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
I’m very new here but already feel invested in it’s goals and success. We don’t need a ton of users or to beat Reddit, etc, we need to be independent and free. Having a slice of the internet not controlled by capitalism is worth fighting for.
I believe things like Threads.net and the Fediverse are fundamentally at odds with each other because the Fediverse is meant to be an alternative not a replacement. No one should be hoping Reddit and others fail because if they do and only the Fediverse was left i believe it would be doomed to become like them.
Thanks for the article. Well worth reading.
I feel like avoiding a corporate trap for instant growth for the sake of protecting more sustainable long term growth is still in essence a focus on growth.
I agree with the decision to try and dodge this poison pill, but I disagree on the ideology that we shouldn’t try and get as many people on board the fediverse as possible. I want federated social media to have revolutionary power, and you can’t have power without leverage.
Meta is also a threat to the privacy of fediverse users
Ross Schulman, senior fellow for decentralization at digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that if Threads emerges as a massive player in the fediverse, there could be concerns about what he calls “social graph slurping." Meta will know who all of its users interact with and follow within Threads, and it will also be able to see who its users follow in the broader fediverse. And if Threads builds up anywhere near the reach of other Meta platforms, just this little slice of life would give the company a fairly expansive view of interactions beyond its borders.
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-threads-privacy-decentralization/
i will clearly go on instances who are blockings theses craps.
It’s actually entirely possible that the vast majority of the team there is pro-fediverse and Meta “wants” it to succeed. But the thing about corporations is they’re fluid entities and could turn anti-fediverse overnight for no reason other than it’s the best financial move now.
The only thing we have to ask ourselves is, at any point in the future will the best possible financial move for Meta be to begin sabotaging the fediverse? It almost seems like a certainty, doesn’t it?
the team don’t own the product. are they even on an union ^^ I say YES for second part.
This is Microsoft’s playbook, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish, it was use by Google to kill off XMPP - https://www.disruptivetelephony.com/2013/05/did-google-really-kill-off-all-xmppjabber-support-in-google-hangouts-it-still-seems-to-partially-work.html, now it will be used by Facebook to try to kill the Fediverse.
Why is this not more widely talked about? Please share this.
It’s not widely shared because the actual facts of that story don’t help the “Facebook will kill activity pub” narrative.
Before Google Talk and Facebook Messenger adopted XMPP it was an extremely niche messaging protocol only used by nerds. After Google Talk and Facebook Messenger dropped XMPP it went back to being a niche messaging protocol used only by nerds.
The standing of XMPP was, if anything, better off after it was abandoned by Google Talk and Facebook Messenger than before those platforms adopted it.
So then for somebody trying to scare monger about Meta, this story doesn’t help. It hurts that narrative, and that’s why people panicing about Threads aren’t talking about XMPP.
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
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.
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.
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.
Scary stuff! Fuck google , Microsoft and facebook
i steal your formatted post, to post it again. I want visibility for this.
Oh yeah. Please do this.
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
I stared too long at it and now my screen looks green -_-’
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’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.
999/1000 users won’t do any research on how ‘this new fb thing’ actually works beyond ‘where can I sign up’. All they want is a stream of content which the greater fediverse provides free of charge. It is going to be the whole Reddit situation with one more step. Portray yourself as the shining beacon of love and liberty, slowly start creeping in more monetisation and then build a wall once you get big enough. Meta and the overwhelming majority of the user base don’t care who is morally ‘better’. That’s not how capitalism works.
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.
You’re missing the bigger picture. If threads is federating with the fediverse, then that means Zuck is downloading and indexing a copy of everyone else’s posts OUTSIDE of threads.
Why can’t Meta (or any other shady company/ organization) do that now anyway. Just set up an innocent looking server, populate it with a small number of accounts to make it look legitimate, federate and start sucking in data. Do you really think every single federated server is run by people with hearts of gold and pure intentions? Your shit is already getting harvested, there’s no stopping that. They don’t need Threads if all they want is to index posts.
Meta sucks, I get it, but I think a lot of the fear Threads is generating is way overblown.
They can and probably have already and if not they will.
Someone posted this to make that point clear to everyone and a few people missed the point.
I’ve been on the fediverse since 2017. Anyone who’s dealt with running an instance knows how much of a pain in the ass dealing with huge monolithic instances is.
Recently on Mastodon for example, Mastodon.social has had huge spam waves of bots creating accounts on it then randomly sending replies with spam links to anyone they can find. And of course because Mastodon.Social is a huge instance with not enough moderators, people on outside instances can’t really do anything except whack-a-mole with the constantly new accounts since the “flagship instance” has open registration. At one point the instance I use now had to suspend mastodon.social temporarily to make the spam wave stop, which of course screwed up everyone’s follows.
The best part of Mastodon is the federated nature of the network, which gets completely screwed up when you have mountains of people on a handful of “too-big-to-suspend” instances rather than have people spread out across hundreds-thousands of smaller spaces.
Like data brokers couldn’t do that anyway.
This. I’m sure it’s already happening. People training LLMs are already pointing their models towards ActivityPub.
“People can scrape your website, therefore you should just submit and allow your server to freely hand all your user’s posts over to meta upon request” is quite the take.
Fundimentally none of the data on here is private, it’s not designed to be private.
Sure but that doesn’t mean your instances should just hand your posts over to Meta??? And other people here are wrong, maybe lemmy does it differently, but on Mastodon when you defederate from an instance, your instance stops communicating with that instance entirely, rejecting all attempts to exchange information from that server. Anything the suspended instance saw before the suspension sticks around, but that’s basically it. If they never get a chance to even see the information, then the server essentially gets nothing.
My point is that the data on here is purposely shared with every other federated instance, there’s no semblance of privacy and your data is shared with hundreds or likely thousands of admins by the time it’s done (more and more as the network grows). There’s no reason to trust that every admin will keep that information private, some people are already talking about putting up services to expose all the hidden information (in the name of “transparency”). It’s simply trivial for Meta or anybody else to get copies of the data because there’s no real protection from it unless you’re making your instance an island (and that’s an island from everybody, not just one specifically known to be Meta).
Yeah, if I post something here, I’m posting it because I want other people to see it. That’s kinda the whole point of reddit-style social media.
They can see what you post, but not your IP, first name, OS, screen density, headphone volume…. Etc.
And defederating/blocking them won’t stop that. This just blocks the consumption of and interaction with threads content. Threads will still be able to see content on those servers. In much the same way that Lemmy.world users can still see beehaw content, despite beehaw defederating.
This is false. When you suspend an instance on Mastodon, it rejects all communication attempts from said suspended server.
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
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.
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.
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 they don’t give a shit then why do they add federation feature at all? It doesn’t make sense.
Right now it’s only supported for Instagram accounts right? So slap in ActivityPub and you’ve got an already working way to extend your app. It’s easy, it’s fast development, and it’s cheap. It makes tons of sense.
Also, Meta and the rest of FAANG are a company of a bunch of nerds with a history of open sourcing software. This isn’t some crazy play, this is completely normal for them.
Yeah and it’s also normal for them to act like sociopaths and shrug and say “sorry, this is just how capitalism works” when it gets exposed how cynically awful they been behaving.
There is zero evidence ethics will be followed here, Silicon Valley has spent decades building a good argument the precise opposite will happen.
What does ethics have to do with any of this? Like you said, it’s all capitalism. The total amount of users in the fediverse is a rounding error on their 10-K. Why would they care about stealing the userbase?
Corporations don’t act ethically unless they can monetize it or they’re regulated.
Counterpoint: it’s not about capturing the current audience so much as heading a threat off at the pass.
I’m not going to argue way or other re: defederation. Just putting myself in their shoes and looking at the field they’re entering. They likely recognize there’s a brief window right now to capture twitter’s disaffected audience as they stumble while a nontrivial subset of those users are exploring open-source, non-corporate alternatives.
It makes perfect sense for them to cast the widest net they can in this moment. And it also makes sense for them to try to stifle the non-corporate side before it has a chance to gain any solid footing.
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.
I’m just here for the beans
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 doesn’t seem at all plausible to me that meta threads will pull users away from mastodon/pleroma/misskey/etc. though. If they “extend” the federation protocol to the point they become incompatible with the rest of these implementations, they will just go away and we’re back to where we were before they started federating.
They don’t pull users away from the competition, they grow their own user base much faster than the competition, the result being that most of the popular content is on their platform. If you want to follow that celebrity/ influencer / news organization/ sports reporter/ politician, you need to join threads.
But that’s already true for Twitter.
And if people weren’t looking for a reason to leave Twitter, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. The point is that this is how decentralized / open standards have been broken and made proprietary in the past.
Dosen’t need to actively “stole” users from the other communities, but if new users have to choose between the independent supported and development instances and the corporate supported with marketing and flashy UI they are going to choose the corporate one. Eventually the great majority of users are under meta’s control and the content is generated there, and you better start complying or get defederated by meta.
Some users will be used to their content by then and may be tempted to move to their platform.
There’s also the tons of news users interested in the Fediverse who get sucked into the marketing of “big tech + Fediverse” and basically just getting slurped up into some inevitable twitter sequel. So it’s existing users and potential new users.
Exactly it’s like selling junk food marketed as health food, you can say it doesn’t stop anyone from eating healthy food but if the junk food is marketed as healthy food (looking at you sugary cereals) than it can steal positive energy from the healthy food movement, gain a false sense of healthiness via associating itself with legitimately healthy food, and distract or disillusion vast swathes of people from actually trying healthy food in the first place.
Techbros being like “we should let tech companies try again (?!?) to make a non-toxic thing out of our idea” is just another case of relatively smart people being dumb af about their privilege because let’s face it, a lot of this is just resume building or a DIY hobby for these folks. They don’t have the same things to lose that trans, black, queer or any other harassed/targeted minority has in coming here. They don’t have a horse in the game whether legitimate communities win or awful corporations do, they still win in the end because both use social media software though the latter pays much better….
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.
Took us a while to shake off IE monopoly, only to squander it and now we have chromium (and to lesser extend, WebKit) monopoly. It’s not as horrible as the IE monopoly yet, but we’re currently in the “extend” stage here with Google forcing standard that benefits them and inconveniences their competitors.
but we’re currently in the “extend” stage here with Google forcing standard that benefits them and inconveniences their competitors.
A tiny bit, but I don’t think its the same thing. First, the web runs fine without Chrome. Firefox is proof of that. Second, the source code is Open Source for at least a version of Chrome, so if Google does silly stuff like trying to Extend, we can (and have) make our own version cutting that garbage out and compiling our own.
Yes, but it doesn’t solve browser monoculture issue where webdevs only target chromium/webkit when building their apps, which slowly kill firefox and make it much harder for a new browser engine tech to compete. When other browser engines are dead, the web “standard” will be fully controlled by google. No amount of forking will help because the web consortium is controlled by the big browser makers, and when firefox dies (and mozilla dies), it will be fully controlled by corporation (google), with microsoft and apple playing some minor roles without mozilla because mozilla actually has quite a big influence in the consortium despite its smaller userbase.
i.e.: The IE approach. Take an open standard (HTML), then fill in the gaps it’s missing with proprietary components (ActiveX), wait until your solutions become entrenched, then start doing evil stuff (implementing HTML slightly wrong so that developers have to do extra work to support compliant browsers).
Right, and that’s exactly how IE/Edge is the one globally dominant browser it is today. Oh no, wait, that’s the very standards compliant Chrome
Wow, you really got me there. I had no idea that IE was no longer the dominant browser by usershare. That 13-year stretch of singular dominance may as well have never happened at all since it didn’t literally last forever 🙄
And… yes, Chrome is very standards compliant, isn’t it? Isn’t it great how they publish excellent standards like FLoC & Manifest V3 without any regard for pushback from external vendors & web engineers? It’s a very not evil thing that they’re doing with their very not entrenched product.
Yes, google, the beacon of privacy, has decided to cancel FLoC. See? Google is actually listening to the web community’s plea. What’s that in the latest version of Chrome just released globally a few weeks ago? Ad Topics? No, it’s totally unrelated to FLoC, no need to worry about that, for realsies!
Google argues that it is mandatory that it builds a user tracking and advertising system into Chrome, and the company says it won’t block third-party cookies until it accomplishes that.
The internet is saved thanks to Google’s commitment to pushing forward with new standards
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.
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!
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/
Does Meta entering the Fediverse mean that they’ll federate with Lemmy instances or just Mastodon instances?
If they do both-ways federation (I’ve heard rumors of it being one-way only) it should theoretically be both Lemmy and Mastodon, but it will work better with Mastodon because they’re both for the same purpose (i.e. Twitter-like apps).
Most of the larger Mastodon and Lemmy instances have defederated threads dot net.
You’re correct, I was moreso referring to federation in general.
Why wouldn’t I just do this?
Didn’t know that Threads is compatible with Mastodon. So they use the same protocol?
not currently but it will. fediverse integration is coming soon
Oh and will it be fully fediverse? It is connected with instagram account which centralized
got it and commented here : https://lemmy.ca/comment/894722
that connection is temporary as well. I’m guessing it’s rushed because they wanted to take advantage of the twitter situation
Let see what will they do
yup. I’m excited about the future of the fediverse
yup, it uses same ActivityPub protocol.
According to Meta, they have plans to integrate ActivityPub into Threads some time soon, meaning they would be able to federate with Mastodon, Calckey, Misskey, Pleroma, Lemmy, Friendica, etc.
But hopefully that means any given lemmy instance could un-federate from it, right?
Yes- but it’s up to your instance admin to do that
threads will never federate.
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?
Haven’t you seen what RHEL is doing? Apparently if you’re big enough you can just say fuck that. I mean who you gonna answer to? Is anybody really gonna take this all the way up to the supreme court?
No, haven’t seen. What is RHEL doing?
IBM decided to only provide access to RHEL source code to those with a developer subscription, effectively putting RHEL behind a paywall and putting it behind an additional license you have to accept with your subscription. I mean, this seems to be pretty clearly against the GPL license that RHEL is not only released under but also the GPL licenses of the many components that RHEL uses. The GPL has some provision for, for example, charging money for source code distribution since that does indeed have a cost, but because they make you accept a second license with your subscription you can’t just turn around and give distribute it yourself to anyone who needs it - which is what you should be able to do with any GPL software. Well, you can do it, they just reserve the right to terminate your contract if you do. So you can do it once I guess? Then afterwards you no longer have access to updates. But who’s gonna make IBM answer for this? Don’t think anybody really can.
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.
My first reaction is this sounds like a great way to onboard more folks into the fediverse - but is this a perhaps a paradox of intolerance? Does Meta as a corporate entity have a natural intolerance to the freeness and openness of the fediverse, and if so, does it need to be violently rejected?
I don’t understand why this is even a question. Is the tragedy of the commons not taught in american education? Is Land Clearance(one example of many linked) and Enclosure not taught? (Serious question open to anyone, I do not know what history is taught outside major european countries)
This is essential basic history to understand how land developed from being a collectively worked upon thing, decentralised, owned by everybody that worked on it, into something that was owned by a tiny tiny number of people so that they could exploit it to the maximum degree.
Decentralisation is the creation of a commons. The goal of corporations is centralisation of power and monopoly. They are at complete polar opposites in goals. The entire point of the fediverse in the first place is to destroy the centralised power of web corporations who took what was originally a digital commons populated by thousands of sites and communities and through a form of digital enclosure turned it into a space controlled by a handful of companies.
Learn history other than the popular military shit folks. It is essential in analysing what affects you.
As a product of American eduation, I can say resolutely that no, that was absolutely not taught.
Of course, this is partially because American education sucks and partially because we never HAD common land here: everything was privately owned, after it was stolen from the people who already lived here, and then most of it had people who had no say in the matter enslaved to work on it for the people who stole the land.
Of course, this is ALSO not really taught, because it’d make people feel sad and make the US look kinda bad, so it’s always talked about but you get like, a week of coverage on both subjects, at most.
It saddens me to hear that kids in the US don’t learn about the fuckups of their ancestors, as this might “upset” them. My kids here in Germany learn about the Holocaust and they take trips to concentration camps so they learn about the past. Not to guilt them or shame them, but to teach them, so history doesn’t repeat itself. (And we’re not even native Germans, we’re east European immigrants.)
I’m probably going to get mega canceled here but I think a good portion of it is that the Holocaust is history.
A lot of what we don’t talk about is how we treated the Native Americans because we’re STILL shitting on them from on high. For example, the Dakota Access Pipeline is the same old shit, different century.
Also talking about how we’ve treated people of color, and any discussion around chattel slavery, ends up being “uncomfortable” because an awful lot of people in this country don’t seem to see any problem with it and would be perfectly happy if we could toss out the civil rights acts and go back to having separate water fountains.
TLDR: it’s ‘history’ in Germany because ya’ll arrest people giving nazi salutes, but in the US wearing a KKK robe is “free speech”.
The problem here is conservatives call learning about our past mistakes “woke” and do everything in their power to remove this curriculum from our schools. For some reason, they look at it as “trying to destroy our great nation and traditional values” instead of “learning from our past to be a better country going forward.”
Except military, which they teach A LOT, we spent maybe 5 days on the crimes we committed against Native Americans, but an entire month or more on the Revolutionary War. Hell, we spent longer on learning about “world religions” than we did all our mistakes. Plus, any WW1/WW2 war crimes committed by our side is not taught whatsoever.
It saddens me to hear that kids in the US don’t learn about the fuckups of their ancestors, as this might “upset” them.
Nationalism is a disease.
Agreed. American history is terribly white-washed.
Basically some dudes came over from England, Indians cooked them corn and turkey and everyone was happy. A few years later their descendants got mad at England, dressed up as the Indians and threw tea off a boat. Some shots were fired but we settled down over a piece of paper that guarantees freedom and guns for all.
Later you might learn that “all” means white land-owning males but eventually that got expanded and now we are al happy in the greatest country in the world (yes, that part is also taught), and every morning for 180 days of the year for 13 straight years we stand up and recite a poem about how much we love our country.
Maybe it’s changing, idk. I graduated the public school system 20 years ago. My kindergartener came home a few months ago saying he watched a video on MLK Jr in his class where they talked about his assassination. I thought that was a bit dark to go to in kindergarten but at least it’s talked about, even somewhat.
It’s all but against the law in Florida (maybe other states as well?) to teach that aspect of history. Wouldn’t want the white kids to feel guilty for being white… because they know about things that happened in the past.
What is “Tragedy of the Commons?” Is that a new concept?
The Tragedy of the Commons was a bullshit piece of justification for the enclosures written by racist colonial-minded eugenicists that resulted in the theft of land from the people and ultimate consolidation of that land as private property in the hands of the landowners. It argued that this was necessary because otherwise the hordes of drooling peasants would destroy it.
The whole point of the tradgedy of the commons is that publically owned finite resources don’t work. You’ve completely misunderstood the point. If you’re following that logic then centralization, ownership, and control is the only answer.
Of course none of that applies, because what is the finite resource here? Both Meta and the fediverse can co-exist without destroying each other for want of servers or network bandwidth. The only real finite resource here is human attention - in which case federating with meta should be a good thing. This is because it increases the amount of content available on both platforms with the less popular platform benefiting the most.
Christ.
They do not aim to coexist. They aim to enclose.
This is incredible levels of naivity. Like, literally completely and totally oblivious to how profit seeking works and what behaviours it creates.
And the tragedy of the commons was a crock of shit made by racist eugenicist colonial-minded fuckbags, that’s the entire point of teaching it, as a way of understanding the kind of utter bullshit that gets spread when landgrabbers(in the modern day the corporations) want to go grabbing. This is why education is important, without it people go reading a wiki article and come to these kinds of nonsensical conclusions.
I didn’t read an article about it, I watched a YouTube video about it from a science and maths youtuber originally. You also didn’t elude to this in your first comment at all. I was actually going to reply to you telling you why it’s a bad concept once I learned it’s history.
I also don’t get why your complaining to me about education. I don’t control what gets taught in the UK (my home country), I just work with what I have.
I still don’t see how it applies to this situation in any way.
Edit: also your username has Lenin in it. Are you a fucking tankie?
Define tankie for me? It’s somewhat lost all meaning given that the Ukrainian government is calling the US government tankies now. This is a serious question for the record, I can’t really say whether I am your definition of tankie or not without knowing it given that the definition seems to change for everyone.
Also since this is going to be political and we both live in the same country (I moderate /r/greenandpleasant), did you vote Corbyn or are you a tory?
I also don’t get why your complaining to me about education. I don’t control what gets taught in the UK (my home country), I just work with what I have.
Enclosure of the commons is 100% taught in the UK at GCSE level as part of the curriculum: https://www.tutor2u.net/history/reference/enclosure-elizabethan-england
Tankie is anyone that supports Lenin or anything more authoritarian marxist than that.
I didn’t vote for Corbyn, because I wasn’t old enough to vote at the time. (Was there even a general election at that time? I don’t remember). It’s a stupid question to ask given he hasn’t been the leader of the labour party for years at this point.
I have never voted conservative. I think I voted green in the last election I voted in but don’t remember. Didn’t get to vote in the last local one as I was busy and forgot.
I never did history GCSE and I don’t think most people did. You have to choose between that and other options like Geography so not everyone will be taught it.
So are you against the RMT railroad strikes because Mick Lynch publicly calls James Connolly his political hero and is an obvious marxist-leninist ?
Are you against Jeremy Corbyn, because he defends the Soviet Union and always has, and because he also promotes the Black Panthers who defended north korea (if you look in the corner of the video around 2:00 there’s even a cute little soviet cccp statue).
Are you against Diane Abbott, because she’s publicly defended Mao on national television.
Are you against John Mcdonnell who has said his job is to overthrow capitalism on the BBC, probably because he’s quoted Mao and read his little red book in parliament?
Are you against the Durham miners gala? Where they march with communist banners and have done so for 137 years?
You have spent too much time in american anti-communist spaces where their brains are riddled with the historical legacy of two red scares, and you’ve spent absolutely zero time in British leftist spaces. You have riddled your mind with american brainworms against socialism and I implore you to join a union and actually go out and organise.
The Tragedy of the Commons is a cherry-picked economic fantasy. It is counter to what really happened, and, thus, false evidence for any point.
Hardin, the author of the Tragedy of the Commons was also a White Supremacist who was horrible enough to earn his own entry at the SPLC.
Normally, it’s genetic fallacy to criticize the source of an argument. But here, the “Tragedy” has been used to justify not honoring treaties, theft of land and resources, polluting indigenous lands, and even genocide.
There is an unspoken bigotry in the argument that deserves recognizing it as racist.
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/garrett-hardin
From what I’ve seen, irregardless threads/there version on the fediverse is going to scrape any and all instances also on the fediverse. Blocking them wont necessarily help with any of this, but maybe if even communities do they wont have enough content to make it profitable? Maybe I’m naive. Well, I know I am, but any way to stick it to the man is a good idea in my book.
The goal short term isn’t to be profitable though. The goal is to pull enough users so they can effectively stunt the growth of ‘competition’.
Although the scraping would happen either way, and if they really felt like it, they could just spool up their own private instance to do some scraping that way instead, even without tying it into Threads.
