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Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network
- UncleOxidant 4y ago" The P92 app will support ActivityPub, MoneyControl reported." Big if true. Color me skeptical, though. How would they be able to control that? (and FB likes control)
- plorg 4y agoRemember when Facebook (and Google, etc.) supported federated XMPP? I can't bring myself to expect any different outcome this time.
- emaro 4y agoI'm afraid of the same outcome too. However I think many admins in the Fediverse are aware and I expected most servers to block any instance from Meta.
- pipeline_peak 4y agoWhy should they be blocked?
- lispegistus 4y agoHaving an instance with a x million users is impossible to moderate. Instances have been blocked for not being able to moderate low thousands of users due to incompetent/unresponsive mods. Having a poorly moderated instance federate with yours is seen as a threat to your users and a proactive admin would not allow federation. Also most admins are aware of EEE tactics and we all know we cannot expect anything even remotely resembling ethical behavior from big corporate instances, they are a threat to the network by default.
- AnthonyMouse 4y agoI was just going to reply with EEE, but the situation you're describing presents a problem. Suppose the network wants to be able to handle billions of users, but you want to keep each instance "small," i.e. thousands of users. Then you'll have millions of instances. Having each instance manually curate a list of others it federates with isn't going to work, but neither is instances not federating with the large majority of other instances. You all need to figure out a way to get rid of this instance-level whitelisting or blacklisting, because that ends with either Meta or an intractable scalability problem.
- hnbad 4y agoThis assumes you (or rather: those users) want all of those billions of users to be directly interconnected. Most people on Mastodon seem to be perfectly fine with living in a microcosm compared to Twitter.
- AnthonyMouse 4y agoHumans demand connectedness. There's something to be said for participating in seven independent communities with seven independent accounts, but when you see something from Community A and want to share it with Community B, a system that doesn't allow either account to make that connection is going to frustrate people, and get outcompeted at the system level by something that does.
- emaro 4y agoBecause you don't have a decentralized network anymore if one server has 2B users while the second largest has 200k. Also moderation as the sibling comment mentioned.
- JohnFen 4y agoDon't know if they "should" be, but I would certainly block anything from Facebook. I don't want to dance with the devil.
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 4y ago>Remember when Facebook (and Google, etc.) supported federated XMPP? Facebook's XMPP server wasn't federated. You couldn't use it to talk to people on other servers.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- plorg 4y agoThank you, I must have misremembered.
- pndy 4y agoIf my memory serves me well, their Messenger was once XMPP-based (perhaps still is somewhere beneath) and you could use it without a fuss in any Jabber client. But then smartphones bloomed and the possibilities having a mobile app arrived. So, I'd expect same scenario here: open at the beginning and walled later - once they capture enough people within. That is, if this thing ever manages to gain attention.
- pipeline_peak 4y agoThe whole benefit of centralized social media is that a large corporation has the resources to maintain it and the control that gives them. I don’t understand what’s in this for them. Maybe there will still be forced ads embedded into the instances. My guess is it’ll be a lot easier to self host than other existing ActivityPub platforms like Mastodon. That’s the sales pitch at the price of an augmented proprietary service. And who knows what restrictions that’s entailed to. There’s not a lot known, but who’s this for? Anyone conscious about this enough to even think about hosting expects freedom to use their own algorithms, moderation, etc. I could only imagine it serving for commercial use. But no customer wants to install MyHomeDepotLife and upload a profile pic just to return a belt sander, I’m at loss for words.
- illumego 4y agoAll of it has always served a commercial use. It's meant to be for you, whether you like it or not. Or you could just go outside.
- MetaverseClub 4y agoIt sounds interesting to me but I wish it was not Meta.
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y agoI will never use any Facebook product again after they completely bricked my oculus devices with the forced sign in.
- cglong 4y agoICYMI, they've stepped this requirement back so now you just need a "Meta account".
- illumego 4y agoYou'll eat the bugs and you'll be happy.
- illumego 4y agoVR goggles? Dude. How about the part where they tried to consign your grandchildren to a dystopian technocratic panopticon? https://hackernoon.com/on-the-infestation-of-small-souled-bugmen-6561ae922e07 https://hackernoon.com/on-the-infestation-of-small-souled-bu...
- zenmaster10665 4y ago[flagged]
- CatWChainsaw 4y agoIt's so annoying reading --comments-- that use "Luddite" in the purely pejorative usage when this is a forum of people who stroke their egos with how much smarter they are than redditors. The concern was that the looms would be used by owners of capital to pay their workers less and hoard more wealth, and they were right. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34961501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34961501
- 1270018080 4y ago"Decentralized" has become a red flag term for businesses. It's been corrupted by crypto scams. There needs to be a new word.
- bawolff 4y agoThe real problem is decentralized is too ambigious. There are a billion different ways something can be decentralized. The term is meaningless.
- mattwilsonn888 4y agoDecentralized doesn't capture what you want it to mean anyways. When crypto people say decentralized, they don't mean AWS edge locations or The Federal Reserve Central Bank which are both decentralized. How about we start saying exactly what we mean? "Non-excludable" captures the important aspect. It doesn't matter if your network is decentralized if it can't maintain this feature. Bitcoin being non-excludable implies that it is secure in terms of consensus control - even if a powerful agent is out to exclude you from the network, they would fail. That is the core property and it leaves no room to hide behind as a buzzword; it means exactly what it means.
- Clubber 4y agoPier to pier is what we always called it, or shortly, P2P. It's how the internet was designed. Now, all piers are equal, but some piers are more equal than others. On a side note, the Napster model was almost perfect, its downfall was centralized indexing. I wonder if a blockchain could be used for distributed indexing using the same P2P communication model of Napster.
- throwaway81523 4y ago> decentralized, text-based social network We had that. It was called Usenet, and it was great. Google destroyed it, so Facebook is going to own the next one from the get-go? Doesn't sound good.
- bawolff 4y agoYou have to really be rewriting history to blame google for the downfall of usenet.
- giantrobot 4y agoThe Google graveyard is expansive but they most certainly didn't kill Usenet. Spam put Usenet on life support and ISPs dropping NNTP hosting pulled the plug. By the late 90s spam killed actual conversations on Usenet. Eternal September had already raised the noise floor but spam just got out of control. First ISPs dropped retention of even text-only hierarchies and then by the early 2000s dropped NNTP hosting entirely. So even people willing to wade through the spam had to go hunting for independent Usenet hosting. Google didn't have anything to do with either of those things.
- fer 4y agoUsenet was destroyed by spam. Even if you set up your client to have your groups clean, for any new arrival without guidance it was a horrible experience that required a lot of effort in bringing signal out of the noise. What killed it was not having a distributed spam filtering as it became popular.
- 4y ago
- NuSkooler 4y ago"Is the Twitter replacement we've been waiting for?" ...by Meta. No. No sir, it is not. ActivityPub (Mastodon variety) has been a breath of fresh air for me. That's my Twitter replacement, though that's bad wording, because I don't want what Twitter has been for years.
- INTPenis 4y agoWhat's in it for them? ActivityPub is a lot like e-mail and that is now basically controlled by the large centralized players like Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft. It was just a matter of time before one of those large actors got into ActivityPub. People who want to communicate with their instances will have to conform. Yes many in the fediverse are very distrusting of the large corporations and will instantly block Meta. But many others just love the technology, the ability to communicate across platforms, and will try hard to be part of it.
- fooker 4y ago>What's in it for them? Commoditize your complement.
- phendrenad2 4y agoSeems like they're taking aim at Discord. The "decentralized" is probably just them latching onto a buzzword, I wouldn't count on that part making it into the resulting app.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- usrbinbash 4y ago> The app is codenamed P92 and will allow users to log in through their existing Instagram credentials So if it relies on the servers of one centralized entity for authentication, how exactly is this thing "decentralized"?
- grugagag 4y agoIt’s decentralized in name only, it’s marketing talk. It’ll still be behind Meta’s walled garden
- Spivak 4y agoThey’re using the language of Discord/Slack were rather than one massive firehose where you curate who you follow you instead create “servers” for your friends, family, and different online communities. Social networks got supermassive scale, it ended up being kinda awful unless you’re a public figure, and now all the “good” communities are on Reddit and Discord.
- charcircuit 4y agoThe same way gmail is but with ActivityPub instead of email. You sign in with your Google account, but you can send emails to an email server run by anyone. For an example of decentralized servers + centralized authentication just look at video games. It's common to have a common identity, but be able to join a server hosted by anyone.
- usrbinbash 4y ago> decentralized servers + centralized authentication ...are not decentralized. De-centralized infrastructure doesn't have single authorities able to act as gatekeepers to basic functionality (such as authentication) of the infrastructure, period.
- foul 4y agoIn the best case it will speak ActivityPub as to embrace, extend and extinguish. Because all this effort is, imho obviously, an EEE tactic.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- salmonellaeater 4y ago> Individual servers would let different groups set their own community standards, though likely with a “floor” of rules set by Meta, in a fashion similar to how Reddit’s individual communities work. This is not praise. Reddit bans people for expressing widely held beliefs. Subreddit mods are required to enforce the site-wide rules regardless of the subreddit's own preferences. As another commenter put it [1], the property that makes a decentralized social network desirable is actually that it's non-excludeable. There's no outside entity that can exclude people from the network. This is very similar to the core of what censorship is: there is a speaker and a listener who both want to communicate, but some third party prevents them. What I would like from a social network is opt-in filtering, where you can choose some list of moderators whose decisions you trust, and subscribe to their block lists. But users should always have the final say on whose posts they view. If this new social network Meta is building puts users in control, it could be great. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35091164 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35091164
- Fatnino 4y agoSo everyone needs to explicitly block cheese pizza for themselves just so a few perverts can share that stuff in the name of "free speech"?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jazzyjackson 4y agoNo, everyone needs to explicitly "choose some list of moderators whose decisions you trust, and subscribe to their block lists"
- lmpdev 4y agoThat still implies either: A) Cheese pizza is permitted B) There are a "floor" of rules
- 4y ago
- exodust 4y ago> "Twitter’s decline..." Is Twitter in decline? According to what measure? I use Twitter as a read-only way to follow a handful of interesting people in tech, science, journalism etc. All of them, regardless of their political leaning, are still posting the same as ever. If anything I see more activity than before.
- jeena 4y agoI've been using Twitter for the last 10 years in write-only mode and have even given up that a couple of month ago.
- whywhywhywhy 4y agoAs someone who uses it but isn’t a fan of it, it’s exactly the same as it’s always been.
- revskill 4y agoMedia is expensive to scale, so use text is better strategy
- nunobrito 4y agoCurious that the article speaks plenty about Dorsey and ommits the fact that he has been very active on the Nostr platform. Nostr is so far the only platform where I see a decentralized future. Mastodon does not provide portable identities that you can easily move to other servers, nor helps you to preserve your post from previous years. Nostr solved both obstacles. One private key, zero email addresses needed. Move your texts to wherever you want, your identity is always verified (as long as you don't leak your private key) and fully private when you wish to remain so. There are even built-in payments over there now. Basically everything that these larger groups have been talking about for years has been implemented with success in a few months independently from them.
- Quindecillion 4y agoI did a quick ctrl+f 'nostr' on the article and when no results came up I closed the browser tab. They obviously haven't done their research.
- nunobrito 4y agoBasically that, or intentionally that. Kind of strange to mention Dorsey so often and some other project rather than the one where he is very active at the moment.
- mariusor 4y agoYou're conflating the limitations of Mastodon with the limitations of ActivityPub. ActivityPub does not require "email addresses" for identity - that's a Mastodon idiosyncrasy. Identities in ActivityPub are URLs, so as long as you own your domain you can preserve your identity. That's not too different than your identity being a public key, with the benefit of human readability. Mastodon doesn't offer you export/import of your activities because - again due to its idiosyncrasies - it does not care about past activities. What a user "sees" when they visit another account is only what that account has posted and has already been disseminated to the current account's Mastodon server. A sane approach to past activities would be to load them in response to the user interaction, instead of serving stale data from the db. For this case exporting activities from one service to another would allow for continuity. This could probably be achieved even at protocol level, ActivityPub in its simplest form has enough vocabulary to allow loading a collection and adding its elements to a another one. Some of these things exist in one form or another in other clients than Mastodon.
- jeena 4y ago> Building a decentralized network could also give Meta the opportunity for its new app to interoperate with other social products — a previously unheard-of gesture from a company known for building some of the most lucrative walled gardens in the industry’s history. It's clear to me that this person forgot everything what earlier Facebook was doing like Facebook Platform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Platform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Platform and Facebook Chat via Jabber/XMPP https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/110/ https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/110/
- justusw 4y agoIt’s called embrace, extend, extinguish for a reason. Is ActivityPub next? Though given Meta‘s recent lack of output I seriously doubt anything tangible will emerge out of this.
- Alekhine 4y agoAlso don't see how it's possible. EEE relies on permissive licensing, which lets you make a better, proprietary version that everybody switches to. Mastodon is AGPL. I suppose if Meta built a competitor that was so great it killed all the Mastodon servers... But thats not going to happen. Perhaps if they built an activityPub platform, then disabled federation when they got enough users? Doubt that would work either.
- jraph 4y agoIt is a bit early for April fools.
- throwawayhello1 4y agoThey better not pull a Google Talk to Mastodon.
- yakshaving_jgt 4y agoMy Instagram used to be full of stuff I actually liked, like cars and women. Now it's full of TikTok videos with the same text-to-speech narration. I don't trust Meta to not somehow ruin whatever they happen to come up with.
- ceejayoz 4y agoIt's remarkable to me that Meta is still pushing Reels so hard despite the fact that most of the popular ones are literally advertising their competitor. The TikTok logo splattered all over Facebook and Instagram is a branding disaster.
- foul 4y agoMeta tolerates them because content is reproduced verbatim and because they view Tiktok as Musical.ly. Thus they probably steal revenue to Instagram but generates it nonetheless by allowing Meta users to consume that same (mostly dull) content on Meta apps.
- A_D_E_P_T 4y agoFor what it's worth, Urbit is this sort of thing. At least right now, and in a de facto way, for it has untapped functionality that might soon enable a wide variety of additional use cases. The barriers to entry are now pretty low, as anybody can sign up via tlon.network
- precompute 4y agoYep, Urbit is incredible. It does require some technical know-how, and has a sign-up fee (unless you can get a planet for free from someone). I think that has really maintained quality of discussion. It has also come a long way in the last 3 years. I was given a free planet in early 2020.
- pelorat 4y agoSo IRC?
- mym1990 4y agoWhat if, and hear me out: we ditch the idea of a better replacement social network and just ditch the concept in general? Let’s go back to not being bombarded by ads every 3rd post, to not getting lost in massive echo chambers, to not doom scrolling for 20-40% of our waking hours, being locked into mega platforms, etc... Is the proposition of “being more connected” really worth the downsides?
- jollofricepeas 4y agoSocial networks are hotels, right. - First they are new and cool. The young, hip and rich stay often. - New becomes old. Shoddy carpet, old fixtures, bad music in the lobby but older people stay until they die. - New hotels sprout up with cool carpet, music and fixtures. The cycle repeats. The only way we can ditch them is to ban them and then they’ll go underground :( What is dead may never die.
- eriknj99 4y agoYou can checkout any time you like but you can never leave
- 7thaccount 4y agoacoustic guitar intensifies for a brief solo Seriously though, your comment gave me a great laugh this morning and made me think about how much of our communication is built off shared pop culture.
- shivekkhurana 4y agoMost of them also happen to be in California.
- mym1990 4y agoTo me the difference is that 1) you pay for hotels and you know exactly what the cost is 2) hotels provide a tangible benefit, mostly being the bed to sleep in. Social media often has this idea that it is “free” and so people don’t think about the massive amounts of time and privacy that is given up as the hours whizz by.
- givemeethekeys 4y agoI call it .. Metastatic.. oh wait.
- spaceman_2020 4y agoNice try Zuck. Fool me once...
- can16358p 4y agoBut why? Why would Meta, an ad driven for profit company, build a decentralized platform? If there is enough centralization to tatget users and show them ads (which might be the incentive of Meta), is it really decentralized?
- college_physics 4y agothey might want some sort of franchise. push some costs and risks down the food chain for a share of the ad pie
- baby 4y agoMy wild guess is that this is their way to operate in China. It'd be much harder for the GFW to block a decentralized app.
- glitchc 4y agoMySpace is still around. Maybe they could buy that. Or LiveJournal.
- motohagiography 4y agoWould I share a product from this company with my family, or have a device they can manage in my home?
- CatsInSinks 4y agoyou mean IRC right?
- js8 4y agoNo, I think it's gonna be a shared textual virtual reality, metaverse if you will, in short, a MUD.
- college_physics 4y agoI am not particularly interested about Meta's views on decentralized social networks. But I would be interested to hear what Apple engineers might think about this. After all at some point there was a thing called AppleTalk [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleTalk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleTalk
- CuriouslyC 4y agoWhat we need is a single distributed protocol for both file sharing, chat and "posts" tied to a verified human identity, with the concept of trust baked in. I want to search my social graph for content rather than google. If your social graph has people shitting out spam or bad content, you could just revoke the trust of the people in the graph that enabled that content.
- commandlinefan 4y agoThat's really what Usenet is - I'm kind of surprised we don't see it used more.
- JohnFen 4y agoGoogle killed it dead.
- giancarlostoro 4y agoThis sounds like they want to take the spot of Twitter and have no images or video. At the same time an opportunity to harvest data from other connected social media platforms.
- choffee 4y agoWill this be the Compuserve to ActivityPub's "email"? I look forward to my free CD.
- yalogin 4y agoWhy is this obsession with decentralized? I don’t see the benefits of it at all. A central server is better if they have a good moderation plan built in. This whole decentralized idea is to wash their hands off moderation and not take a blame for the hellhole it will become. From a pure functional point of view, how can a decentralized network provide any performance guarantee? What am I missing?
- swayvil 4y agoA central authority that has total control over the conversation is considered by many to be a bad thing. Some think that a more democratic approach is preferable.
- rchaud 4y ago> How can a decentralized network provide any performance guarantee? Why can't it just be like message boards like Xenforo and PHPbb? There are numerous sports-related boards created 10+ years ago on that old tech that are still handling thousands of users concurrently. They're also well moderated too; that's something that becomes impossible if you are trying to manage hundreds of thousands of users.
- chrisandchris 4y agoYup, missing those days where sharing consistet of more than 160 characters, only pictures or videos, or then text sprinkled with useless GIFs. Gotta go back to those 2k-years where the phpBB-era was in it's high.
- turnsout 4y ago> a good moderation plan ^ This is the reason decentralized is better for everyone, including Meta. At a certain scale, content moderation goes from "hard" to "actually impossible." With enough users, you will eventually have an Kurdish knitting group that meets in Turkey, who uses ethnic slurs ironically as a commentary on the government's treatment of immigrants, and you'll have to unravel the whole thing when someone complains. And the whole conversation is happening in Kurdish.
- m3kw9 4y agoAdding decentralization to your twitter competing product isn’t gonna out content twitter which is what most care about.
- bitwize 4y agoDecentralized, text-based social network? I seem to recall something like that from the 90s. BluesNet? ScrewsWet? Something like that. Being the 90s and all, it was probably all just a fever dream anyway.
- echobear 4y ago"decentralized"?
- turnsout 4y agoThis is a tangent, but it's so cute that Meta copied Apple's naming scheme for secret projects. Mark really thinks he can be Steve.
- papichulo4 4y agoYeah. Meta is hiring, Meta is firing, Meta is about to publish their first coloring book, ML models available, discount mattresses, the boss-lost-his-mind-everything-has-to-go, Meta is taking VR to the next level, Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network. Sure, sure. Good luck, Meta!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- yazzku 4y agoThe bastardization of the term "decentralized" in this post has energy levels over 9000 for sure. Should be flagged as click-bait.
- sangnoir 4y ago*<Looks off into the distance>* What if it's going to be part of the Fediverse?
- mgkimsal 4y agoAnd all participants can be paid in Libra!
- capableweb 4y agoThen it's federated, so they're still using "decentralized" wrong, which would imply direct client<>client communication (decentralized), rather than client<>server<>client (federated) communication.
- taskforcegemini 4y agodoesn't "federated" imply >server<>server< ?
- capableweb 4y agoYeah, my comment was maybe too simplified. More something like "N clients <> N servers <> N servers <> N clients".
- chasd00 4y ago"decentralized, text-based social network" just sounds like IRC all over again.
- freewizard 4y agousing Instagram login is not decentralized, a text-based social network prototype doesn't sounds a lot of work, are they dusting off one project in past hackathon to make the news? Meta do have some good cryptography work and talent in FB msg / Whatsapp, that may lead them to build a somewhat ATP/Bluesky competitor. With that said, they are really behind in this game. My main concern is these new product from social OG will still be likely ad driven model, which made Facebook/Twitter what they are today.
- timcavel 4y ago[dead]
- xhkkffbf 4y agoJust curious. Has anyone experienced this claim: "Twitter’s revenue collapsing and the site itself going down for hours now on a regular basis," I don't spend much time on Twitter, but every time I've fired it up, I was met with a bunch of current tweets. Is it really going down "on a regular basis"?
- uhtred 4y agoAnother social network, yay. I don't see us realizing the star trek utopia anytime soon.
- uhtred 4y agoSocial networks and "apps" to the great unwashed masses are akin to giving a shiny new rock to a chimp. No think just use look nice better way tell people more bout me.
- xena 4y agoIt's going to make the fediverse crumble from the load.
- notShabu 4y agoIMO decentralization should never be a key selling "feature" that users should experience. Similar to the philosophy behind the "right to bear arms" it's best as a self-imposed framework of checks and balance on the centralized system. The majority of people are better off in a centralized system. Decentralization is the solution to the "who will guard the guards" problem of power & corruption. I don't currently have a desire to become a gun-prepper-hoarder but living in a country where this is a potential-possibility model of life gives a sense of freedom even as I overly-specialize in typing alphanumeric letters in a specific format and rely on the System to transmute this effort into tokens-of-worth to trade for things like toilet paper and housing rights. Where Meta and other companies fail here is that they're trying to ride the hype w/o understanding that it's not a feature in of itself but a "meta"-feature to allow for better features. Decentralization forces the leader to actually lead through leadership qualities. Not through owning 51% of voting rights, not through golden handcuffs, not through implicit H1B or EB1-C visa and greencard threats. The failure mode for decentralization is when it enforces a meritocracy that no one single human is capable of living up to. The leaders are ceremonial or non-existent. The desire for decentralized technologies is a frustration with how fallible and incompetent the current set of leaders feel and a desire to shorten or outright eliminate the complexity of the brittle chain of value transformations necessary to maintain a living. It's a desire to ascend technology into a force of nature like the sun or the wind. This goes against every company's reason-for-being because nature is free while a company is a system that harvests nature and makes a profit by selling customers concentrated forms of it.
- saos 4y agoI still wouldnt use it
- shaunxcode 4y agoThis is a reification of that chatgpt meme of a meat company trying to appeal to vegans by launching a new vegan meat made of real meat.
- aaroninsf 4y agoWork for them? Quit. Considering it? Don't. Using them? Don't. Few companies members of this site convince themselves it's OK to work for, have done and continue to do more harm to our society, psyches, and body politic. Just don't. No one asked for a surveillance-first Shitter.
- pie_flavor 4y ago> Twitter's decline Where?
- hiidrew 4y agoReminds me of Noah Smith's recent article, Vertical Communities (https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/vertical-communities https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/vertical-communities). It does seem like there is a slight trend with some of the Twitter-exodus leading to users going to specific Mastodon communities, which seem closer to subreddits than Twitter. Takes me back to my early internet days of growing up on phpbb forums. But then of course you have the flip side of companies trying to copy the Tiktok model, one feed with the algo ruling all. I think I prefer the former though!
- Awelton 4y agoI don't care what facebook is selling, I am not buying. Like every other big tech company they have been "building" all kinds of things, but haven't actually BUILT anything for years. The only two things they seem to be able to do at this point are stagnate or buy something someone else built.
- t0bia_s 4y agoIt's like Shell that sponsors COP. No, thanks.
- rsolva 4y agoSince an increasing amount of people now has experienced what social media can be like without ads and algorithm-driven feeds in the Fediverse, monetizing these social networks this way will be increasingly difficult. The ethos that has formed among people communicating on top of the open and free ActivityPub protocol is a strong stance against everything that has made Meta so much money. Any company wanting to introduce ads or user tracking/profiling into the Fediverse would most likely be blocked by a large majority of existing communities.