Beehaw Support

Only my personal opinion. Seems very odd that they would sign an NDA. The deal is that when two companies meet it is more common that both companies will say that they do not want to exchange confidential information. There might be exceptions to that... but generally one should always say NO. Then only consider if there is a very good reason.

Other thing I would say is that NDAs have a scope. So you cannot really evaluate the NDA unless you read the document and know the scope. Could have been very limited scope.

I don't know that it's much of a reason to panic.

I expect they'll defederate themselves when they move to ActivityPub in order to make it look like it's not "part of some larger network", a lot like how TruthSocial is basically a Mastodon instance.

Obviously, we don't know much about what was said or signed, but I really doubt it's anything super concerning.

This reminds me a bit of when people discover who contributes a significant amount of code to the Linux kernel. Google, Microsoft, Intel, etc.

As much as I hate Facebook, they're not dumb when it comes to software. React has significant adoption and Zstd is a great compression algorithm, which they also developed in-house.

And while they weren't involved, the lead designer of Btrfs worked on a lot of it while he was at Facebook (I think they now also use it as their primary filesystem, I don't remember).

Basically, relax. Everything's going to be fine.

Sounds troubling. But not all of their actions turn out to be completely nefarious, and this could represent a genuine effort to contribute to the next generation of infrastructure. The emerging network protocol appears to offer an opportunity for both non-profit and commercial ventures.

I would hate that enough to switch instances over it, I think. That meeting could be over anything from being about tracking users across sites, to an offer to pay the admins to stay federated with some Facebook ActivityPub project, to asking the admins to add sponsored posts or comments, to a request for free advice from the admins about the fediverse, to trying to recruit the admins to go work on some other Facebook project. I don't know. But I can't imagine this ever being a good thing, when it comes to that company - I don't touch anything they run. And putting an NDA on just an initial meeting is sketchy as heck - even unenforceable NDA's are used to threaten people all the time (see: Weinstein, etc).

Nobody in their right mind trusts Meta. What they call a “meeting” is nothing more than an unpaid consultation. They want to pick brains for free. That’s all.

What do the invitees get out of it? Some carefully chosen information that may not even be true, which (thanks to the NDA) they won’t be able to talk about anyway? A mediocre lunch? A demonstration of Meta’s “awe-inspiring” metaverse technology? Please.

Here's the creator of pixelfed saying he won't work with Meta, and I believe his pixelfed instance also signed the pact.

https://mastodon.social/@dansup/110567561923047973

Here's another post for more info

I'm here to get away from meta and the like. Please don't let them in.

I don't really know much about NDA's but giving the benefit of the doubt, and considering the size of Facebook. It could just be them trying to cover their own asses with an NDA.
Imagine an enthusiastic Facebook developer joining the conversation with the Mastodon dev and slipping up on some other in-house project out of excitement. An NDA would probably cover that sort of thing? Just speculating at this point :)
Idk.., for now I'll wait it out and see what comes of it.

Update: Supernaut directly stated that he hasn't been contacted or attended a meeting, and went further to set up a page to visualize instances entering the Anti-Meta Fedipact

Definitely a weird occurrence. Also not sure if that NDA would even be enforceable depending on the content of the meeting, but I'm not a lawyer or even close to it.

I do see Eugen's point that knowing is better than not knowing---doesn't mean that he supports it---though dansup's response doesn't exactly inspire confidence in me.

It’s ok that fosstodon didn’t sign the pact. We literally do not know anything about it.

If it is pretty harmless, then let the user decide if they want that blocked.

If it’s terrible and you want to be on a platform that blocks it for all users, then just migrate your account.

They only really need mastodon.social to be on board, as their brand itself can do the rest to compete with twitter, so this discussion is kinda of moot.

I personally don't like it for mastodon, that will definitely lower the standards and bring a lot of advertising wether we like it or not. For other fediverse communities however, I think this is a good thing. It will be much easier to bring the people we want to it once the fediverse is more "popularized".

As long as it doesn't affect established platforms and services like pixelfed I don't really care what Meta does.

~~Not very happy to hear this. The whole point behind all of these movements is to move away from what was wrong with social media: centralization, selling our data, etc etc. If this is a deal that gives them money in exchange of our data or to start implementing targeted ads, I'll probably just end up quitting social media altogether.~~

I'm not sure I understand what's going on exactly, so a lot of this is just what my immediate reaction is after reading this.

Edit: I misread. So they had an NDA meeting with Meta and are now blocking Meta activity in the Fediverse?

Oh fuck no.