- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
From the article
" Casey Newton at Platformer reports he has e-mail confirmation from Meta that:
[Meta is] exploring a standalone decentralized social network for sharing text updates. We believe there’s an opportunity for a separate space where creators and public figures can share timely updates about their interests (Source).
Their new app is codenamed P92, and according to a separate report by Moneycontrol:
… will support ActivityPub, the decentralised social networking protocol powering Twitter rival Mastodon and other federated apps (Source).
It will also:
be Instagram-branded and will allow users to register/login to the app through their Instagram credentials.
"
They won’t be able to directly monetize it. I don’t see why they are pushing it.
All the data of any instance they’re federated with will be on their local server.
They will be able to mine information on servers they don’t have to pay to host.
Collecting and selling information IS how they monetize
I thought the point of federation is that they wouldn’t have all the data on their server, only that they could access it on a different server.
But the deal with this kind of social media is that they don’t have my name, location, or any kind of demographic data. They need that to correlate to other interests to sell the advertisers to target ads. In the fediverse there really isn’t any way for the advertisers to target a specific audience. So even if they have all the data, it’s not nearly as useful as Facebook data.
The point of federation is to have essentially message boards that can communicate to each other. Every instance federated with youe home instance that someone within your instance interacts with, is copied to your instance. The comments or posts you make are first made to your home instance copy, then backed up to the host instance. This is why lemmy.world users can still see and comment posts from beehaw before it was defederated, as they’re seeing their local instances copy of it. The defederation means that those comments on the copied version are no longer backed up to the host.
When federated with everyone, for facebooks server for example, they will essentially have a copy of everyones server, updated until the point of defederation.