Wait, their server is online already?
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.
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.
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
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.
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’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.
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.)
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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Is there a way for a Lemmy user to block content from Meta’s instance? If so, I’d love to.
How likely is a federated threads going to be used to harvest data for whatever advertising or AI purpose meta has?
Aside from ensuring their launch product has immediate content, the only reason meta would do this is for that $$.
That said, it could be a symbiotic relationship with instances who’s users aren’t super worried about that & find value from the addtl content it will surely bring.
There’s nothing stopping them from harvesting data with or without Threads. They can just create their own hidden Lemmy, Mastadon servers and pull all the data that way. Sure, someone could catch on and block that server, but they could just spin more up wherever.
This is the main concern.
I create Threads. It gets 30 million users very quickly. Lemmy users only make up say, 1 million users.
I make changes to Threads that don’t follow the ActivityPub protocol to the T, this makes the Lemmy servers glitchy when interacting with Threads content until Lemmy can be patched, but I’ll just keep making these changes to Threads over and over.
User A likes Lemmy, but it’s really starting to glitch out all the time. They have a lot of friends they interact with on Threads and because Lemmy has so many issues they say fuck it, hop over to Threads so they can consistently keep up with their friends/community.
Tbh it’s far more likely they’ll implement extensions to activitypub that are specific only to threads & make activitypub users want them - but can’t have them - this peeling off users for them vs a slower moving, free & collaborative platform.
Imho to avoid a Google loves XMPP (they pretty well killed it) situation ActivityPub servers need to largely block Threads completely or face being extinguished in much the same way as XMPP. Don’t give them a foothold & don’t trust that a private entity like Meta will play nice, they aren’t joining to be a peer, they’re joining to either take it over or kill the competition.
I mean, how is a bot not already crawling through public sites like Lemmy and Mastodon for the purposes of AI training? Federated or unfederated, if you are providing social media services that data you have is already out there.
Sure, its a symbiotic relationship for the people who “aren’t super worried” about it, until metas platform becomes big enough to defederate with the rest of the fediverse, taking all of its users and content with it, and leaving you on an empty network because everyone you know “just uses the meta instance”…
I mean wouldn’t that be not a bad thing? The people who don’t want to federate will be left in their own community with their posts/content intact.
Its not about when people don’t want to federate with meta, its when meta no longer wants to federate with you.
Let me put it this way. If I surveyed every person in my social circles right now, the only person who is using the “Fediverse” as we call it is myself. The others who know about it only know of it because I won’t shut up about it.
But lets say Threads.net takes off, and becomes a new mainstream social media. Maybe its easier to sign up and start using, maybe the UI is a little better, or maybe its just advertised well to current Instagram and Facebook users. Suddenly, 20-30% of the people in my circles might be using the “Fediverse” through Threads.
“This sounds awesome!” I hear you saying. Well there’s a catch. New users to the fediverse tend to just join the biggest instance. We’ve seen this already with Lemmy.world, I personally chose it because it was a lesser populated instance, but it quickly became #1 and is now the fastest growing. Well this means new users would all sign up on Threads, right? Suddenly, the fediverse is 100x larger than it once was, but 80-90% of all the content comes from Threads users.
And then, one day, now with a stranglehold of almost all content coming into the fediverse, Meta is free to defederate from the rest of the platform. Maybe they throw up ads, start selling user data, whatever. Now you and I are left here, with almost all of the traffic gone. Many users switch to threads, because thats where the content is.
Sure, the fediverse is kind of in that final position right now, but the context is much different; everyone here is excited to make this a community. In this scenario, we’d be trying to rebuild the platform. Imagine trying to get everyone to migrate back to MySpace right now, you’d be laughed at whether it was actually a better platform or not.
If it feels like I’m reaching here, look up what happened with XMPP and Google. We have been on this ride before.
I fail to see how that would generally impact people who interact from the fediverse side of it rather than Meta’s own instance. Like if Meta decides to no longer federate with the rest of the fediverse, that would be like all the normies signing up for Threads.net and not interacting with Mastodon at all right?
I think you are reaching.
Right, I get what you’re saying and if they aren’t federated to begin with then I don’t think there’s any issue. The issue comes when you federate, get everyone used to being able to interact with that user base and that content, and then defederate. The end result might be the same amount of users on lemmy in either case, but i’d wager the reception at that point is totally different.
In the first scenario, there is only slow and steady growth.
In the second, there is slow and steady growth, followed by huge, rapid growth, followed by a sudden decline that would make user interaction drop off a cliff, while the content and interaction is still available, just on another platform. I’d bet most people won’t be interested in continuing to use a “dead” platform.
Not if their communities and friends leave for threads.net because by the time the defederate occurs most of the communities either are on threads.net or have threads.net equivilants.
You can’t have a community without the community part of it.
Why would their existing communities and friends leave for threads.net if they are on Mastodon to begin with? Most fediverse users I find seem to be pretty passionate about the platform, I doubt they will leave just because their friends are on Threads.
Because a lot of the new traffic is really less passionate about fediverse, and more passionate about getting away from Reddit and Twitter. Plus the friends/communities people will make that come from that group.
You’re thinking too short-term and not after things have started to reach some normalcy again. And also that Meta is specifically trying to get in now while those communities are trying to form.
And what’s wrong with people making that choice? I know some of the “mainstream” people on Mastodon right now left because of Twitter’s craziness but would probably be open to having an account on Threads or Blue Sky. Why the paranoia about people making choices that are best for them? TBH Mastadon search sucks and finding accounts to follow is hard.
Because once these centralized services reach the point of defacto, they always just trying to push more and more of what they want. We’re practically hitting a bubble at the moment of every social platform that took over trying to nickle and dime. It’s the reason for all of this in the first place.
Facebook - Well it was always crap.
Reddit - killed all the forums, now trying to own all the text as content, making lives harder for it’s moderators, and continuing not to pay them for the clearly thankless job. Quality of posts has degraded.
twitter - messed up the entire purpose of their checkbox, keeps trying to find various ways to make money, entire quality of platform quickly degrading due to server migration
Youtube - Has started pushing for more ads, and punishing users who don’t watch said ads.
People think about the short-term too easily, and then just kick and scream when it’s already too late, and moving requires a ton of coordinated work, and “putting up with”, making new things work, because everyone let the last thing get screwed over.
The constant cycle of letting products get ruined and moving on gets annoying after awhile.
It’s too easy to say “why not?” and very difficult to word “Because it always ends the same”
I say they can just make a Threads account for when they want to interact with those friends. It isn’t that hard. I use different services to check my bank balance or to pay my electric bill.
I’m just hoping it’s a massive failure just like the metaverse. I wish no success for the Zuck fuck in any of his endeavors.
Someone want to explain how to get followers on there? Feel like posting to the wind on that site?
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
For kbin users to unilaterally block content from threads:
- Go to /d/threads.net
- Click the block button next to the subscribe one
The only drawback is that it will only start working after the first piece of content from threads.net has been shared on your instance - for now it returns a 404 not found.
Edit: Mileage may vary, depending on how Threads solves its fediverse integration.
Does /d/ block an instance?
I think there is a misunderstanding in the kbin community.
/d/ blocks a domain, A domain is not an instance.
But i’m not shure what /d/ blocks or not. As far as I know it’s what’s between the bracket’s after a post ()You’re right that it’s a bit trickier than I thought. It blocks the shared content: images and other content hosted at lemmy.world can be blocked from https://kbin.social/d/lemmy.world/ , but it will not include links to external sites, nor will it work for text posts. Blocking lemmynsfw.com worked fine for me, but that’s of course because it’s an image-heavy service.
Whether or not it will work for threads.net off the bat I guess then depends on how Threads interacts with the fediverse; whether it merely shares a link content stored locally, or whether it distributes the content in its entirety.
I updated my post to clarify!
Getting a 404 error, but might just be due to kbin upgrades, etc.
Thanks! Keeping this open so i can do it later.
Does anyone know if kbin.social will even federate to begin with?
Since Threads won’t apparently be federating at all, with anyone at launch - no.
Great! Commenting for finding later.
Lemmy should defederate from threads.net
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Same with Kbin. I would honestly go back to reddit sooner than I would accept being smooshed together with Meta.
Otherwise, Meta’s groups could become just another Lemmy instance
Does Meta entering the Fediverse mean that they’ll federate with Lemmy instances or just Mastodon instances?
I’m not worried at all about Zuck taking over Mastodon at all, they’ll try but they are just so incompetent, because literally every single product idea they have they either stole or bought from somebody else. Great tech, terrible products, zero originality is the Facebook mantra and that is because they have a delusional CEO that they can’t fire, because Zuck has delude himself into thinking he’s an “ideas” guy like Jobs instead of an “executions” guy like Bezos that he really is, and until he realizes that, he will always fail.
(also, delusional for actually thinking Ready Player One is a good book)
If making a TikTok clone didn’t get people to switch from TikTok, why would they think making a Twitter clone is going to get people to switch from Twitter?
The only way I see Facebook being a threat is when they give up on making their Twitter clone and start providing easy subscription service hosting for Mastodon/Lemmy to EEE. THAT would be the time to worry.
I feel like we are seeing lots of these tech companies just clawing at new innovations for profit cause they can’t seem to run a stable business otherwise without fucking things up somehow. See the the crypto/nft boom, AI and it’s rapid and still somewhat untested and shoddy implementation, etc. We’ve got strikes popping up in the US as the months go on cause people are definitely feeling the shittification of things in multiple industries including tech and entertainment as of late.
Everything tech companies like meta have been doing in the last several years is looking for their next growth fix to keep their investors happy while running their business like a toddler between sweets.
Elon happened to set Twitter on fire, Instagram is failing to beat TikTok in short form content or even competing with things like YouTube, Facebook itself has been shriveling up over the years, now there’s some cool new tech space in the Fediverse and no corporates taking advantage of it - probably looks like early crypto to Zuck if he can swoop in and outpace the open source projects with enough funding.
Facebook itself has been shriveling up
Like George Costanza’s member in the swimming pool.
While you may dismiss Zuckerberg as delusional, he’s shown a talent for using others’ ideas and making them profitable under Facebook. The success of Instagram and WhatsApp is proof. Google+ is nowhere to be seen anymore.
As for Mastodon, underestimating Meta’s potential threat, particularly federating with Mastodon (this can be seen as “easy hosting” of something like Mastodon), might be a mistake. Even without originality, they have the resources to cause significant disruption.
I think what’s different this time is that Zuckerberg has finally ran out ideas to steal, what Zuck is truly good at is taking a good idea amd wringing every drop of money and data out of the user for ads at the expense of missing good, honest opportunities over the decades. Off the top of my head, how do you think it would have went if Facebook started using the momentum of the popularity of Facebook games to start publishing high quality original games in the 2010s to lock people in instead of going Meta 10 years too late out of desperation?
As for Instagram and Whatsapp, I think that’s more on Google fumbling literally everything they touch during Sundar Pichay (Yes, I think even less of Google than Facebook, they are the modern 90s Microsoft) than Facebook.
That’s the ultimate issue with basing your company entirely off stealing ideas and internet ads, eventually you get so lazy and addicted to the easy money you forgot how to make good things anymore. Zuck couldn’t kill TikTok, but a hungry and cornered Bytedance is now coming for Instagram, so he should honestly should be more worried about that right now.
One other thing is that you can’t just throw money at things to beat the market leader, you also need to bring something different to the table. Look at Mixer vs Twitch for example.
I think that an important part of twitter was the proximity to power through politicians, journalists and celebrities. If threads is good at making those people switch over, then I think a lot of other people will switch over as well. On big part of twitter users is people who love discussing the news and current events and that’s much more appealing when you can do it on the same platform as people who are in the news or write the news.
(On the other hand lemmy has Margot Robbie so maybe we’re in the race as well?)
Threads is not an all an idea but an execution. Twitter abandoned it’s value proposition of nobodies being able to shit post non-billionaire elites and threads just relaunched that concept. Way different situation than trying to compete with TikTok since Twitter set itself on fire and made itself unfashionable. Nobody needs to innovate the next Twitter they just need to replace what Twitter took away. The fediverse itself would still seem to service a different demographic from that since shit posting celebs is all normies ever wanted from that platform.
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.
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
Google successfully did this to XMPP.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I was struggling to get all the way there initially, but that makes sense. Thanks for actually taking the time to respond!
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.
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….
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.
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.
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 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.
What I heard some people said about the fediverse was that before email was controlled by big corporations you can host your own email and no issues. Nowadays its much harder for a regular person to do this because big corporations took control of the federated email. So to my understanding even this social networks are in danger of the same thing happening. Please anyone correct me if I am wrong.
You are. It’s just as easy now to host your own mail server as it was thirty years ago
Hosting mail is easy, not getting hit by spam filters is the difficult part
Agreed, but your emails actually reaching people wasn’t in the initial requirements presented 😉
Meta jumping on the Fediverse bandwagon would kill it one day. It’s an EEE strategy. We need to keep them out. Defederate from them.
I don’t think so. How would they kill the fediverse? Like there will still many communities that will not federate with Meta and still continue to operate as usual.
I think this is a pretty good read.
I think that article is mostly fearmongering.
Most people using Mastodon right now are not following mainstream people on their feeds - they are mostly following like-minded people who have made the switch from Twitter. If their server decides to federate with Meta, it will actually improve their experience because they can start following mainstream people from the comfort of their Mastodon feed. And if Meta decides to break ActivityPub (which I doubt), it will be back to the original status quo for most users.
And most mainstream people will not be signing up for Mastodon anyways, they will be signing up for Threads/Blue Sky.
@app_priori @jacktherippah I would never put anything past Facebook’s intentions and the reactions of some Mastodon users. I think a good chunk of Mastodon users would still go back to a centralized network and might see Threads as a way to have both worlds … until the other shoe drops.
Well that’s because Mastodon has many shortcomings. Like the search sucks. It’s hard to find people to follow without asking people for recommendations. Mastodon is scarcely a Twitter replacement; it feels like it was built to create extremely insular communities. Like Gab and Truth Social run on Mastodon’s software.
@app_priori I sular communities that can federate. That’s the draw for me, but may not be for others. I think I’m done with a Twitter-like experience but I know a lot of other Twitter “refugees” just will not roll with the new experiences. And recreating somewhere where news and information can be diseminated. I mean it seems like it would be an easy technical problem to solve and I’m surprised that it hasn’t happened already.
Anyways lol I’m rambling
