I’m just musing on the end game for #Meta here, and would love to hear what others think.
On the topic of how there have been rumors that Meta wants to federate with only instances that will follow their moderation standards:
Twitter had entire teams to moderate and control content. It cost so much money in moderators and tools. We have seen first hand what happens when that breaks down - advertisers leave.
Reddit used unpaid moderators and never made money because of the amount of content that was not advertiser-safe - now that they are trying to break from that and control moderation in an advertiser-friendly way, they are seeing first-hand the break down of moderation and the revolt of unpaid users as moderators. They will have to suddenly put a lot of money into probably paid moderation and mod tools if they want to pivot to a really advertiser-safe platform.
Meta doesn’t want to spend all that money, obviously. It costs a lot. So of course they will look to instances with volunteers who are willing to moderate friendly spaces and content for them, and probably pay them a pittance. And if those instances fail to moderate, Meta can simply defederate and stop paying those instances - they can absolve themselves of responsibility very easily.
I was over here theorycrafting on how much money it would take for me to run an instance and sell out to Meta, and I thought that they would have to pay me not only enough for server and hosting costs, but also for my salary to essentially make running an instance and small team my full time job, and enough for me to pay salary to moderators, and to a devops person to keep the server up and running and updated, take any new protocol changes Meta implements, etc. Of course they wouldn’t pay me that much. If they were willing to pay that much they would do it themselves.
Basically, Meta is playing a very smart corporate game here. Any instance that is going to choose to federate with Meta is making a deal with the devil to suddenly be extremely accountable towards Meta, and if it’s a sufficiently large instance then they’re suddenly accountable for a LOT of moderation or else Meta pulls support and suddenly they’re responsible for a big instance and have to shoulder the financial burden themselves. It’s a losing game, in my opinion.
I’m unsure what Meta would have to gain by paying server admins some amount of money, while they can also just simply not paying any money. Paying money to admins would get literally everyone mad at them, including most importantly, regulators. They could just… not do that? Just put out their moderation standards to get on the white list, and present it as a take-it-or-leave-it deal
I think it’s “corporate pragmatism” disguised as “altruism”.
Like, Meta wants a mass of users on its platform very quickly. (The average person signing up for Threads will likely not understand federation and some of these people are not actually on Threads.) Meta also knows that these sorts of instances go down all the time - during the Mastodon migration in November, many instances were stood up - 25% went offline between then and now, according to this blog post. Some of that is server costs I bet. Meta can pay a small amount to instance owners to help offset those costs and also incentivize them monetarily to keep themselves online.
Much less altruistic, and this one is completely rumors and I’m afraid I’ve lost the original source which claimed it, but… Some chatter went on that Meta would let the instances it federates with choose whether they want to have the advertisements and sponsored posts federated to them. Obviously, if they take the ads they get more money, and that’ll help offset more of the costs…
And on Meta’s side, suddenly they can tell advertisers of this amazing built in user base they can sell ads to. Win-win, except for us (the users) who lose.
