In other news, Discourse, the free forum platform, is now joining the Fediverse.
Yep, Discourse forums will become compatible with Mastodon!
https://meta.discourse.org/t/activitypub-plugin/266794/116
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.
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.
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.
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.
Except that since federating is a technical action we can look at, and examine technically, we can all of course see that it gives Meta access to nothing that they couldn’t have scraped publicly.
Sure, if that’s your only concern — and disregarding that it’s a minority who would likely have the time, diligence and knowhow to actually confirm that you’re right — but Meta’s interest in directly leaked or scraped data is probably secondary to embrace-extend-extinguish alternatives to their services. Discourse doesn’t exactly have that motive.
deleted by creator
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_(software)
Ah so unrelated to Facebook. Good
It’s funny seeing how different a reaction people have to the same basic thing happening.
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.
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.
The same technical thing, yes. The key difference really is whether or not a notoriously exploitative corporation is behind.
Except that since federating is a technical action we can look at, and examine technically, we can all of course see that it gives Meta access to nothing that they couldn’t have scraped publicly.
Sure, if that’s your only concern — and disregarding that it’s a minority who would likely have the time, diligence and knowhow to actually confirm that you’re right — but Meta’s interest in directly leaked or scraped data is probably secondary to embrace-extend-extinguish alternatives to their services. Discourse doesn’t exactly have that motive.