masterspace

Signing an NDA to talk about an unreleased product is not predatory, it’s standard practice for virtually any business (especially the kind inviting random people off the internet to see them). Many jobs require you to sign NDAs just to go through the interview process.

There is nothing gained by not going to the meeting with Meta, if they want to launch their Twitter clone they are more than capable of doing that regardless of whether or not this guy takes a meeting to hear them out. All he’s done is learned less about what they plan on doing leaving him less capable of taking the best course of action, and if you trust him to make the right decision then that’s objectively a bad thing.

Such bravery coming from someone who sounds oh so employed.

That’s standard practice if you’re going to be talking about an unreleased product.

This is not a proper talk by meta that you could just “hear them out”. They explicitly said off the record and confidential, there’s no reason for that if it’s something innocuous.

They plan on showing demos of their product to them or talking about potential features it might have. Boom, they require an NDA.

I don’t think you understand how the professional world works or how common NDAs are. I’ve signed NDAs while going through interview processes at FAANG and other large companies just so that we can talk freely about projects I might work on. Especially for a company like Facebook where everything they do will get about a dozen news articles written, they’re going to make you sign an NDA for any conversation about an unreleased product.

Having a larger market = having a larger network = greater network effects for content

Having Meta join with Mastodon might actually sway people off twitter and into the fediverse where it will be easier to migrate over to a different instance.

It’s foolish not to hear them out, you accomplish nothing. This isn’t some silicon valley episode where he has some arkane secrets that meta engineers couldn’t figure out that he might leak. Meeting with them is zero risk and he would gain more information on what they’re planning.

Meta is more likely to pull people away from Twitter than Mastodon is, and having all of Twitter be run with ActivityPub / open to federation is a good thing.

We must have zero-tolerance for corporations or we might as well just give up.

As long as servers cost money to run, corporations will need to be involved.

At a fundamental level, it’s either

a) run by donations as a non profit, but as we’ve seen from wikipedia it will be a constant struggle to have enough money to last indefinitely (especially since Reddit / kbin / lemmy cost a lot more to run than Wikipedia)

b) run by subscriptions, which will greatly limit growth, reach, search engine optimization, etc.

c) run by advertising in which case corporate ad networks (like the kind that Meta runs) will need to be involved or

d) have instances that are government run / paid for, but it would be difficult to accomplish on a global scale and may come with restrictions that not everyone is happy with

It sucks but those are pretty much the only four options for running a digital community that requires paid servers and hosting space. Either corporations or some large government organization are going to have to be involved.

The crappy scripts that I wrote while teaching myself to code at an electrical engineering / architecture firm are used more often than the professional software I’ve built for FAANG and Fortune 500 companies since.

That’s an upside, but it’s not necessarily a “good” thing to be fragmented if it means you don’t have the network effects to make a satisfying community.

End of the day a lot of Reddit’s value came from its popularity.