Don’t know how many have seen this, but @vantablack@beach.city provided screen shots of a conversation with someone who claims to have friends at meta and knows something about their strategy and what’s covered by the NDAs:

See https://beach.city/@vantablack/110594120842443355

Short story: they want to buy out the big instances by “supporting them financially” in exchange for federation, influence over moderation, and, opt-in ads.

Also, a thread from Aral Balkan on these rumours: https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/110598855375585873

If true …

1. this totally makes sense and I’m surprised I hadn’t seen someone cook up this as a hypothetical … whatever motivations meta had they were of course going to wrest some control over the fediverse, and big instances plus a poor culture of garnering donations were a weakness.
2. the reason I haven’t seen this as a hypothetical is because it’s fundamentally unfathomable that this is happening, already, less than a year after the twitter migration … these admins signed NDAs and have been keeping this from us!!!
3. This completely raises the stakes and highlights exactly what was wrong with those NDAs.
4. A reasonable position right now would be to demand from the probable admins whether they’re going to take money from Meta and for what, and that they either have to answer or step down because opacity on such an issue is fundamental.
5. IMO, a campaign would make a lot of sense. Many will likely find this uncomfortable, and for good reason, these issues are “move the needle” big. If their admins aren’t able to be clear on certain fundamentals like ads and taking money and giving meta a seat at the moderation table, that’s also reason to be uncomfortable.
6. We could have a list of instances that are open for sign ups that have openly stated that they haven’t signed an NDA and aren’t going to do any of the above things with Meta.

#DefederateMeta