@darius Exactly. And I'm not too surprised big corp is putting NDAs on people who join their meetings. NDAs don't mean you have to agree to anything in the meeting either. You can even stay silent during the whole meeting.

But if no one goes to the meeting, no one can say to the others to start working on fire retardant tech, either.

When Tumblr announced they were planning to federate, I contacted them and we had a meeting. I told them they needed to put user safety first and foremost in all feature and protocol level decision making and gave them some pointers. I don't know the result of that or if it was effective but I'm glad I did it.

I would like to get a chance to yell about this stuff to Meta, too, you know?

@darius This is exactly why I don't get people being doom and gloom about the NDA meeting.

Do I trust Meta? hell no. But knowing what they're up to, and being able to do something about it—even if you can't talk about it directly—is valuable AF.

It is precisely because we don't trust them that we need skeptics in the room at meetings like this.

@darius

This has some of this type vibes, probably based on the past 20+ yrs on wot META has done, 'probably', allegedly, obvs. 💩👀👀

@darius I have in the past looked at an NDA from a bigco and edited each clause to be mutually binding, signed it and handed it back.
When they say "I can't sign this, I don't have the authority" we can maybe have a useful conversation.

@darius that “if” is doing a lot of work!

@darius When BigCorp insists on an NDA, that's enough to warrant a public warning of possible impending harm.

Any entity wanting to privately discuss, under penalty of legal harm, any matter regarding participation with a network that explicitly functions under a principle of complete openness and transparency should always be met first and foremost with suspicion and concern for harms they may commit, intentional or not.

You understand that, surely.

@darius
Oh also... people should have the good sense to realize that if Big Corpo wants you to sign an NDA, you are probably doing something wrong.

@darius

What REALLY rubs me the wrong way is that the Internet and the Web (and Fedi) is built on open, freely available standards. We WANT to disclose the contents of our developements, our protocols and APIs.

For a company to initiate talks with projects on the open web to require NDAs is running counter to core values in those projects. It's extremely tone deaf and a strong signal they are not interested in protecting our commons.