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Big corpos don’t want to take it over, they want it gone.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
I’m very new here but already feel invested in it’s goals and success. We don’t need a ton of users or to beat Reddit, etc, we need to be independent and free. Having a slice of the internet not controlled by capitalism is worth fighting for.
I believe things like Threads.net and the Fediverse are fundamentally at odds with each other because the Fediverse is meant to be an alternative not a replacement. No one should be hoping Reddit and others fail because if they do and only the Fediverse was left i believe it would be doomed to become like them.
Thanks for the article. Well worth reading.
Meta is also a threat to the privacy of fediverse users
Ross Schulman, senior fellow for decentralization at digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that if Threads emerges as a massive player in the fediverse, there could be concerns about what he calls “social graph slurping." Meta will know who all of its users interact with and follow within Threads, and it will also be able to see who its users follow in the broader fediverse. And if Threads builds up anywhere near the reach of other Meta platforms, just this little slice of life would give the company a fairly expansive view of interactions beyond its borders.
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-threads-privacy-decentralization/
i will clearly go on instances who are blockings theses craps.
It’s actually entirely possible that the vast majority of the team there is pro-fediverse and Meta “wants” it to succeed. But the thing about corporations is they’re fluid entities and could turn anti-fediverse overnight for no reason other than it’s the best financial move now.
The only thing we have to ask ourselves is, at any point in the future will the best possible financial move for Meta be to begin sabotaging the fediverse? It almost seems like a certainty, doesn’t it?
the team don’t own the product. are they even on an union ^^ I say YES for second part.
I feel like avoiding a corporate trap for instant growth for the sake of protecting more sustainable long term growth is still in essence a focus on growth.
I agree with the decision to try and dodge this poison pill, but I disagree on the ideology that we shouldn’t try and get as many people on board the fediverse as possible. I want federated social media to have revolutionary power, and you can’t have power without leverage.
This is Microsoft’s playbook, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish, it was use by Google to kill off XMPP - https://www.disruptivetelephony.com/2013/05/did-google-really-kill-off-all-xmppjabber-support-in-google-hangouts-it-still-seems-to-partially-work.html, now it will be used by Facebook to try to kill the Fediverse.
Why is this not more widely talked about? Please share this.
It’s not widely shared because the actual facts of that story don’t help the “Facebook will kill activity pub” narrative.
Before Google Talk and Facebook Messenger adopted XMPP it was an extremely niche messaging protocol only used by nerds. After Google Talk and Facebook Messenger dropped XMPP it went back to being a niche messaging protocol used only by nerds.
The standing of XMPP was, if anything, better off after it was abandoned by Google Talk and Facebook Messenger than before those platforms adopted it.
So then for somebody trying to scare monger about Meta, this story doesn’t help. It hurts that narrative, and that’s why people panicing about Threads aren’t talking about XMPP.
Why wouldn’t I just do this?
You can only do that if you’re an admin. The post is for those on an instance that doesn’t/won’t defederate from Threads.
threads will never federate.
They literally announced their intention to federate, friend. One of many announcements. See the section “Compatible with Interoperable Networks.” ActivityPub is the open source protocol underlying lemmy, kbin, mastodon, etc. This is totally an EEE situation - a corporation only says “we’ll let you leave us” if they intend to dominate the fediverse to the point that leaving is painful to the user. Which means they’re going to fuck the standard or do other strategic action to fuck the fediverse.
Big corpos don’t want to take it over, they want it gone.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Same reason I am highly critical of Jack Dorsey’s BlueSky and its attempt at rolling out a separate protocol. The last thing we need is for the Fediverse to be fragmented into a dozen protocols that do things ever-so-slightly differently and prevent network convergence.
Another reason to avoid it is that Jack Dorsey supports known anti-vaxxer and general conspiracy kook Robert F Kennedy Jr. Not the kind of people I’d want to run my social network.
Scary stuff! Fuck google , Microsoft and facebook
So I’m on Threads (occupational hazard, I have Instagram for work) and it’s a surreal experience. It’s like if everyone you know on Facebook and Twitter joined you on a muted Tumblr overlay. Someone’s already @'d Zuck to ask for a “home feed that’s just your follows.” So… like Mastodon.
exaggerated_eye_roll.wav
I have Instagram for work
get a new job.
get a new job.
Get a new and improved attitude to share with the fediverse and leave this one over at reddit.
Jobs that require you to have an Instagram account shouldn’t exist.
Use Threads to preach the benefits of Mastadon, Lemmy, and the Fediverse in general. Spread the good word that if you don’t want to be bombarded by ads, manipulated by unscrupulous algorithms, and have your data jealously horded to be sold to who knows then get off Threads and enter the cool kids zone!
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.
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.
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.
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
Not only was it not very successful, it’s an old outdated Microsoft playbook from the 90s/early 00s and was targeted at closed source competitors and freeware, not open source software where you can just fork out a separate version.
By all means block Meta instances if you want, but they have 3 billion users, they definitely don’t give a shit about a “competitor” with a few hundred thousand users. If simply the presence of a corporation in the Fediverse is enough to destroy it, then it wasn’t going to last long anyways. It’s embarassing that “embrace, extend, extinguish” caught on around here just because it’s a catchy alliteration.
Let me offer a rebuttal. The fact that this playbook even exists and is well-known is a cause for concern. Yes, Microsoft’s campaign wasn’t very successful, but that doesn’t mean Meta won’t try or learn from Microsoft’s mistakes. I ask: is the probability of this happening non-zero, and if so, is it lower than you’re comfortable with? For me, and many others here, that answer is no.
Moreover, this is a greater problem: Meta is well-known and has practically infinite marketing budget. They can spin their app as the de facto, causing many people to lose control of their data. By association, some people will blame the Fediverse and not Meta. Defederating signals that we are not willing to participate with them and tells potential Fediverse users that they will not be able to engage with us—and whatever they decide, we cannot impact more.
The crux of my argument is risk management. Defederated is a conservative measure to prevent possible issues in the future.
Honestly this is just pure paranoia because nobody has given a solid reason as to why they would give a single shit about the few hundred thousand users here. Your only argument is “well it exists, so maaaybe they’ll use it but better” which has no basis. As for losing control of your data, you have no control of your data here. It’s public information. Any person, corporation, computer literate cat, etc can already scrape everything you post here. Don’t mistake anonymity for data privacy.
Like I said, block em, defederate, whatever measures you want to take are an option, but for the love of god let’s just stop parroting nonsense at eachother because it sounds clever. I came here to get away from reddit culture.
I just wanted to say, I am by no means technical but your position is exactly what I was thinking, if an open source project can’t survive when it’s competitors start using it, then it’s never going to survive. The whole point is for it to be interoperable, resilient, and antifragile, and there are plenty of open source projects that achieved that. Competitors switching over to open source is a natural progression of any open source project if one assumes it is successful.
100% agreed with this. The scaremongering just makes no sense.
By all means block Meta instances if you want, but they have 3 billion users, they definitely don’t give a shit about a “competitor” with a few hundred thousand users.
If they don’t give a shit then why do they add federation feature at all? It doesn’t make sense.
Right now it’s only supported for Instagram accounts right? So slap in ActivityPub and you’ve got an already working way to extend your app. It’s easy, it’s fast development, and it’s cheap. It makes tons of sense.
Also, Meta and the rest of FAANG are a company of a bunch of nerds with a history of open sourcing software. This isn’t some crazy play, this is completely normal for them.
Yeah and it’s also normal for them to act like sociopaths and shrug and say “sorry, this is just how capitalism works” when it gets exposed how cynically awful they been behaving.
There is zero evidence ethics will be followed here, Silicon Valley has spent decades building a good argument the precise opposite will happen.
What does ethics have to do with any of this? Like you said, it’s all capitalism. The total amount of users in the fediverse is a rounding error on their 10-K. Why would they care about stealing the userbase?
Corporations don’t act ethically unless they can monetize it or they’re regulated.
Counterpoint: it’s not about capturing the current audience so much as heading a threat off at the pass.
I’m not going to argue way or other re: defederation. Just putting myself in their shoes and looking at the field they’re entering. They likely recognize there’s a brief window right now to capture twitter’s disaffected audience as they stumble while a nontrivial subset of those users are exploring open-source, non-corporate alternatives.
It makes perfect sense for them to cast the widest net they can in this moment. And it also makes sense for them to try to stifle the non-corporate side before it has a chance to gain any solid footing.
Exactly. Which is why I believe that all this fearmongering is because of Meta’s reputation (rightfully so) rather than because Meta actually has a plan to destroy the fediverse. And it’s not the like the fediverse can be actually destroyed, people can always start new instances at any time.
My take was that most people 1) don’t want Meta/Facebook spam - low effort memes, propaganda, etc. and 2) don’t want their content to be used by Meta. The former seems pretty easy - just defederate and you don’t see any of their crap. The second is sort of a gray area… Whether or not you are diametrically opposed to Meta/Facebook or not, once you post your content to a public site, it’s available. I haven’t been here long, but defederation seems to work both ways, so FB would have to scrape content from known instances to get that content unless I’m mistaken.
FB could smoke any instance by DDOSing scrapes whether intended or otherwise, but once you post your data on a public forum, Meta could theoretically use it.
But to your comment - I don’t see what starting a new instance would do for anyone for #2. Any new instance is discoverable by nature, so FB can come knocking at any time for content whether you defederate or not.
- As if Lemmy currently isn’t overrun with low effort memes? Have you seen all those cans of beans running amok here?
- I imagine there are many parties already scraping content from the fediverse as we speak - that’s the nature of public web content.
I’m just here for the beans
As far as (1) goes, 90% of the content on Lemmy is just a Lemmy circlejerk, the remaining 10% is memes. What influx of “low effort content” could possibly make the discussions on Lemmy worse than they already are?
As far as (2) goes, you realize your data on Lemmy is open to everyone to scrape, not just Meta? Every single one of your upvotes is public.
I doubt that is the plan. The Fediverse is tiny, even after the recent growth. Prior to June it was basically just Mastodon, and I doubt Meta is agile enough to start this from scratch in response to the June growth. This is a lot of effort to take down a competitor that’s widely considered to be rough around the edges, and is only just now hitting 2m active monthly users.
Realistically Threads has been in the works for a while as a way to eat Twitter’s market share while Twitter destroys itself.
I suspect they see value in the ActivityPub protocol in the same way Yahoo saw value in email in the 90s.Regardless of whether EEE is their intention or not, Meta’s presence in the Fediverse is going to have major implications for its long term stability.EDIT: on further reflection, I suspect the value they see is pressuring other would-be competitors to also implement ActivityPub. I suspect they do genuinely want to grow the Fediverse… because doing so would increase the amount of data they could collect and sell from it.
On embrace phase the intention is not malicious, they probably want things to grow. Corporations just in long run will eventually lead to someone asking “how can we capitalize this” and this lead the FOSS part of things to be cut out, and destroying the protocol at that point.
Fediverse should defederate every corporation and just grow naturally.
It looks like articles today are saying that Meta is delaying integrating ActivityPub at launch.
That said, I’m not seeing how we get to the last E, extinguish. By its very nature, ActivityPub is decentralized to avoid total control. So even if Meta embraces the technology and wants to monetize it (because capitalism, of course), extending ActivityPub would (hypothetically) be open source - or they would fork it, diverging and making their version closed, and otherwise not function in full with other ActivityPub instances (like with kbin, Lemmy, and Mastodon). Without buying the platform from the developers in full, I don’t see how ActivityPub or the greater Fediverse dies. And I could just be missing something obvious, so if you can explain how we get there, I would really like to hear and understand.
I guess the only way I could see it is if Threads got so popular that people literally stopped using the other apps - but I also don’t see that happening, because anyone already using stuff like Mastodon are using it because Twitter, Facebook, etc, suck ass and they’ve moved away from sites like that.
EDIT: Thanks to the one person that actually replied, I saw I was on the right track at the end, but failed to see the obvious (as I assumed).
It’s hard to predict but the extinguish part would come from bigger non-Threads instances implementing compatibility with Thread-only extensions (in the interest of their users, or for money) and fragmenting the community. Threads then becomes the defacto ActivityPub standard. Maybe some instances stay true to the standard but with extremely reduced communities because now they can’t see what other instances are publishing. So now you have to decide between your ideals and your social network. At best, you’re back to square 0.
It happens in the extend part.
Large corporation will have much more resources, they will implement features and refactoring, which small open source teams do not have capability to implement. They will start pulling users because they support features that other do not.
This also means that they will start getting control.
And then finally they just cut the communication, and split the community. All the way they can claim to be working “for the community”
I really hope the fediverse can block out the meta crap…
There is an anti meta pact. Encourage your instances to sign and follow through. https://fedipact.online/
Do you really need to import a CSV just to block a single domaine? Sounds over complicated
Complicated and pointless. There’s no reason why you wouldn’t want more engagement.
Really? I can think of several billion.
You’d rather have less people than more people on the platform?
Yes.
I don’t want more people just for the sake of more people. Meta is a cesspool of idiocy.
Spontaneous idea of how to use copyright law for keeping Meta out of the Fediverse (more for fun):
Introduction: Parts of the Fediverse, including Mastodon, are software licensed under the APGL license. This license is a great choice because it forces the ones running the software to grant users access to the source code. GPL for example would allow to run proprietary services based on GPL code. The AGPL does not. Companies like Meta and Google will likely not use AGPL code because it might force them to also publish their proprietary systems behind the scenes. However, this does not help much for keeping the Fediverse save. They simply implement their own software which will not be open source.
Therefore we may need another approach. Defederating is the simplest and in my opinion currently the best. It’s easy and keeps people in control.
However, there could be some ‘automatic’ approach using copyright law. It’s a hack which allows to use existing law to regulate the way instances can federate.:
- instances would Federate only if the other side can provide a certain piece of information called X
- X is protected by copyright law, therefore by default, instances are not allowed to provide X
- However, X is released under a license which for permits to copy and distribute X under certain conditions
- The conditions allow to tune who can legally federate
- Conditions could be
- The server software must be AGPL licensed
- The instance must not be owned by a company with a certain amount of annual revenue
Open question is, who owns the copyright of X?
Haven’t you seen what RHEL is doing? Apparently if you’re big enough you can just say fuck that. I mean who you gonna answer to? Is anybody really gonna take this all the way up to the supreme court?
No, haven’t seen. What is RHEL doing?
IBM decided to only provide access to RHEL source code to those with a developer subscription, effectively putting RHEL behind a paywall and putting it behind an additional license you have to accept with your subscription. I mean, this seems to be pretty clearly against the GPL license that RHEL is not only released under but also the GPL licenses of the many components that RHEL uses. The GPL has some provision for, for example, charging money for source code distribution since that does indeed have a cost, but because they make you accept a second license with your subscription you can’t just turn around and give distribute it yourself to anyone who needs it - which is what you should be able to do with any GPL software. Well, you can do it, they just reserve the right to terminate your contract if you do. So you can do it once I guess? Then afterwards you no longer have access to updates. But who’s gonna make IBM answer for this? Don’t think anybody really can.
So we’re all pro federation and decentralization, until we aren’t… I think this is a very preemptive and paranoid measure, but thankfully it will work out just as the technology was built for, some will block, some wont, everyone will make their choice, and be happy in their corner of the internet.
Ever heard of Mastodon blocklists? I mean defederation has been happening for a while.
But I think that’s fine. Instances should have every right to block instances that they disagree with.
That’s disingenuous. It’s not like Meta is some unknown party here with a clean reputation. They have a history, one that repeatedly shows they couldn’t care less for the fundamental freedoms of the fediverse. Just like in society, for us to build free platforms where everyone is welcome, we must paradoxically not tolerate those that wish to wield the freedom of the platform against itself.
Meta should stay away from fediverse!
Yeah, not a fan of the ominous shadow threads™️ casts. I don’t trust them not to flood the fediverse with assorted toxic garbage to push people back towards their walled garden platforms.
The fediverse offers something radical - a new shot at genuine self determination and a socialised, self-governing internet. That shit spells B-A-D N-E-W-S for incumbent platforms (imo) and they’re bad actors in general; they wouldn’t think twice about smothering anything that threatens their short/long term profits. Who’se going to stop them?
Might be a little bit overly risk concious but goddamn. If I were them, I’d be trying to kill alternative ecosystems before they grew - especially if mine (metas) is both trash to use, and be used by.
Even worse, the Threads app is a privacy nightmare
I bet meta really wants to keep track of people in fediverse
What does “Other Data” even cover? Could be literally anything Meta wants
I bet your DNA profile is part of the “other data”. /s
Technically genetic information is covered by ‘sensitive info.’ I’m not joking.
Does Meta entering the Fediverse mean that they’ll federate with Lemmy instances or just Mastodon instances?
If they do both-ways federation (I’ve heard rumors of it being one-way only) it should theoretically be both Lemmy and Mastodon, but it will work better with Mastodon because they’re both for the same purpose (i.e. Twitter-like apps).
Most of the larger Mastodon and Lemmy instances have defederated threads dot net.
Didn’t know that Threads is compatible with Mastodon. So they use the same protocol?
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.
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.
