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Embrace, extend, extinguish. Only proven way to destroy decentralized, free, open source solutions.
First stage embrace might not even be malicious, but with corporations it will eventually lead to someone thinking: how can we monetize our position. It is just nature how business works.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
It’s worth pointing out that the wiki article lists several examples of Microsoft using this approach but I wouldn’t class many of them as successful.
Google successfully did this to XMPP.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Thank you for this article. It shows exactly what’s Facebook’s plan. They will join in, make their own implementation that doesn’t work well, pass the blame to the other platforms that use the protocol*, which in turn pressures them to debug and slow down themselves around Facebook’s stuff, and then they cut them off entirely.
The correct attitude is to extinguish Facebook now. They’re not welcome.
*And yes, this would work. Users are absolutely gullible about this shit, even without ever being told anything directly. Look at Apple users and their blue/green speech bubble thing. Every single flaw with the system is Apple’s fault - but the dumbass cultminded users see the green speechbubble and blame the other users for the flaws, not Apple. They literally just did the stupid tribalism comic and it worked.
I’m not going to say you are wrong, but I have yet to meet a single fucking person that actually cares about bubble colors.
I hear this parroted so often, but never see it myself. Didn’t see it when all I had used was Android devices, didn’t see it when I tried an iPhone and got involved in their own communities.
Wait, so Apple intentionally made iOS messages highly incompatible with Android users?
XMPP still exists. Google dropped support for it, that’s definitely not killing it. Google drops support for projects all the time by the way, it’s kind of their thing.
Google dropping support for XMPP is what put it one foot in the grave. They abused the protocol to gain the lion’s share of users for Google Talk, and then cut off any resistance that remained. It exists still, technically, but when’s the last time you heard about or used it? I only know about it because EVE Online players used it for large group text communication before Discord became a thing.
XMPP still exists in the same way that critically endangered animals still exist: barely and by the adamant will of some dedicated few.
XMPP wasn’t even remotely popular until Google integrated with it, I tried Jabber back in the day lol. Google brought the users it lost, you can’t argue this was an attempt to kill it. At worst it’s the same as before Google integrated.
That’s the problem though. If XMPP had grew organically then it would fare much better. With how it happened, XMPP’s growth was mostly because of Google, and that put a lot of pressure to other servers and the protocol’s development to cater to them, because they had the majority of the users in their platform.
It is absurd to think XMPP would have gained traction without Google. And it is an objectively shitty protocol, so Google dropping it was the right move. It is kind of weird to see people holding up Google dropping XMPP as some horrifying example of embrace, extend, extinguish, when anyone that’s actually developed software with the protocol wants it to die in a burning fire.
This is pure speculation at best, but since we’re speculating I strongly disagree. The internet overall didn’t care about open source software in the early 00s, and most people still don’t today. Corporate freeware that can spend more on a polished product is going to win over the general population every time.
App I work on, we’re replacing XMPP with messages over push/rest/websocket. XMPP is not fun to use compared to newer stuff.
enthusiast dev here, can vouch, having to make a XMPP library for myself for a bot I ran, I HATE the protocol with a burning passion, it’s weird and not how you would expect it to be. I’m sure the complexity of the standard didn’t help against its downfall. That being said, fully think that it will be harmful in the longrun of Activity Pub for Meta to be jumping in. but there will be some enthusiasts that still use it regardless.
Not only was it not very successful, it’s an old outdated Microsoft playbook from the 90s/early 00s and was targeted at closed source competitors and freeware, not open source software where you can just fork out a separate version.
By all means block Meta instances if you want, but they have 3 billion users, they definitely don’t give a shit about a “competitor” with a few hundred thousand users. If simply the presence of a corporation in the Fediverse is enough to destroy it, then it wasn’t going to last long anyways. It’s embarassing that “embrace, extend, extinguish” caught on around here just because it’s a catchy alliteration.
Let me offer a rebuttal. The fact that this playbook even exists and is well-known is a cause for concern. Yes, Microsoft’s campaign wasn’t very successful, but that doesn’t mean Meta won’t try or learn from Microsoft’s mistakes. I ask: is the probability of this happening non-zero, and if so, is it lower than you’re comfortable with? For me, and many others here, that answer is no.
Moreover, this is a greater problem: Meta is well-known and has practically infinite marketing budget. They can spin their app as the de facto, causing many people to lose control of their data. By association, some people will blame the Fediverse and not Meta. Defederating signals that we are not willing to participate with them and tells potential Fediverse users that they will not be able to engage with us—and whatever they decide, we cannot impact more.
The crux of my argument is risk management. Defederated is a conservative measure to prevent possible issues in the future.
Honestly this is just pure paranoia because nobody has given a solid reason as to why they would give a single shit about the few hundred thousand users here. Your only argument is “well it exists, so maaaybe they’ll use it but better” which has no basis. As for losing control of your data, you have no control of your data here. It’s public information. Any person, corporation, computer literate cat, etc can already scrape everything you post here. Don’t mistake anonymity for data privacy.
Like I said, block em, defederate, whatever measures you want to take are an option, but for the love of god let’s just stop parroting nonsense at eachother because it sounds clever. I came here to get away from reddit culture.
I just wanted to say, I am by no means technical but your position is exactly what I was thinking, if an open source project can’t survive when it’s competitors start using it, then it’s never going to survive. The whole point is for it to be interoperable, resilient, and antifragile, and there are plenty of open source projects that achieved that. Competitors switching over to open source is a natural progression of any open source project if one assumes it is successful.
100% agreed with this. The scaremongering just makes no sense.
Not only was it not very successful, it’s an old outdated Microsoft playbook from the 90s/early 00s and was targeted at closed source competitors and freeware, not open source software where you can just fork out a separate version.
In Microsoft’s case I agree. However Google successfully used EEE to essentially kill of XMPP where they initially added XMPP support to Google Talk, then extended it with their own features which weren’t up to spec, and then later killed off XMPP support.
So when’s extinguish come in? XMPP still exists, google dropping support didn’t kill XMPP, it just doesn’t work with their app anymore. They weren’t trying to kill XMPP, they were just going what Google does and dropping projects as soon as they aren’t profitable.
Yes XMPP still exists but I’d argue compared to previously standard XMPP is no longer as widely spread. Where as previously you would have people talking to each other over different XMPP services, that kind of federation no longer exists. For example WhatsApp supports XMPP but good luck trying to talk to WhatsApp from another client.
XMPP was never popular to begin with, because it’s a messaging service that relies on the people close to you using it, which was rare before Google Talk integrated. Corporate run apps brought direct and indirect usage, you can’t argue this is an overall loss when they pulled away from XMPP, at worst it’s the same as if they never integrated. The same is true for ActivityPub, whether everyone defederates or blocks Meta instances now or they stop supporting ActivityPub later makes no tangible difference.
I went to university in the 2000s at a smallish German Technical University. Rarely anyone used jabber. What literally everybody in the early 2000s was using was ICQ. Every dorm had ethernet, everybody had a PC and everybody had ICQ running 24/7. The ones not living on campus were peer pressured into getting DSL (which was still uncommon elsewhere).
Then came Facebook, and suddenly all those ICQ contacts were gone. Still, rarely anyone used jabber, only those who didn’t like Facebook. I didn’t know a single person who was on Google Talk.
Then came Android, iOS and Whatsapp, and that’s what „killed“ XMPP, because XMPP was so not ready for mobile networks.
Exactly. Which is why I believe that all this fearmongering is because of Meta’s reputation (rightfully so) rather than because Meta actually has a plan to destroy the fediverse. And it’s not the like the fediverse can be actually destroyed, people can always start new instances at any time.
My take was that most people 1) don’t want Meta/Facebook spam - low effort memes, propaganda, etc. and 2) don’t want their content to be used by Meta. The former seems pretty easy - just defederate and you don’t see any of their crap. The second is sort of a gray area… Whether or not you are diametrically opposed to Meta/Facebook or not, once you post your content to a public site, it’s available. I haven’t been here long, but defederation seems to work both ways, so FB would have to scrape content from known instances to get that content unless I’m mistaken.
FB could smoke any instance by DDOSing scrapes whether intended or otherwise, but once you post your data on a public forum, Meta could theoretically use it.
But to your comment - I don’t see what starting a new instance would do for anyone for #2. Any new instance is discoverable by nature, so FB can come knocking at any time for content whether you defederate or not.
- As if Lemmy currently isn’t overrun with low effort memes? Have you seen all those cans of beans running amok here?
- I imagine there are many parties already scraping content from the fediverse as we speak - that’s the nature of public web content.
As far as (1) goes, 90% of the content on Lemmy is just a Lemmy circlejerk, the remaining 10% is memes. What influx of “low effort content” could possibly make the discussions on Lemmy worse than they already are?
As far as (2) goes, you realize your data on Lemmy is open to everyone to scrape, not just Meta? Every single one of your upvotes is public.
If they don’t give a shit about the fediverse why do they want to join it? Only Facebook can win from this.
Easy integration outside Instagram. They’re rushing to market to head off Twitter and the app only works for Instagram users, way easier to extend that by integrating open source software than rebuilding their own proprietary software from scratch. They can win without destroying it.
That’s partly because of actions taken by various governments. Who knows what tech would look like today if Microsoft from the 90s forced us all into Internet Explorer.
Also, more successful examples would be Google. They have done this very thing several times but then keep messing it up lol
It looks like articles today are saying that Meta is delaying integrating ActivityPub at launch.
That said, I’m not seeing how we get to the last E, extinguish. By its very nature, ActivityPub is decentralized to avoid total control. So even if Meta embraces the technology and wants to monetize it (because capitalism, of course), extending ActivityPub would (hypothetically) be open source - or they would fork it, diverging and making their version closed, and otherwise not function in full with other ActivityPub instances (like with kbin, Lemmy, and Mastodon). Without buying the platform from the developers in full, I don’t see how ActivityPub or the greater Fediverse dies. And I could just be missing something obvious, so if you can explain how we get there, I would really like to hear and understand.
I guess the only way I could see it is if Threads got so popular that people literally stopped using the other apps - but I also don’t see that happening, because anyone already using stuff like Mastodon are using it because Twitter, Facebook, etc, suck ass and they’ve moved away from sites like that.
EDIT: Thanks to the one person that actually replied, I saw I was on the right track at the end, but failed to see the obvious (as I assumed).
It’s hard to predict but the extinguish part would come from bigger non-Threads instances implementing compatibility with Thread-only extensions (in the interest of their users, or for money) and fragmenting the community. Threads then becomes the defacto ActivityPub standard. Maybe some instances stay true to the standard but with extremely reduced communities because now they can’t see what other instances are publishing. So now you have to decide between your ideals and your social network. At best, you’re back to square 0.
It happens in the extend part.
Large corporation will have much more resources, they will implement features and refactoring, which small open source teams do not have capability to implement. They will start pulling users because they support features that other do not.
This also means that they will start getting control.
And then finally they just cut the communication, and split the community. All the way they can claim to be working “for the community”
It happens in the extend part.
This is it right here.
If you need a real-world example look at the original web browsers:
NCSA Mosaic (the very first web browser) fully supported what would be later known as HTTP verison .9 . There was universal compatibility because there was only one browser supporting HTTP. Later Netscape Navigator would come on the scene and add functionality that was not supported in Mosaic (like the <blink> tag for example), but nothing hugely breaking page views between the two browsers.
Fast forward to Internet Explorer v3, v4 and v5 where MS would not only show all the pages that the prior browsers would, but they EXTENDED by letting HTML still work without following all the same standards. It was easier to write pages for IE than it was to the specification. Then EXTENDED again by MS added ActiveX to web sites meaning now ONLY MS IE could display these pages, and for a time that meant only Windows computers could. This is the Extinguish part.
The “Extend” step gets adopted because its attractive to users.
Here’s a non-computer analogy:
Lets say your current car get 25MPG. Now lets says that Shell come out with a gasoline that would let your same car go 40MPG with zero changes. Just buy Shell gas now at nearly the same price as anyone else’s and you get significantly more range. Most people would do it. Moreover, Shell buys Honda and starts manufacturing cars designed to work on that same new Shell gas could go 60mpg with even more power! So when you go to buy your next car 5 years later after using the gas, you don’t want to turn down 60MPG with more power. That Shell/Honda looks very attractive! All this time all the other gas stations have been going out of business because few people want to pay nearly the same amount for gasoline that only gets a fraction of the range. In the end, ONLY Shell gasoline is being sold, and nearly everyone drives a Shell/Honda to get the most benefit. This is Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
I actually witnessed IE’s rise, leaving netscape navigator and opera in dust, and then open source phoenix (later firefox) rising from ashes, steadily taking back user share. Google chrome took a good chunk too and by that time IE was done and desperate enough to give in and use chromium framework.
There was a point in time I thought it’s impossible, the close source monstrosity with neverending standards incompatibilities will stay on quick launchers forever but it did not. What a journey.
Anyone here remembered that Internet Explorer is Evil! site? The person who made that website complained about those tactics such as the ActiveX stuff and also made fun of Microsoft for doing it.
I was struggling to get all the way there initially, but that makes sense. Thanks for actually taking the time to respond!
I doubt that is the plan. The Fediverse is tiny, even after the recent growth. Prior to June it was basically just Mastodon, and I doubt Meta is agile enough to start this from scratch in response to the June growth. This is a lot of effort to take down a competitor that’s widely considered to be rough around the edges, and is only just now hitting 2m active monthly users.
Realistically Threads has been in the works for a while as a way to eat Twitter’s market share while Twitter destroys itself.
I suspect they see value in the ActivityPub protocol in the same way Yahoo saw value in email in the 90s.Regardless of whether EEE is their intention or not, Meta’s presence in the Fediverse is going to have major implications for its long term stability.EDIT: on further reflection, I suspect the value they see is pressuring other would-be competitors to also implement ActivityPub. I suspect they do genuinely want to grow the Fediverse… because doing so would increase the amount of data they could collect and sell from it.
On embrace phase the intention is not malicious, they probably want things to grow. Corporations just in long run will eventually lead to someone asking “how can we capitalize this” and this lead the FOSS part of things to be cut out, and destroying the protocol at that point.
Fediverse should defederate every corporation and just grow naturally.
Big corpos don’t want to take it over, they want it gone.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Scary stuff! Fuck google , Microsoft and facebook
Same reason I am highly critical of Jack Dorsey’s BlueSky and its attempt at rolling out a separate protocol. The last thing we need is for the Fediverse to be fragmented into a dozen protocols that do things ever-so-slightly differently and prevent network convergence.
Another reason to avoid it is that Jack Dorsey supports known anti-vaxxer and general conspiracy kook Robert F Kennedy Jr. Not the kind of people I’d want to run my social network.
That’s bonkers, I don’t even see what there is about the man to support. He’s just an amalgam of nonsense conspiracies.
My boomer parents unironically think he’s the best politician since sliced bread for the last few weeks.
It is very easy to argue that network convergence is NOT a good thing. That’s the whole point of the “embrace, extended, destroy” point you responded to.
The point being is that inventing a new protocol is either a case of Not-Invented-Here syndrome or an attempt to fragment the ecosystem - hence jumping straight into the extinguish phase. It does not paint BlueSky as a good actor in this race - especially as there are no substantial improvements over ActivityPub as far as I can tell.
If Meta is running a fediverse instance, they’re doing it for money. Sure, I might be able to block Meta-sourced content from reaching me, but that doesn’t prevent me-sourced content from reaching Meta - where they can monetize it.
Show me how to do that, and I’m on it like white on rice.
Easy peasy!
Neat, but it still means nothing. You’re still posting in a public forum. You can copyright or watermark your work, but fair use is a two way street.
Neat, but it still means nothing.
I see you’re not well versed in bird law.
There is “messages or messages” in the middle, might want to change that.
Where would this be posted or stored to have legal effects?
Is there a text version available for others to copy?
I printed it out and put it on the front door of my house. The castle doctrine means that this is enforced against all internet companies I use in my house.
You make a good point.
Under the Castle Doctrine laws in my state, if Zuckerberg walked into my house without being invited then I could start blastin.
I’ll post the legalese mumbo jumbo on my door to keep him out, like he’s a vampire.
Where would this be posted or stored to have legal effects?
A different reality.
This is exactly my concern, I don’t want my online activity to become another revenue stream for meta. If they can put ads next to our posts then we’re back to working for free for the billionaires.
deleted by creator
The issue is the stuff I post being monetized by Zuck et al. I’m not interested in providing free content for billionaires.
If I understand correctly, the concern is not for the users on Meta’s “Threads”. It’s the fact that the content you create on Mastodon or whatever fediverse part with which Meta federated would eventually reach users on Threads, and thus “you” (on the fediverse corner outside of Meta) are indirectly monetized.
I tried to sign up for this junk and it immediately suspended my account at the end of the sign up process for some reason. Now it’s demanding my mobile number to appeal it.
Get fucked Zuckerberg you tosser.
That seems to be a tactic they use to obtain the pieces of info you didn’t already give them.
i’ll join the voices saying this is bad for the fediverse, and bad for users in general. there are LOTS of normie users who are joining threads who will be shut off from learning about all the cool other servers if everyone blocks them. this will mean users who want to interact with them need to sign up on Threads, which is what we don’t want.
what we want is that users on Threads see other servers, learn that they’re better, and migrate over.
don’t block Threads, show them how much better we are.
The entire fucking point of fediverse is that corporations can be disconnected when they try to come knocking. You’re literally arguing against the reason the platform exists to begin with.
this is not the point of the fedeverse, this is you’re own angry brain trying to force the general public to agree with you without wanting to explain to them the whole situation.
Given that I’ve been here for three years and you’ve been here 20 days I’m going to say I know a little bit more about it.
appeal to authority, classic.
Reddit-brain citing debate shit in a conversation. Classic.
Be more normal.
logical fallacies aren’t “debate shit” they’re poorly constructed arguments you resort to when you don’t have a real argument.
They are debate shit when you throw them out in average conversation. Do you say this shit to your nan or a random person in the street? Fuck no you don’t because you’d get lamped and called an absolute freak for it. Like I said - Be more normal.
ActivityPub was built for the express purpose of decentralising the net after the corporations had successfully enclosed and monopolised on what was originally a commons. It is literally called a commons-based protocol. Guess what’s anti-commons? Corporate monopoly seekers.
It would be real fucking nice if people that have been here for a handful of days didn’t suddenly try to wing-it as authorities on a topic they’re barely familiar with. I welcome you, I really do, I welcome you to a space in which we are actively harming corporations. I do not welcome this reddit behaviour and I do not welcome this attitude where you think you need to pretend an ill-informed opinion gained in just days is everything. It’s ok to say “I do not know enough about this to have an informed opinion”. It’s tiring.
Anyway, gonna block you for 24 hours now so we disengage from this shit and entirely unproductive back and forth. Later maybe.
No offense, but I have plenty of ways of interacting with my ‘normie’ friends that don’t involve whoring out my personal data. If someone insists they want to hang out with you but only when they’re hosting a Pampered Chef party, they can fuck right off.
Honestly, after literally over 30 years on the internet, I can safely say that this idea of bringing everyone together into one space, that will make both the space and the people better, does not work. Even back in the 90s it affected the signal to noise ratio badly. Now there are significant sets of bad actors, shitposting/meta and general noisy ignorance and hate that can easily, easily drown out any decent signal. It’s like a permanent Eternal September.
Think of this like the subject of tolerance - typically criticised that as a philosophy, in that it would thus tolerate the very things that would undermine and destroy it. Rather, it is not a philosophy, but a social contract - if you don’t use tolerance yourself, others are not bound to be tolerant of you. Of course, I’m not talking about being tolerant/intolerant here, but using the quality of engagement and participation in a community, as a barometer for whether that user should be engaged in that community.
Some barriers to entry are self-selection for appropriate users, and therefore a good thing - whether through obscurity, level of engagement, education or whatever. Without these, everything gets overrun and crushed. We haven’t yet found a good self-moderating system for online communities that provides everyone with a positive and fulfilling experience.
Threads can be Threads. The fediverse can be the fediverse. No-one is forced to choose just one, and trying to force them together is going to crush the fediverse. Lemmy has about 20,000 active users. Threads got 30 million signups in 24 hours.
Just gotta like… make sure they don’t echo chamber each other into January 6ing again.
Naw man, don’t play games with your abusive ex. Meta can stay over there, we can stay over here. We don’t need to talk to each other.
Do you honestly think only the positive, friendly people would hop over? The entire fediverse will be overrun by crazy political conspiracy theories and hostile homophobic/transphobic/anti abortion stuff in no time.
what exactly is stopping people from doing that regardless of what meta does with threads?
Meta deliberately provokes that kind of stuff since rage baiting is good for engagement. They’ve cultivated and minmaxed that kind of behaviour for years. I’m sure it exists in small pockets here already, but nowhere near the same level.
i don’t think you have a firm grasp on how nitch communities congregate.
Yup this is dumb and misguided
I really hope the fediverse can block out the meta crap…
There is an anti meta pact. Encourage your instances to sign and follow through. https://fedipact.online/
Has lemmy.world blocked meta?
As far as I could tell they haven’t signed the anti meta pact so probably not.
That site is really bringing me back to my Myspace days
yeah, for real… wtf is up with that page?
Personality
If personalities were bumper stickers… this would tell me that they were a 13 year old girl who just learned html.
Or… ‘don’t take me serious!’
Do you write screeds about the woke mob and women with blue hair too?
It’s not normal, you’re completely right about that. It doesn’t matter. Everything does not have to look like the corporate internet and frankly advocating that everything on the internet wear a suit and tie to be “taken serious” (your words) is something you should re-examine. Spaces with different cultures are good and having a kneejerk reactionary intolerance to them is bad.
That’s bull.
If you can’t see the relevance of looking professional than I don’t know what to tell you. It’s important.
I stared too long at it and now my screen looks green -_-’
Unpopular opinion but defederating Meta is a terrible idea. What are people thinking will happen? Allow them to federate and you’ll have mastodon users able to view and interact with posts from Threads without needing to be concerned about ads or tracking, without giving over any more control of privacy than they would to any other fediverse instance, and without needing to possess accounts homed within the Meta infrastructure.
Defederate them, and anyone who wants to interact with anyone on threads will most likely need to maintain a presence on both and handover more personal data to Meta than they otherwise would.
Defederating is actively hostile to fediverse users.
The idea is that at first threads.net will seem “normal”, like all the other fediverses
Then they start adding features that either break against other servers, or straight up aren’t supported, making threads.net seem more enticing just because all the neat features aren’t on the other sites.
Think how Internet Explorer killed Netscape with all the Page Load errors caused by ActiveX, yet everyone wanted ActiveX sites.
Once they’ve walked through the path of least resistance and grabbed the bulk of the traffic, they just defederate from everyone.
Yep - best option is to defederate them well before they gain traction & start creating problem by not contributing back to the protocol in a way that benefits everyone.
I think after the community got burned by Microsoft & then google we’re finally learning.
Couldn’t any instance or app do this already? Like #peertube does videos in a way that isn’t necessarily fully federated with #mastodon. We get partial functionality everywhere and some places will have some extra things. If it is popular enough, then add it to the standard and let everyone who wants it add the functionality.
I don’t want to interact with anyone on Threads. It is new and it is Facebook.
Was about to say just that. I’ll love to reject people that only follows big corpos.
It isn’t the people. It’s just if I already decided not to use Facebook or twitter. Why would I get back into bed with the devil on an experimental product?
People are concerned about Facebook/Meta trying to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish ActivityPub - if I’ve understood correctly.
People keep saying EEE as if that’s a point in and of itself without really explaining how in this instance
Embrace, they join the fediverse seemingly in good faith. Bringing their larger userbase to massively increase the size of the fediverse.
Extend, they add some features that are convenient when interacting with their base across the fediverse. But these conveniences require proprietary software integration.
Extinguish, once enough users and platforms are tied into the conveniences of extend, they use that to force compliance. Stricter and stricter rules on their proprietary software. Comply or die.
The fediverse won’t be gone afterwards, but if it EEE works then we will end up very stifled.
The outcome then would be that Meta’s instance would be defederated/defederate itself - how would that be different from now?
They’d probably attract more people (even people that are here right now) before doing so. Thus creating another centralized platform.
If the Threads product was so superior, and Mastodon so unable to respond that millions would leave Mastodon - sure. I doubt it though…
You’re severely underestimating the budget Meta can throw at this. Mastodon/Lemmy/etc. right now are largely volunteer-run as opposed to full-time employees.
I wouldn’t underestimate them though. After all, they own some of the biggest social network platforms on the globe and have the formula to hook people up down to a t.
While Threads is federated social circles and communities will have time to form. Thread users will by nature of having the support of a corporate juggernaut, be the lions share of users on the 'verse. When threads pull the plug, the Fedverse becomes a ghost town overnight and everyone not on Threads will be forced to migrate if they want to keep their social circles and communities intact.
I think few people would migrate away in that scenario. Some might create additional accounts (none of this is zero-sum). It’s not unlikely that Mastodon itself will become bigger because of it, and it’ll get hard for Meta to unilaterally pull the plug - a bit like email.
If they become so ubiquitous that all you see are Threads messages, all they have to do is start adding their own extensions to ActivityPub and degrade the experience of everyone who is not using their app.
What kinds of extensions should the typical activitypub user be worried about? I don’t care if Meta adds payments or virtual avatars or whatever–if the core functionality of the Threads app is simple microblogging, it should be perfectly interoperable with that side of the fediverse.
The more likely effect IMO (if Meta holds to their word on enabling federation on their side) is that other large social media companies (e.g. reddit, twitter) will feel pressured to federate and that will make the fediverse better, not worse.
My account is on kbin.social but I’m working on getting kbin self hosted. When I do, I’ll absolutely be federating with Threads whether or not kbin.social does.
A cool post pops up in your feed. You click it. You are met with an overlay that says “Sorry, this post isn’t compatible with your browser. Please log in to Threads.”
Over half your feed are Threads posts.
Speculative example.
Here is an example of a corpo dealing a blow to an open source project. The article covers an example of Microsoft and Google killing a competing open source project(s).
Most comprehensive article on this topic I’ve seen since this Meta shenanigan started. Thanks for the read
meta is not here to promote open networks. They will do more harm than good. If you want to learn more about how google achieved it with the XMPP you can read the story here https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html written by one of the core developers.
This is an interesting article, but I don’t think it’s fair to blame Google for the death of XMPP. Google were the largest consumers of XMPP at one point, sure, but Google was in no way (and never has been) the market leader in communications applications. Google talk came and went, Hangouts came and went and so on. The argument of “When google pulled the plug, XMPP users had to use something else to keep in touch with friends” is equally true of Google messenger users as well. I don’t know anyone that ever exclusively used a Google messenger app, now or then.
Google isn’t entirely innocent here, they definitely didn’t treat the protocol with the respect it deserved, but the development of XMPP was/is fraught with its own problems. I remember setting up an XMPP network for use in a small office as an internal chat tool, it was a nightmare of an experience. Different XMPP Clients had different levels of compatibility with different XMPP servers, many of the clients were just poor overall and the user-experience left a lot to be desired. All we wanted was a simple instant messenger for work, in the days before Slack and Teams. We ended up using OpenFire because it was developed in tandem with Spark, it was basic but worked well for our needs but any time I tried to adopt a different messenger, half the features didn’t work.
Lots of naivety here. Big corps only act in their own interest. They view the world in terms of opportunities and threats. Eating Twitter’s lunch is an opportunity. The Fediverse is too small to be worth much today, but someday it might grow up and challenge the status quo. That makes it a threat.
They have also already declared that if you federate with them, your instance has to abide by their code of conduct, so they already throwing their weight around.
I think that’s essentially true for any instance, though. You don’t federate with instances you don’t want to.
Threads is new - unless you meet someone who for some reason only has a threads account, just talk to them elsewhere.
Otherwise, why is it the Fediverse user who has to get the threads account? Tell your people to make an account elsewhere. If you are conscientiously avoiding threads, you’re probably the only one in the relationship with a principle boundary to cross in this situation.
Strongly disagree here, better to cast them down now while the chance is there. No mercy or quarter provided to Meta considering their track record.
If anyone is foolish enough to go there, let them, but do not drag us towards them.
Some instances will federate and some will block them. It doesn’t have to be all one or the other.
I’m all for federating with them. But give the user the ability to defederate their posts/comments based off their settings. I would rather my information not be supplied to any company owned by Facebook, that’s just me.
The information they could get is already public. That’s how Activity Pub works.
That’s completely fine, but just because a knob can be lockpick doesn’t mean you leave it unlocked.
Granted I have very little experience with activity pub, but I would expect that it should be very possible to have something similar to how defederating Works where if you don’t allow it to be sent to a specific Community it just won’t communicate.
edit: Looking back at it though, it wouldn’t stop them from just opening a secondary instance nobody knows about, having it set to private and then just running it as an info collector I don’t think.
yep, your edit is correct - and is what the previous poster meant by public info
I agree with you.
Instances can defederate from meta at any point they choose, should it become necessary in the future. Until then, it is a huge boon to the more decentralized parts of the fediverse to get content from where all the “normies” are, as well as giving more visibility to non-meta instances and giving said normies a road to the less data-hungry parts of the network.
it is a huge boon to the more decentralized parts of the fediverse to get content from where all the “normies” are
This is something I can’t understand. There’s obviously no profit motive to push fediverse to everyone, and most content is dogshit.
Can you explain why you find either to be preferable?
Reading material: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
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that’s exactly what I was thinking
This opinion doesn’t seem unpopular to me.
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I’m with you. What’s the hate with Threads? It’s going to basically just be like another Mastodon instance anyway, right? Just keep using whichever instance you want and Threads will end up adding more content to the fediverse. I don’t really see the downside.
In case you’re wondering why all the down votes, it’s because of this concept:
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Edit: Heres a summary I had in another post.
Summary:
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The Fediverse is a decentralized network of servers communicating through the ActivityPub protocol.
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Large corporations like Google and Microsoft have a history of either trying to control or make decentralized networks irrelevant.
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Google joined the XMPP federation initially but implemented their own closed version, causing compatibility issues and slowing down the development of XMPP.
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Eventually, Google stopped federating with other XMPP servers, leading to a decline in XMPP’s popularity and growth.
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Microsoft used similar tactics to hinder competing projects, such as the Samba network file system and open source office suites like OpenOffice and LibreOffice.
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The strategy involves extending protocols or developing new ones to deny entry to open source projects.
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Proprietary formats and complicated specifications are used to maintain dominance in markets.
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Meta’s potential entry into the Fediverse raises concerns as it could lead to fragmentation and a loss of freedom.
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The Fediverse should focus on its values of freedom, ethics, and non-commercialism to avoid being co-opted by large corporations.
How a new federated decentralized platform can avoid this fate:
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Stay true to the principles: The platform should prioritize and uphold the values of freedom, openness, and decentralization.
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Develop open and robust protocols: Use open standards and ensure the protocol’s specifications are transparent, well-documented, and not controlled by a single entity.
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Foster a strong community: Encourage collaboration, participation, and diversity within the community to avoid reliance on any single company or organization.
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Emphasize user control: Give users control over their data and privacy, allowing them to choose which servers and communities to join and ensuring their content is not subject to corporate surveillance.
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Focus on user experience: Create a user-friendly interface and provide features that attract and retain users, making it easy for them to engage and connect with others.
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Avoid centralization of power: Design the platform in a way that distributes authority and influence across the network, preventing any single entity from gaining too much control.
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Promote interoperability: Support compatibility with other decentralized platforms and protocols to encourage communication and collaboration across different networks.
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Educate and raise awareness: Educate users about the benefits of decentralized platforms, the risks of centralized control, and the importance of supporting independent, community-driven initiatives.
By following these principles, a new federated decentralized platform can strive to maintain its integrity, preserve user freedom, and resist the influence of large corporations seeking to control or make it irrelevant.
Really appreciate the detailed response. Makes more sense why people would be wary of it after reading through that.
My reading of that isn’t that Google killed XMPP, it’s that they thought XMPP would be useful for the userbase they brought in, they realised it wasn’t, and they ditched it. There’s no indication that XMPP had the userbase and lost it to Google, or even that XMPP had features that were stolen by Google
The point is simple, the moment you have the biggest chunk of the userbase, you have more weight in establishing praxis for standards & protocols. In fact, the protocol needs to catch up with you, rather than viceversa. Google did the same with Chrome, for example. Try to start a browser today, and with all the stuff that Google forced into standards and that your browser need to comply with, you will fail. Even just forcing a pace in changes to ActivityPub can mean that a number of tools that are developed by volunteers won’t be able to keep up.
Imagine Meta brings in 100m users. This is a fraction of their userbase, but it is 8x the whole fediverse. Imagine now that they make some change that doesn’t comply with ActivityPub, what do you do, break the tool that is used by the 90% of the users, or adapt? And what if they push changes to ActivityPub, so that everyone needs to catch up quickly: lemmy, mastodon, pixelfed, etc. How soon before some tools with less active development will die because non-compliant? (Similarly to how some browser break with some sites)
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Spontaneous idea of how to use copyright law for keeping Meta out of the Fediverse (more for fun):
Introduction: Parts of the Fediverse, including Mastodon, are software licensed under the APGL license. This license is a great choice because it forces the ones running the software to grant users access to the source code. GPL for example would allow to run proprietary services based on GPL code. The AGPL does not. Companies like Meta and Google will likely not use AGPL code because it might force them to also publish their proprietary systems behind the scenes. However, this does not help much for keeping the Fediverse save. They simply implement their own software which will not be open source.
Therefore we may need another approach. Defederating is the simplest and in my opinion currently the best. It’s easy and keeps people in control.
However, there could be some ‘automatic’ approach using copyright law. It’s a hack which allows to use existing law to regulate the way instances can federate.:
- instances would Federate only if the other side can provide a certain piece of information called X
- X is protected by copyright law, therefore by default, instances are not allowed to provide X
- However, X is released under a license which for permits to copy and distribute X under certain conditions
- The conditions allow to tune who can legally federate
- Conditions could be
- The server software must be AGPL licensed
- The instance must not be owned by a company with a certain amount of annual revenue
Open question is, who owns the copyright of X?
Is there a way for a Lemmy user to block content from Meta’s instance? If so, I’d love to.
Do you really need to import a CSV just to block a single domaine? Sounds over complicated
This is for instance admins rather than users.
This function is designed to allow you to maintain a list of blocked domains rather than just one.
Meta jumping on the Fediverse bandwagon would kill it one day. It’s an EEE strategy. We need to keep them out. Defederate from them.
I don’t think so. How would they kill the fediverse? Like there will still many communities that will not federate with Meta and still continue to operate as usual.
I think this is a pretty good read.
I think that article is mostly fearmongering.
Most people using Mastodon right now are not following mainstream people on their feeds - they are mostly following like-minded people who have made the switch from Twitter. If their server decides to federate with Meta, it will actually improve their experience because they can start following mainstream people from the comfort of their Mastodon feed. And if Meta decides to break ActivityPub (which I doubt), it will be back to the original status quo for most users.
And most mainstream people will not be signing up for Mastodon anyways, they will be signing up for Threads/Blue Sky.
I’m not worried at all about Zuck taking over Mastodon at all, they’ll try but they are just so incompetent, because literally every single product idea they have they either stole or bought from somebody else. Great tech, terrible products, zero originality is the Facebook mantra and that is because they have a delusional CEO that they can’t fire, because Zuck has delude himself into thinking he’s an “ideas” guy like Jobs instead of an “executions” guy like Bezos that he really is, and until he realizes that, he will always fail.
(also, delusional for actually thinking Ready Player One is a good book)
If making a TikTok clone didn’t get people to switch from TikTok, why would they think making a Twitter clone is going to get people to switch from Twitter?
The only way I see Facebook being a threat is when they give up on making their Twitter clone and start providing easy subscription service hosting for Mastodon/Lemmy to EEE. THAT would be the time to worry.
I feel like we are seeing lots of these tech companies just clawing at new innovations for profit cause they can’t seem to run a stable business otherwise without fucking things up somehow. See the the crypto/nft boom, AI and it’s rapid and still somewhat untested and shoddy implementation, etc. We’ve got strikes popping up in the US as the months go on cause people are definitely feeling the shittification of things in multiple industries including tech and entertainment as of late.
Everything tech companies like meta have been doing in the last several years is looking for their next growth fix to keep their investors happy while running their business like a toddler between sweets.
Elon happened to set Twitter on fire, Instagram is failing to beat TikTok in short form content or even competing with things like YouTube, Facebook itself has been shriveling up over the years, now there’s some cool new tech space in the Fediverse and no corporates taking advantage of it - probably looks like early crypto to Zuck if he can swoop in and outpace the open source projects with enough funding.
Facebook itself has been shriveling up
Like George Costanza’s member in the swimming pool.
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I think that an important part of twitter was the proximity to power through politicians, journalists and celebrities. If threads is good at making those people switch over, then I think a lot of other people will switch over as well. On big part of twitter users is people who love discussing the news and current events and that’s much more appealing when you can do it on the same platform as people who are in the news or write the news.
(On the other hand lemmy has Margot Robbie so maybe we’re in the race as well?)
Lemmy should defederate from threads.net
Same with Kbin. I would honestly go back to reddit sooner than I would accept being smooshed together with Meta.
Otherwise, Meta’s groups could become just another Lemmy instance
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So I’m on Threads (occupational hazard, I have Instagram for work) and it’s a surreal experience. It’s like if everyone you know on Facebook and Twitter joined you on a muted Tumblr overlay. Someone’s already @'d Zuck to ask for a “home feed that’s just your follows.” So… like Mastodon.
exaggerated_eye_roll.wav
I have Instagram for work
get a new job.
get a new job.
Get a new and improved attitude to share with the fediverse and leave this one over at reddit.
Jobs that require you to have an Instagram account shouldn’t exist.
Use Threads to preach the benefits of Mastadon, Lemmy, and the Fediverse in general. Spread the good word that if you don’t want to be bombarded by ads, manipulated by unscrupulous algorithms, and have your data jealously horded to be sold to who knows then get off Threads and enter the cool kids zone!
