This blog post by Ploum, who was part of the original XMPP efforts long ago, describes how Google killed one great federated service, which shows why the Fediverse must not give Meta the chance
This blog post by Ploum, who was part of the original XMPP efforts long ago, describes how Google killed one great federated service, which shows why the Fediverse must not give Meta the chance
An excellent read. My synopsis is that if any big corporations joined the Fediverse they would fracture it, and that no matter what Meta, Reddit, Google, etc. would never want to see a decentralized platform succeed.
Pretty much the Fediverse needs to never let a big company tie into it. Our group needs to work at growing but at a sustainable rate.
We can’t effectively block corporate injections, unfortunately. The admins of large hub instances are just of the opinion that bigger is better, and that more is more. They’ve been excited by the prospect of, I don’t know, legitimacy or something, for a while now.
The result is going to be the network… not fracturing, per-se, but significantly restructuring itself. Big instances will get sucked into Big Social’s halo, and be like the suburbs to Meta’s or Tumblr’s metropolitan centres. Smaller instances will end up as the exurbs. Content will flow quickly between metro and suburban spaces, and trickle across suburban spaces between the metro and exurban spaces. And which Fedivesre site you choose to use will end up mattering even more than it does now.
Right now, there’s speculative reason to believe that Meta’s offering up incentives to big instance admins. Those incentives will ultimately result in Meta owning them by proxy. They’ll be client kingdoms, to mix metaphors, working on Meta’s behalf, but getting relatively little in return for it.
I think Reddit moderators probably have a good idea about how they’ll ultimately end up feeling.
@MyMulligan @jherazob I disagree.
I think the key thing is to just make sure that you don’t use non #FOSS clients. #GoogleTalk started as a client for #XMPP, people migrated to it, and then #Google dropped support for #XMPP. If so many people didn’t use #GoogleTalk, the #XMPP network would have remained unimpeded.
At this point it wouldn’t matter, all they need to do is to mess with the protocol and it’d achieve the same thing, Meta and everything in it’s sphere would “work well”, but connecting with true ActivityPub servers would work just glitchy enough to annoy their users and point the fingers towards our side, just like it happened with XMPP
@jherazob
what the heck makes you think that all the #Fediverse users are just gonna leave for #Meta because federation with it is “annoying”? lol
I wasn’t talking about our users, i was talking about theirs, a direct mirror of what the author described with XMPP
@jherazob The #Meta situation isn’t comparable to the #XMPP situation though
Correct, it’s worse, you can very much argue that Google had good faith intentions, you cannot even pretend that Facebook does while keeping a straight face