#2502 Digital Erasure: A Lesson from Mastodon's Alliance with META

We’re witnessing an interesting paradox of digital disappearance. Mastodon, the platform that built the foundations of decentralized social networking, is vanishing from the narrative about ActivityPub protocol development. This is no coincidence - it’s the effect of gradual control takeover of social protocols by tech corporations.

Summer of Protocols 2024 and the AP encryption project demonstrate how quickly one can be erased from digital history. Mastodon, despite its pioneering role, is systematically overlooked in the discussion. Social Web Foundation, where META appears as a partner, becomes an example of how not to build the future of the open internet.

Eugen Rochko (Gargron) made a classic mistake - entering an alliance with META without safeguards and community consultation. History warned us about such steps - from Cambridge Analytica to Facebook’s subsequent privacy violations. Now we’re observing the consequences: gradual erasure of the protocol’s social character in favor of corporate control.

This is a warning for other open source projects - alliances with Big Tech always come at a price. Sometimes that price is one’s digital identity. Mastodon doesn’t appear in Social Web Foundation projects even in the symbolic form of one of many social networks for content sharing. Isn’t that telling?

The latest reports (see sources) about META using pirated content from LibGen to train AI models only confirm that the corporation hasn’t changed its approach to “free content” and intellectual property. They don’t seem to be a trustworthy partner…

META consistently implements its strategy - first exploiting user content, now reaching for pirated books to train AI, while simultaneously trying to hide these practices from regulators. This shows the true face of the partner that Mastodon decided to collaborate with.

This serves as a warning for other open source projects - alliances with Big Tech always come at a price. Sometimes it’s your digital identity, and sometimes it’s legitimizing questionable business practices.

Sources:

Zuckerberg approved Meta’s use of ‘pirated’ books to train AI models, authors claim

Court docs allege Meta trained its AI models on contentious trove of maybe-pirated content

• ActivityPub