No, that would not be a good reason for me. Generally I would want to discuss everything you could without an NDA. Keep in mind most of the time receiving confidential information is more of a concern then disclosing it. If I then determined I need an NDA, then maybe it is better to have a JDA (Joint Development Agreement) that specifies how jointly developed IP is going to be handled. I am speaking very generally.

In this context maybe the concern would have been business plans not patentable IP for example so maybe they wanted an NDA solely restricted to the business plans of the company and maybe it could be worded very narrowly. Not sure how I would react to that. It would have to be very tightly worded and passed in front of my attorney.

One needs to understand the other party. Generally the other party may likely be looking to learn as much as possible, then internalize that and the project cutting you out. For a simple consulting agreement fine. If you expect to have a long term business relationship or go in with other expectations, that has to be carefully considered and anything not in writing does not exists.

Maybe there may well need to be a financial relationship tool. The major instances will have costs associated with Facebook users if federation happened. They could simply say, you pay your way we will not block you.

One issue with the Fediverse is someone has to pay. All the users coming from Reddit right now. They should be donating to their sites to cover the huge influx. It costs money.

And that's probably the wiser assessment, given their other activities. Here's the relevant part of that NYT article.

But Meta said it saw no reason to keep its code to itself. The growing secrecy at Google and OpenAI is a “huge mistake,” Dr. LeCun said, and a “really bad take on what is happening.” […]

“Do you want every A.I. system to be under the control of a couple of powerful American companies?” he asked. […] Meta’s open-source approach to A.I. is not novel. The history of technology is littered with battles between open source and proprietary, or closed, systems.

I get this is the fediverse and we're supposed to hate big tech and all, but this "everything Facebook has done is evil" is objectively wrong and such a Reddit take. Facebook's biggest problem has always been the people that use their products spreading hate and misinformation and their lack of moderation at their current scale, a problem that every single social media has hit, including the fediverse (i.e. Beehaw defederating with lemmy.world). And honestly, with governments refusing to take a heavy stance on regulating misinformation should it really be up to tech companies on what can and can't be shared on their platforms? Then there's data leaks like Cambridge Analytica, but that was a ticking time bomb, because data privacy back then wasn't a concern anywhere. I've worked in the data industry for a decade now and it was the fuckin wild west back then lol.

And then there's the good shit they've actually done. The article you replied to (not behind a paywall for me for some reason?) talks about how they open sourced their LLM AI for research purposes. Their data center designed were open sourced to help other data centers hit net zero carbon emissions (they're a huge contributor to the Open Compute Project). They've open sourced a ton of tools/languages as well.

WhatsApp is still fully end to end encrypted messaging and they're pushing the same on messenger now (their WhatsApp site even has a whole section for local law enforcement telling them they can't provide message data, a huge plus for Americans given previous laws that have come out).

Their targeted advertising has rightfully gotten a lot of scrutiny, but there's a lot of misinformation behind it, like "Facebook is listening to my calls" and "Facebook is reading my message data", which they've denied and there's no actual evidence of. I have family with small businesses that wouldn't have made it through the pandemic without their advertising platform.

I don't think that they have any place in the fediverse, honestly I'd be surprised if they wanted in on it anyways, but in my mind they aren't any more evil than any other corporation and the "Facebook is straight evil" attitude is just an attempt for Redditors to feel superior about their social media corporation choice.

If I were to guess this meeting was probably a job offer if anything lol.

The Silicon Valley way of doing things is "growth at any cost". Of course Meta wants in on what might turn out to be the next big thing. Of course they want to use money and power to dominate the protocol, insert all sorts of monetization, and ruin the whole thing. And when it doesn't work out because they've done the same dumb shit that already ruined Facebook and Reddit the protocol will have been destroyed and rendered useless. Meta goes back to Facebook and Instagram while the entire Fediverse project becomes defunct.

This is the history of these companies. Thankfully "fediverse" is not something Meta can just outright buy and then destroy, but they can still throw their weight around with cash and the enshittification will quickly ensue. The Fediverse needs to resist. It's hard to say no to money, but VC capital is what is destroying the internet. We need to do this differently if we want it to succeed.

You left out the part where they crawl the entire fediverse and hoover up data on everybody in it.

Yes. I was thinking the same thing. XMPP is a great example. They could have all federated, but then they chose not to. This will be the exact plan presumably.

Everyone can see all your posts now. They are all public.

I do, but the same could be applied to every bad actor on the fediverse, all your info of your profile is free for everyone to sell

Ah, I see thank you. I've been out of the loop so I guess I'll take a step back and see where all of this lands.

Yeah the guy who runs my mastadon instance has been boosting pro-meta posts all over but then I see him boosting people on the opposite side of the aisle on occasion. Not sure where he stands if he's not made a statement himself. I hope he's part of that pact.

And looks likr the meeting has already happened.