook followed MySpace followed Friendster, or its if we're very lucky it will be a Fediverse or other federated protocol. Having big corporate social media interest in a federated platform could be more beneficial to the Fediverse users than anyone else, by means of de facto ensuring that the big corporate users are operating on the same protocol as opposed to something separate all together. Also, it means that if someone gets tired of being on a node operated by Facebook or whateve the fuck and you already have friends on some other Fediverse node, you are familiar both with the workings of the tech and you can possibly port/sync/forward your account elsewhere or at worst make a new account on another federated server, plus you can still talk to your friends on the corpo server if you wish
The major issues of concern are either A) corporate node decides, after integrating themselves heavily into the ecosystem to make some technical contribution or change that, while it may add some technical benefit, only nodes others do/follow/accept can connect, essentially acting as a fork. or B) Corporate node defederates with many others so only those who ideologically or policy wise align (ie accepting some sort of monetization) will be able to communicate. Neither one of these seems very likely and both take a significant investment into getting into the Fediverse community and userbase while also being willing to burn a lot of the users and goodwill they generated in the first place so while its possible it would be difficult to be a return on their investment financially or otherwise. To say nothing for the fact that B can happen just as easily (and stupidly) by admins on smaller fedi nodes and is another issue to be discussed entirely.
However, the possible benefit to a decentralized federated protocol to have the big corpo nodes there as part of the interoperable network , exposed to and exposing users elsewhere that there's something besides the rules of the corpo node that's on the same network, and a lot more , to say nothing for the "next social media platform" transition being a federated decentralized network instead of the next also-ran centralized walled garden, is a big potential benefit.