It baffles me that so many don't see it for what it is.
Meta contacts their competitor, and says that they want to build a competing product, and want us as competitor to help them with that. How can you possibly fall for that. Meta can already use activitypub for whatever they are building without any need to contact anyone from the Fediverse. The only possible reason they contact instance admins is because Meta wants to dictate the terms on how to Fediverse operates.
I’ve never really understood the EEE argument here. XMPP was an open proptocol, Google embraced it and attracted users, then extended it and took those users away. But according to this article, Google didn’t extinguish XMPP. It’s still around and serving its niche community.
That’s already the situation the fediverse is in. This is a niche community and there are already existing social media companies that the majority of internet users are on. If Facebook joins the fediverse, it brings billions of new users to the fediverse. If they then leave the fediverse, ActivityPub will still be here and all of us on the real fediverse will still be here, in a niche community. Everyone here has already chosen the fediverse despite it being a clunky, unpolished, niche network. How is EEE a relevant fear for the fediverse?
Well, isn't that sort of mentioned in the article?
If fediverse development slows down e.g. because adoption of inofficial Facebook extensions takes time it will harm the whole platform. Not by directly taking away users but by blocking progress.
I don't think the Fediverse is small enough for this to be a serious concern. Especially once multiple companies (Tumblr?) are invested in the fediverse I don't see this happening anymore.
I'm usually one who doesn't buy into conspiracy theories; however, at this point I believe the Reddit protests actually (I hate this meme) broke the internet.
Reddit was the "idiot cousin that causes minimum annoyance occasionally, that hasn't really hurt the advertising line much" for so long, that they all became dependent on the free, moderated, and literal fact checked by people it effects data for so long. That now, after the last weeks, of all the deleting, rewriting, restoring, rewriting, restoring, and rewriting again that all their cached data, and reddits "current" data is now worthless.
The super funny thing is, all the AI's are still pulling data from reddit, they are going to have to cull and sanitize all data and every connection to it, and can also never trust it again... Because many many many people actually care about being part of a community, and will continue to modify/poison their previous comments to keep corps and their mindless "AI" from their "OWNED CONTENT."
Yes I read that and explained why I don’t think its relevant. Facebook can’t slow down progress on the fediverse because:
progress is already slow. The fediverse has been in development for 15 years and still is a clunky, niche network and likely will always be less polished than large corporate networks.
Every developer on the fediverse is aware of the EEE playbook and next to none of them will try to remain compatible with any corporate extensions.
What do you mean? Progress is already slow so any additional slow down will seriously harm the fediverse precisely because of the limited resources IMHO.
I'm not quite as optimistic as you but yeah, I don't think it will be easy for Facebook and if they misjudge it they will end up making a competitor stronger by bringing more attention to it.
When a large company takes an open protocol, embraces it using adding users to the network through heir platform, then extends it using proprietary means, they have full control over how the protocol runs in the network.
When the open standards are forced to make changes to be functional with the dominant proprietary app that is poorly (and sometimes incorrectly) documented, open source groups are constantly on the backfoot in order to maintain compatibility, and that makes it harder to compete on their own right.
A second example given is LibreOffice, whose documents are made to fit the XML standard by Microsoft, but there are quirks in their documented standard that if you follow it too closely it isn't formatted quite the same as the document produced in Microsoft Office, so they were pressured to effectively copy MS and deviate from the standards MS claims to follow.
But the Fediverse is not looking for market dominance or profit. The Fediverse is not looking for growth. It is offering a place for freedom. People joining the Fediverse are those looking for freedom. If people are not ready or are not looking for freedom, that’s fine. They have the right to stay on proprietary platforms. We should not force them into the Fediverse. We should not try to include as many people as we can at all cost. We should be honest and ensure people join the Fediverse because they share some of the values behind it.
This above is, I think, a very important attitude that is all too often thrown aside in the search for success. So many have dreamed of the "year of the Linux desktop," but I have never shared that desire; and it is largely for fear of what is being referenced above. I like those peculiar freedoms of Linux and other open source software projects. If it, or other such projects, were to take a truly significant market share I feel it would almost certainly start becoming what it opposed. I want the freedom and the honesty of such projects to remain, even if (possibly because?) they are somewhat niche, geeky and not entirely newbie friendly.
Great fucking article. Nice look into the history of proprietary software. This part stuck out to me:
But there’s one thing my own experience with XMPP and OOXML taught me: if Meta joins the Fediverse, Meta will be the only one winning. In fact, reactions show that they are already winning: the Fediverse is split between blocking Meta or not. If that happens, this would mean a fragmented, frustrating two-tier fediverse with little appeal for newcomers.
We need to convince instance owners not to federate with Meta. History tends to repeat itself and I'd rather not see this nice little corner of the internet die.
Some features around uploading/managine files between google classroom and google drive is broken in Firefox, LibreWolf. But I suspect it's due to the disabling of 3rd party cookies, because it's also broken on ungoogled-chromium.
I hope the Fediverse chooses not to play the larger corpos game and minimizes their influence at all stages. I forget where I saw it posted but just like linux, the Fediverse doesn't need to rush success. It will be successful, because what large corporations offer as social media is dreadful. Sooner or later all of them force some form of poison pill through their platform. Your content doesn't need to be commodified into product. No one owns your content and no one should be able to push content/ ads on you that you do not approve of. We may need to pay a little something for this freedom, and that's cool. Free as in freedom & not as in beer. Long live the fediverse or what ever currently holds to those values.
Maybe I’m bitter, and I know a lot of people wouldn’t agree with this, but honestly? I think the non-corporate part of the Fediverse should just assume malice from the get go and preemptively defederate from whatever Meta put out. That way nothing’s changed - Meta would essentially have a private / proprietary / isolated network, as far as users are concerned (much like Facebook already is), and even if the Fediverse will see less growth in the short term because of that, there will be no confusion on where everybody stands.
Interesting, it was a variation of embrace, extend, extinguish, without the extend part.
In a way, I think it happened to the entire internet. Look at browsers today, web development (that one might be controversial, but I think big techs somewhat forced bloated frameworks to be the standard way to create websites), video streaming, etc.
No, extend is a major part of it. That's how they topple community projects. They extend in good faith at first to get everyone locked in, then they extend in nefarious ways to keep the community stuck playing catch-up. Once they've absorbed all the users from the community projects, they kill off back access leaving the community project crippled in users and lost in direction.
Trust me. Facebook will definitely add great things at first but their goal is to draw users out of the fediverse and into Facebook.
Amen. When people talk about how Reddit or Twitter will always be bigger, I say, "Let them be bigger." What we have out here is fantastic just the way it is. In a global world, "small" is still millions of people.
Think less "Bitcoin" and more "Freenet." IMO the point shouldn't be to try to monetize stuff, it should be to decouple content from the instance it was posted on (i.e., to mirror popular content across instances to distribute the load) while still maintaining control and attribution for the user that posted it.
doesn’t have to be blockchain based, but there should be some sort of incentive for people to take up the burden of hosting (and moderating, I guess) like blockchains have for people to run nodes, or instances will start shutting down eventually when the people who were footing the bill get tired of it. Or maybe I’m wrong and instances will survive on donations and goodwill of their moderators. I’m not sure how that’d work if communities get really big though
That's not going to work for web hosting. The only reason it works for crypto or folding is because each request takes minutes to run and there's no time dependence on returning the result. Additionally, they don't need much data and all data needed is dispersed with the task.
Websites are completely different. Each individual request is tiny, taking milliseconds to process. Each request is very time dependant, you have a person literally waiting for the result. But the biggest issue is that what people really want is stuff from a database. So that database would need up grant full access to everyone, meaning anyone could change whatever they wanted. Lastly, that database would need to be hosted anyway so you've gained nothing.
Don't suggest tech solutions when you don't have any idea what the problem or solution actually involves.
We just need Wikipedia style funding. If the server publishes their costs and fundraises, then people can support it directly. Instead of the stick and carrot of subscriptions or the rat race of ads, just be open and honest about server needs. If the users aren't able to raise funds, then cut back to what's affordable. Users will either deal with the reduced server capacity or they'll need to pay up to continue enjoying it. This doesn't need to be a free ride, but I trust the community will rally for a good service.
A lot of server owners do this already. The instance I'm on for example does this and also disclosed that they would donate any "proceeds" to the development of Lemmy. So they are only paying for upkeep costs.
The counter is that there are federation costs too. For relatively balanced nodes that should not matter. But if you are a small instance with a lot of popular communities it might be a problem. Plus you will never get a large fraction of people contributing. So those that can will need to remember to give a solid contribution.
This made me wonder - what happens if my chosen Lemmy server goes down? Do I lose my account?
Hopefully, some kind of account portability is possible or in consideration. Even if it's a manual download of settings and subscriptions that could easily be uploaded to another instance.
As of right now, yes your account would go poof. Mastodon currently has a way to migrate servers, but it hasn't been implemented in Lemmy yet. I'm sure at some point it will become available, but if you are worried about all your posts I'd make local backups for now.
Thanks. I'm not really worried about my comments, nothing I'm saying is that useful long term. It's more the list of subscriptions, that would be a headache to recreate.
I had to reinstall my local instance, and wasn’t able to import my old database. That meant I had to go re-subscribe to everything and even worse, nothing on my account will actually federate. Comments I make on the “main” admin account won’t federate anywhere, because the instances see that “old” user with the same name, but exchange is different.
So I had to create this second account, and use this to comment on things with. It’s a pain, but hopefully it gets better. Even if it’s just being able to export my subscriptions so I don’t have to try to find them all again.
Should be mandatory reading for anyone who wants this to succeed. I hope we don't make the same mistakes as doomed so many other open source open protocol projects in the past.
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