Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI drops multiple products and layoff 60 so that its current budget can accomodate the stratospheric compensation of its new CEO.

This might be an unpopular post but so’ll be it: Mastodon is the existing proof that Meta could kill Mastodon any time.

Mastodon was using a protocol compatible with GNU Social: OStatus, but some features were quickly added without consideration for other implementations.

So when per-post privacy were introduced, for example, they were very public on GNU Social, because their devs had no idea this was coming. And GNU Social was blamed for it.

https://privacy.thenexus.today/mastodon-a-partial-history/#mastodon-gnu-social-and-the-early-fediverse

Instead of having more users, GNU Social is now (almost?) dead. Of course it’s not just because of the above. But it wouldn’t have been set back so much without Mastodon.

Now, Mastodon is opensource, has more features and some compatible implementations. I run Pleroma myself. But why would one think Meta could not cripple them both?

On the former, there is always a risk for the scraper. For example, you could scrape 100% of Youtube, but good luck spreading any piece of video out there.

My concern is on the latter and you don’t need to do anything: if one user from Threads decides to follow you, you implicitly gave Threads permission to proceed, because the instances are federated. If I misunderstood their terms and conditions, I will happily welcome the correction.

All instances can collect some level of info about you. Only one decided it’s entitled to distribute it to third parties, use it to train its algorithms, and generally speaking make as much money as possible out of it.

But in the process, you will also have a “monetize content from other instances users” phase.