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.
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.
Talking about any alternative scenario is always speculation, but I believe the “How to kill decentralized networks” post that’s been going around lately puts it nicely:
One thing is sure: if Google had not joined, XMPP would not be worse than it is today.
You missed rest of my comment. You, and this article, are speculating on made up assumptions, and frankly silly assumptions. Open source software is almost never more popular than freeware counterparts. Saying “oh maybe it would’ve been this time” is ridiculous.
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.
How convoluted the protocol is doesn’t really matter as long as someone creates an easy tool to spin up your own server.
I think the XMPP comparison stills stands: Google was able to steer how the protocol developed, or which version of the protocol people used because they had the majority of the users and other servers wanted to still be able to interact with them.
Suppose that Facebook joins the fediverse and most large instances federate with them. All is great, then Facebook starts to make demands to other instances in order to keep federating with them, e.g. no posts about protests. Because a large share of ActivityPub activity will be on Threads, naive users would prefer instances that federate with it, so instance mods will be incentivized to comply with Facebook’s demands to attract new users and maintain their current one and… you see where this is going. The only way to deal with this is to deny Facebook this kind of leverage in the first place, either by blocking them instantly or at their first mishap or demand.
so instance mods will be incentivized to comply with Facebook’s demands to attract new users and maintain their current one
This is where your argument falls apart. Why? There is no incentive for instance mods to want to grow their instances exponentially.
If Facebook’s ActivityPub grows to be incompatible with the existing implementation, who cares? So what if you run a Mastodon instance and aren’t getting millions of new users a day?
This is much ado about nothing. While there is a shared platform, enjoy the ride, and if they don’t want to play by your rules anymore, there’s no harm to anyone in saying goodbye and staying your course.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
There are no users “exploring open source alternatives.” Have you seen the Lemmy signup flow? It’s a complete shitshow that probably turns away 95% of people to begin with.
Facebook almost certainly doesn’t see Lemmy and Mastodon as a threat or competitor. They adopted ActivityPub because it’s nice, and they’ll move on as they need to scale, and Lemmy and Mastodon will continue to survive as they always have.
Seriously though I am one person seeking open source alternatives and I came here because others showed me the way.
The number is not zero, and the cultural moment is ripe for non-corporate options unless corporates recapture the audience before they’ve even lost them.
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’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.
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.
Talking about any alternative scenario is always speculation, but I believe the “How to kill decentralized networks” post that’s been going around lately puts it nicely:
You missed rest of my comment. You, and this article, are speculating on made up assumptions, and frankly silly assumptions. Open source software is almost never more popular than freeware counterparts. Saying “oh maybe it would’ve been this time” is ridiculous.
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.
How convoluted the protocol is doesn’t really matter as long as someone creates an easy tool to spin up your own server.
I think the XMPP comparison stills stands: Google was able to steer how the protocol developed, or which version of the protocol people used because they had the majority of the users and other servers wanted to still be able to interact with them.
Suppose that Facebook joins the fediverse and most large instances federate with them. All is great, then Facebook starts to make demands to other instances in order to keep federating with them, e.g. no posts about protests. Because a large share of ActivityPub activity will be on Threads, naive users would prefer instances that federate with it, so instance mods will be incentivized to comply with Facebook’s demands to attract new users and maintain their current one and… you see where this is going. The only way to deal with this is to deny Facebook this kind of leverage in the first place, either by blocking them instantly or at their first mishap or demand.
This is where your argument falls apart. Why? There is no incentive for instance mods to want to grow their instances exponentially.
If Facebook’s ActivityPub grows to be incompatible with the existing implementation, who cares? So what if you run a Mastodon instance and aren’t getting millions of new users a day?
This is much ado about nothing. While there is a shared platform, enjoy the ride, and if they don’t want to play by your rules anymore, there’s no harm to anyone in saying goodbye and staying your course.
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.
100% agreed with this. The scaremongering just makes no sense.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
There are no users “exploring open source alternatives.” Have you seen the Lemmy signup flow? It’s a complete shitshow that probably turns away 95% of people to begin with.
Facebook almost certainly doesn’t see Lemmy and Mastodon as a threat or competitor. They adopted ActivityPub because it’s nice, and they’ll move on as they need to scale, and Lemmy and Mastodon will continue to survive as they always have.
What’s 95% of zero?
Seriously though I am one person seeking open source alternatives and I came here because others showed me the way.
The number is not zero, and the cultural moment is ripe for non-corporate options unless corporates recapture the audience before they’ve even lost them.
That’s the crux of my perspective.
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