A warning and a perspective from an insider who has been through this before.
I sure hope that Meta doesn’t try to integrate ActivityPub into their apps. As a user that feels like they finally found their home (Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy/kbin), please, go away Meta. lol
The biggest issue is who pays for the server infrastructure at scale.
This made me wonder - what happens if my chosen Lemmy server goes down? Do I lose my account?
Hopefully, some kind of account portability is possible or in consideration. Even if it’s a manual download of settings and subscriptions that could easily be uploaded to another instance.
We just need Wikipedia style funding. If the server publishes their costs and fundraises, then people can support it directly. Instead of the stick and carrot of subscriptions or the rat race of ads, just be open and honest about server needs. If the users aren’t able to raise funds, then cut back to what’s affordable. Users will either deal with the reduced server capacity or they’ll need to pay up to continue enjoying it. This doesn’t need to be a free ride, but I trust the community will rally for a good service.
The counter is that there are federation costs too. For relatively balanced nodes that should not matter. But if you are a small instance with a lot of popular communities it might be a problem. Plus you will never get a large fraction of people contributing. So those that can will need to remember to give a solid contribution.
The Fediverse seems like a good place to implement a distributed, block chain based peering setup. Join a community and share the hosting
OMG why do tech bros try to force blockchain into everything
Think less “Bitcoin” and more “Freenet.” IMO the point shouldn’t be to try to monetize stuff, it should be to decouple content from the instance it was posted on (i.e., to mirror popular content across instances to distribute the load) while still maintaining control and attribution for the user that posted it.
But how does blockchain, as a technology, help with that? The Fediverse already has a mechanism for distributing content across multiple instances.
That’s not going to work for web hosting. The only reason it works for crypto or folding is because each request takes minutes to run and there’s no time dependence on returning the result. Additionally, they don’t need much data and all data needed is dispersed with the task.
Websites are completely different. Each individual request is tiny, taking milliseconds to process. Each request is very time dependant, you have a person literally waiting for the result. But the biggest issue is that what people really want is stuff from a database. So that database would need up grant full access to everyone, meaning anyone could change whatever they wanted. Lastly, that database would need to be hosted anyway so you’ve gained nothing.
Don’t suggest tech solutions when you don’t have any idea what the problem or solution actually involves.
That should be in the FAQ
The Fediverse is bound to come to the attention of big corporations, and if it becomes big enough they will view it as competition and try to crush it. I doubt it can outcompete them in terms of popularity. The best hope has to be coexistence, in which the Fediverse doesn’t try to win the most users, but defends its integrity against large corporations entering the space to sabotage it.
The comparison with XMPP may not be conclusive: XMPP is purely a communication protocol, so if not many people use it, not many people can be reached through it and it becomes less useful. Something like Lemmy, by contrast, is not intended to get you in touch with everyone in the world. It can function as long as it has enough users to make it interesting, enough money to pay for servers (so easy ways for users to fund it), and enough skilled developers willing to work on it. It doesn’t need huge numbers of users, and it doesn’t need to outcompete Reddit or any other corporate platform.
I hope Lemmy can equip itself with good tools for managing trolls and other kinds of attack, including corporate-led sabotage, because those things are likely to come soon. There has been an explosion in bot accounts recently, which are ominously dormant for the time being. If those all get switched on at once, there will be a huge amount of noise and a big increase in traffic. Lemmy needs to prioritize equipping itself to withstand this.
But if Meta enters the space and siphons off a bunch of users, there’s no reason the rest of us can’t continue here as before, without it. It may be a relatively small community but it can still function.
there’s no reason the rest of us can’t continue here as before, without it.
That’s OP’s point. They won’t just siphon users. They will profit off of our content, while providing nothing in return, and intentionally breaking things to ensure the network never grows larger than a certain amount.
Offers for help should be treated the same as offers from a country you are actively at war with. No instances should federate with any Meta own/operated/controlled system. To do otherwise is suicide for the fediverse.
We should also avoid building on technologies they control. Even if OSS, they can knowingly introduce bugs in updates that only break fediverse tech and not meta tech. Which is exactly what the examples in the posted article did. Microsoft did exactly this, to ensure dominance in document file formats.
It seems really stupid from our perspective. Maliciously petty, but our paychecks don’t depend on the success of the fediverse, while theirs does depend on it’s failure.
These are not compatible communities, due to the owners of one.
I think the best outcome is for Fediverse to succeed at proving the model is better for users than mega corps. Then grow and last long enough until the EU takes notice, such that if any bad actors try to ruin it they’d want to protect it. We’re probably talking far into the future, but I think if handled well it can get to that point.
If the Fediverse takes off, it would be fair to expect that new mega corps would arise out of that success. At one point, Reddit was a scrappy startup. Before that, Facebook, Google, and even Microsoft were small companies that were going to change the world. Who knows which high user, high uptime instances will end up requiring full time staff, or which software tools will be used for interfacing with the Fediverse (or analyzing stats within the Fediverse), or otherwise make a profit out of all the activity that would be going on here?
Yes, and if it becomes really big, then every federated instance would find itself coping with large amounts of traffic passed to and from the big instances, and it will become difficult to run a small operation cheaply. At that point, only the big players with big money will be able to run sites in the Fediverse and it could end up mirroring what has happened to the rest of the internet.
On balance I think it’s best if existing Fediverse instances don’t federate with the big corporations. But there are still other ways the corporations could sabotage this place, so the developers and the site admins need to be ready.
if it becomes really big, then every federated instance would find itself coping with large amounts of traffic passed to and from the big instances, and it will become difficult to run a small operation cheaply
I think that’ where the biggest threat lies. How is a small operator going to keep up with the demands of a corporate server cluster with millions of users. A small operator would have to defederate. That puts us back to the crux of original question, should corpos be allowed on the Fediverse. Why not save everyone the circle jerk and blacklist them from the start.
A secondary threat is corporate sabotage of the ActivityPub protocol. They already have a track record of doing that to free and open standards.
I wouldn’t assume the EU would necessarily be interested in protecting the Fediverse. Legislation like the GDPR is very much oriented towards working with corporate entities and the open Fediverse model is generally at odds with the right to be forgotten (since it’s effectively impossible to ensure all copies of a user’s data are deleted - I don’t even think it’s possible to determine which nodes may have a copy of a year old post).
I assume the parent commenter referred to the EU because they seem to be the only governing body on the planet with enough influence and an actual desire to actually stand up to major corporations. The US sure ain’t going to be doing it, and the list of other options is essentially zero, so that’s the only hope we have in terms of legal protections or regulations.
The right to be forgotten can be argued as being even stronger in the fediverse.
Yes, you can’t delete the content that you created, but you can delete the account associated with them, edit them, etc. with far more control than any corporate system gives you.
No there isn’t a button to just “delete all things related to me” as some people want, but that wasn’t what the right to be forgotten was about.
People knew the technical limitations of it from the start, the problem was that when users would take actions they thought deleted their content, private code would very much not delete it.
There is no such illusion here on the fediverse
But if Meta enters the space and siphons off a bunch of users, there’s no reason the rest of us can’t continue here as before, without it. It may be a relatively small community but it can still function.
It could lead to fracturing. If, for example, different forks of the software showed it with varying degrees of giving into Metas direction, that could fracture the community. Or simply the question of how to cope with the new imbalance.
You cant have a curve ball being thrown into traffic and expect your car comes out fine just because you are closing your eyes.
But fracturing is not necessarily a death sentence. I don’t necessarily want a billion users part of my echo chamber.
Have you actually read the article? That is literally how it first started for XMPP.
And because there were far more Google talk users than “true XMPP” users, there was little room for “not caring about Google talk users”. Newcomers discovering XMPP and not being Google talk users themselves had very frustrating experience because most of their contact were Google Talk users. They thought they could communicate easily with them but it was basically a degraded version of what they had while using Google talk itself. A typical XMPP roster was mainly composed of Google Talk users with a few geeks.
And once google separated completely,
As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all. But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them, we were simply offline. It was our fault.
The big difference is that the Fediverse, like Reddit and Digg before it, are not communication platforms between individual that know each other IRL… They are content sharing and discussion platforms. The content that mainstream Meta or Twitter users are interested in and generating is largely not what I am interested in, so how is it a bad thing if most of them disappear from my platform?
Plenty of us have already gone through the most painful part of the transition and are now focused on building something new. If we can do that once, we can do it again, but it’ll be even easier to divorce from Meta if I don’t care about what I’m “losing” in the split.
But the Fediverse is not looking for market dominance or profit. The Fediverse is not looking for growth. It is offering a place for freedom. People joining the Fediverse are those looking for freedom. If people are not ready or are not looking for freedom, that’s fine. They have the right to stay on proprietary platforms. We should not force them into the Fediverse. We should not try to include as many people as we can at all cost. We should be honest and ensure people join the Fediverse because they share some of the values behind it.
This above is, I think, a very important attitude that is all too often thrown aside in the search for success. So many have dreamed of the “year of the Linux desktop,” but I have never shared that desire; and it is largely for fear of what is being referenced above. I like those peculiar freedoms of Linux and other open source software projects. If it, or other such projects, were to take a truly significant market share I feel it would almost certainly start becoming what it opposed. I want the freedom and the honesty of such projects to remain, even if (possibly because?) they are somewhat niche, geeky and not entirely newbie friendly.
I’ve never really understood the EEE argument here. XMPP was an open proptocol, Google embraced it and attracted users, then extended it and took those users away. But according to this article, Google didn’t extinguish XMPP. It’s still around and serving its niche community.
That’s already the situation the fediverse is in. This is a niche community and there are already existing social media companies that the majority of internet users are on. If Facebook joins the fediverse, it brings billions of new users to the fediverse. If they then leave the fediverse, ActivityPub will still be here and all of us on the real fediverse will still be here, in a niche community. Everyone here has already chosen the fediverse despite it being a clunky, unpolished, niche network. How is EEE a relevant fear for the fediverse?
It’s in the article but to paraphrase it:
When a large company takes an open protocol, embraces it using adding users to the network through heir platform, then extends it using proprietary means, they have full control over how the protocol runs in the network.
When the open standards are forced to make changes to be functional with the dominant proprietary app that is poorly (and sometimes incorrectly) documented, open source groups are constantly on the backfoot in order to maintain compatibility, and that makes it harder to compete on their own right.
A second example given is LibreOffice, whose documents are made to fit the XML standard by Microsoft, but there are quirks in their documented standard that if you follow it too closely it isn’t formatted quite the same as the document produced in Microsoft Office, so they were pressured to effectively copy MS and deviate from the standards MS claims to follow.
Ironically XMPP is a counterexample to your argument. They made the switch to mandatory TLS even though GChat didn’t.
That’s a neat fact!
I’m not on Facebook for a reason, I will never fed with meta.
I sorta wish we could subscribe to federation endpoints the way we do to magazines. Then it won’t matter what is being federated overall. Hail the user, hail thyself!
Instances could do what Beehaw does and defed one direction but still allow their content to be seen by other instances. I think Meta could decide to defed and block that, if they wanted to, however. (Beehaw doesn’t seem to care if other instances see their content as long as they can control posts/comments on their end, which doesn’t bother me at all since it doesn’t effect me in any way. And I still get more content!)
Should be mandatory reading for anyone who wants this to succeed. I hope we don’t make the same mistakes as doomed so many other open source open protocol projects in the past.
The solution is to simply ignore the corpos
I hope the Fediverse chooses not to play the larger corpos game and minimizes their influence at all stages. I forget where I saw it posted but just like linux, the Fediverse doesn’t need to rush success. It will be successful, because what large corporations offer as social media is dreadful. Sooner or later all of them force some form of poison pill through their platform. Your content doesn’t need to be commodified into product. No one owns your content and no one should be able to push content/ ads on you that you do not approve of. We may need to pay a little something for this freedom, and that’s cool. Free as in freedom & not as in beer. Long live the fediverse or what ever currently holds to those values.
Interesting, it was a variation of embrace, extend, extinguish, without the extend part.
In a way, I think it happened to the entire internet. Look at browsers today, web development (that one might be controversial, but I think big techs somewhat forced bloated frameworks to be the standard way to create websites), video streaming, etc.
No, extend is a major part of it. That’s how they topple community projects. They extend in good faith at first to get everyone locked in, then they extend in nefarious ways to keep the community stuck playing catch-up. Once they’ve absorbed all the users from the community projects, they kill off back access leaving the community project crippled in users and lost in direction.
Trust me. Facebook will definitely add great things at first but their goal is to draw users out of the fediverse and into Facebook.
Maybe I’m bitter, and I know a lot of people wouldn’t agree with this, but honestly? I think the non-corporate part of the Fediverse should just assume malice from the get go and preemptively defederate from whatever Meta put out. That way nothing’s changed - Meta would essentially have a private / proprietary / isolated network, as far as users are concerned (much like Facebook already is), and even if the Fediverse will see less growth in the short term because of that, there will be no confusion on where everybody stands.
E: Well, thankfully and as expected, I’m not the only one to think this way: FediPact is an Organized Effort to Block Meta’s ActivityPub Platform
I’d rather federate with Google plus. I need to get back in touch with my old circles. ;)
As opposed to many of you, I look forward to Meta joining up with ActivityPub. I’ve learned to embrace Eternal September; and have come to understand the debt I owe to it. Companies win, yes. I haven’t used Google chat in years. I don’t bother keeping a copy of Gaim/Pidgin on my PC because I don’t want to bother talking with anyone in a Jabber chat (Yeah, yeah, it’s XMPP now, I started when it was Jabber and I was on the mothership server). Everyone I need to talk to moved from GChat to Skype, and then at some point, from Skype to Discord. They never stopped at Jabber, Mumble, or other OSS options; though some joined me in passing through. As I’ve said, human nature is opposed to load-balancing. People want to be part of the largest possible community, at least at first.
I would love to have an easy way to talk to local friends again, and have a wide base of information to share with them. If this new system is easier to coordinate local groups with than Meetup is, I’ll be joining and becoming a fairly active user. I might keep my Lemmy accounts, my Mastodon account, and my KBin account - just like I’m keeping my Reddit account now.
If servers want to defederate from Facebook, that’s their loss.
