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Yes, Facebook's upper management is definitely not freaking out about Mastodon. However, from my own experience working at a large, somewhat ethically-challenge
by stncls 5y ago
Yes, Facebook's upper management is definitely not freaking out about Mastodon. However, from my own experience working at a large, somewhat ethically-challenged organisation (not fb), it would not surprise me in the least if they gently yet actively pushed down a competitor, provided it can be done discreetly.
- whimsicalism 5y agoDoubt it, not worth the liabillity risk.
- flatline 5y agoWhat liability? A few million dollar fine? Look at what Microsoft did to numerous competitors over decades: Borland, Mozilla, etc. FB squelching Mastodon is minor league.
- yaacov 5y agoYes, Microsoft has famously never had any major issues with antitrust
- DamnYuppie 5y agoWhile they have run afoul of the government a few times the penalties and "negative press" ever amounted to anything that slowed down their growth or revenue. So to the OP's point if you can afford the fine it doesn't really matter?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jhasse 5y agohttps://techcrunch.com/2015/12/01/whatsapp-is-blocking-links-to-rival-app-telegram-on-android/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/12/01/whatsapp-is-blocking-links...
- artiszt 5y agorecalled that too. so far for Zuckerboi not known to 'be evil' when it comes to competition and/or what one may think of in context of so-called 'opponent research'. and, seemingly not beeing 'known-for' doesn't necessarily mean seriously not-involved and not-guilty. Epstein, Prince Andrew and the Weinstein creep too were not known -- however, turned out, eventually, there were and there are some who knew and appear to know ..
- jrm4 5y agoI would love to live in the world in which there were some actual liability risk to facebook on this (or for that matter, on anything important to it.) I genuinely am curious, in Facebook's world today, how do you see this playing out in a way that actually hurts Facebook. I legit want to know so I can actively work toward making it happen.
- spoonjim 5y agoMastodon is a “competitor” to Facebook the way a grandma doing middle school tutoring in her backyard is a competitor to Harvard.
- smolder 5y agoYes, of course, at least now. Yet, it does present a non-negligible risk, in the same way that some startups can become unicorns, or some college kids web project can become a global giant.
- rkk3 5y ago> Yet, it does present a non-negligible risk, Negligible: so small or unimportant as to be not worth considering; insignificant. The first page of search Mastodon results for me are all about a heavy metal band from Atlanta. Sounds like a negligible risk to me.
- jrm4 5y agoBut when you have near-infinity resources, everything is technically "non-negligible," and that's the case here. Let's say there's a 0.01% chance that Mastodon beats Facebook. Okay, what's 0.01% of however much Facebook makes? That's how much they should spend on it, and I'd bet that amount of money is nothing to scoff at.
- alisonkisk 5y agoThis is the fallacy of ignoring the existence of extremely small numbers. if mastodon had a 0.01% chance of "beating" facebook, it would have many $millions in funding.
- rkk3 5y agoIt sounds like you are arguing that there is no level of risk low enough to be ignored, and that there is no such thing as negligible risk. So if there is 2^-500 chance of an alien invasion, lets put a team on it!
- rapnie 5y agoThere may be more reasons to see Mastodon as a potential threat. There's something of a different paradigm to it. First of all it is decentralized (federated), and anyone can spin up servers for themself or a community of users, set their own topic and rules (CoC, ToS) and connect with the larger social network (the Fediverse). Second of all this fediverse is based on open-standards and anyone can develop their own social apps and integrate them with others. Mastodon just happens to be the most popular / well-known. Other apps, such as Pixelfed and Peertube offer nice, ad-free, and 'calmer' experiences to their large-scale social media alternatives (Instagram and Youtube). See https://fediverse.party/ https://fediverse.party/ Also note that Twitter has taken an interest in decentralized protocols with Bluesky project.
- tentacleuno 5y agoWhat happened to Bluesky? They made a bunch of promises and it sort of... disappeared after that.
- rapnie 5y agoThey recently hired Jay Graber as project lead: https://twitter.com/arcalinea/status/1427314482154414080 https://twitter.com/arcalinea/status/1427314482154414080
- kixiQu 5y agoThey've also started setting up community working groups -- the whole thing's coordinated in a Discord server, which is very weird to me, but you can see what they're up to.
- rictic 5y agoCurrent hypothesis is that they're just moving slowly, there are signs of life
- dragonelite 5y agouuhm going back to a time before the algos took over my timeline would be awesome.
- cowsandmilk 5y agoThere are far more discreet approaches than marking these messages as spam and notifying users. My guess is that an actual person reported this as spam and Facebook automatically accepted the report.
- heavenlyblue 5y agoSpam is an easy plausible deniability
- bellyfullofbac 5y agoRe: discreet, how true.. since their news feed prioritization algorithm is a black box they can just rank posts about Mastodon very low, so low they'd probably show your American contacts ads about monkey-proofing your house (something relevant for India) before showing that post...
- eterevsky 5y agoYou can't do such a thing discreetly, since people will notice if you take down their posts, and Facebook is not known to ban mentions of their actual competitors like YouTube, Twitter or TikTok.