masterspace

Signing an NDA to talk about an unreleased product is not predatory, it’s standard practice for virtually any business (especially the kind inviting random people off the internet to see them). Many jobs require you to sign NDAs just to go through the interview process.

There is nothing gained by not going to the meeting with Meta, if they want to launch their Twitter clone they are more than capable of doing that regardless of whether or not this guy takes a meeting to hear them out. All he’s done is learned less about what they plan on doing leaving him less capable of taking the best course of action, and if you trust him to make the right decision then that’s objectively a bad thing.

Such bravery coming from someone who sounds oh so employed.

That’s standard practice if you’re going to be talking about an unreleased product.

This is not a proper talk by meta that you could just “hear them out”. They explicitly said off the record and confidential, there’s no reason for that if it’s something innocuous.

They plan on showing demos of their product to them or talking about potential features it might have. Boom, they require an NDA.

I don’t think you understand how the professional world works or how common NDAs are. I’ve signed NDAs while going through interview processes at FAANG and other large companies just so that we can talk freely about projects I might work on. Especially for a company like Facebook where everything they do will get about a dozen news articles written, they’re going to make you sign an NDA for any conversation about an unreleased product.

Having a larger market = having a larger network = greater network effects for content

Having Meta join with Mastodon might actually sway people off twitter and into the fediverse where it will be easier to migrate over to a different instance.

It’s foolish not to hear them out, you accomplish nothing. This isn’t some silicon valley episode where he has some arkane secrets that meta engineers couldn’t figure out that he might leak. Meeting with them is zero risk and he would gain more information on what they’re planning.

The crappy scripts that I wrote while teaching myself to code at an electrical engineering / architecture firm are used more often than the professional software I’ve built for FAANG and Fortune 500 companies since.