Apple recently changed privacy settings on its iOS platform. With that, Facebook is losing out on $10 billion of revenue this year. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/facebook-says-apple-ios-privacy-change-will-cost-10-billion-this-year.html

Meta's entire business model depends on tracking and surveillance of its users. If it can't do this, it no longer has a reason to exist. Surveillance capitalism is Meta's entire reason to exist.

The killing blow is governments challenging Meta. Due to new privacy rules in the EU, Facebook may be shuttered across Europe. Hundreds of millions of accounts may soon be useless. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/02/meta-may-be-forced-to-shutter-facebook-instagram-in-eu/

Not only is Apple inflicting damage on Meta, so is Google. Just as with iOS, Google is making privacy changes to Android. How many more billions is Meta going to lose? https://www.businessinsider.com/google-privacy-changes-ad-tracking-android-facebook-iphone-2022-2

In summary, Meta is dead because:

1. Userbase is contracting
2. Employees are whistleblowing
3. Governments are regulating
4. Share price is cratering
5. Innovation ain't happening

Biggest reason: its surveillance model is now dead.

Meta is dead -- and it's time to bury it 💀 ⚰️

You might ask, "How can this be? Meta still makes billions!"

Nonetheless, it's dead and I have research to back that up! Read on for my post-mortem. 🧵 https://blog.peerverse.space/facebook-a-post-mortem/

First, what do I mean by dead? I mean Meta is dead in the same way MySpace is dead: it's cultural relevance is gone. And where cultural relevance goes, so does a social network. There's no recovering from that. It's dead.

I'm not randomly saying Meta is dead. Here's some cold, hard facts:

1. Facebook is losing daily users
2. Teenage usage is set to decline by 45%
3. They missed their last earnings estimate by $0.17
4. Their YTD stock price is down -36.08% (for comparison, the S&P is -6.17%)
5. The market expects earnings to fall – again

These are not good trends and spell doom for Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. But there's still more...

@clacke @thor Yeah, but I mean they didn't speak Norse at that point.

@thor I often wonder what English would be like if Britain stayed under Norse control.

@silmathoron The Fediverse is obviously not perfect, but my point of comparison is Twitter.

So first off, you should never trust Twitter with any kind of open APIs or protocols. Trusting Twitter with that kind of thing is like trusting Lucy to place the football for Charlie Brown: you're better off just assuming they'll remove access.

(By the way, the post was dropped just a few days after Elon Musk bought a 9.5% stake in Twitter. Some might call this coincidental but I call it, "Perhaps you should justify your job if you want to keep it.)

Bluesky spent the bulk of their post kicking FUD at Mastodon hiding under notions of, "You can lose your identity!" and "What if an instance goes down?"

Anyone familiar with Twitter and Mastodon knows this is a case of the kettle calling the pot black.

Yet, there's an easy fix to this flaw in federation. Add a P2P element. Focus less on where content comes from and more on what it is. Build a system for nodes to ensure trust.

Nevertheless, Bluesky did have a few valid critiques about Mastodon, and it's that a Mastodon instance is only as successful as its ability to fight trolls and spam. If the average instance can't keep up, we know what will happen to the Fediverse: it will end up like email.

Remember Twitter's super uber-secret project Bluesky? They finally explained what they're up to, and it's spicy 🌶️

So spicy that I had to write a 1,200 blog post one what exactly it entails. Key learning: Twitter doesn't like Mastodon. 🧵 https://blog.peerverse.space/lets-talk-about-project/

In a nutshell, Bluesky is saying, "We know the Fediverse exists, it's better than Twitter, but trust us, we're building something better so... don't go anywhere!"

To sum it up, I'm skeptical that Bluesky is anything more than vaporware.