In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they were not 100% in control. So they pulled the plug and announced they would not be federated anymore.
Basically keep people from using all the other platforms. Then stop supporting them. Similar like .docx never quite works in the open document editors. At least i refuse to believe that OSS devs are less skilled and motivated.
I've seen people bringing this up, but while they talk of EEE and XMPP, it seems like the analogy here is not being quite finished and formulated.
If we apply that to this, it seems like people are saying "if Meta changed the ActivityPub protocol to favor them and become incompatible with the rest of the Fediverse, Fediverse users would choose to return to Meta-owned platforms."
And that's what I'm questioning. Would you? Would you think others here would? I wouldn't. I'd rather go to whatever fork Fediverse devs favor instead. If anything, all the fear being expressed every time Threads integration is brought up only emphasizes that this is not how it would play out
I hear you. During the reddit exodus i left without having an alternative and stumbled upon lemmy much later. So i am fine going back to not having social media. However, a social network only survives if there is enough content. And if we are honest, lemmy barely has enough content.
Ill give you an example: I like climbing and there is !climbing@lemmy.ml with roughly 2 posts a month and !climbing@sh.itjust.works with less. I am happy to see something about my hobby twice a month. But all my friends still are on reddit, because two posts a month are not enough to them.
If you click on my profile, you will find 4 posts. I am a natural lurker, like most people on the internet, i read, vote and maybe comment. These posts, i made them because i wanted to add some content to this platform. While facebook is federated, there will be much more content. We can see theirs, they can see ours. Sounds like a win-win, right? But it may also make lemmings dependent on facebook content. If there is always more than enough content to endlessly scroll, I don’t need to upload my stuff to the network. However, if facebook pulls the plug after a long time, that leaves barely any content here and lemmy is basically dead.
I would probably still be around: Angrily clicking on some link about random big corpo, once a month smiling because someone shared a picture doing the same hobby as i. But for sure there are still people on old XMPP instances, while motivated dev’s reinvented XMPP: Matrix
And that’s what I’m questioning. Would you? Would you think others here would? I wouldn’t. I’d rather go to whatever fork Fediverse devs favor instead. If anything, all the fear being expressed every time Threads integration is brought up only emphasizes that this is not how it would play out
The network effect can be strong. Say you’re now able to contact all your friends via your favourite Activitypub instance, you had to previously use Facebook.com or Threads or whatever but now they’re all here. You delete your Facebook and keep your Activitypub account to speak to all your friends who are on Threads.
Now Meta pulls the federation plug, or adds some feature that makes your Activitypub server not able to fully cooperate (Maybe you can talk, but you can’t video call anymore, or you can’t post GIF/images, whatever). Now what? All your friends are over there and getting annoyed with you. So… you eventually succumb and fire up a Threads account.
You mention EEE and forgetting how it works in next paragraph.
Embrace - facebook joins fediverse, existing users rejoice because now the user base was added with threads users
Extend - facebook starts adding proprietary features to their product, many users start switching, because if they use threads.net they can have the new features AND still have access to the entire network
Extinguish - facebook comes to conclusion that there’s not many users on fediverse anymore, and being compatible only holds them up, so they disconnect, suddenly it gets very silent on fediverse, some people will jump to threads.net, because their friends are there, others will quit completely eventually making the network even emptier
This exact thing happened with Jabber/XMPP and it was also realization that vast majority of people are not loyal to some ideals and will switch to whatever works for them. Companies absolutely hate to have product they can’t fully control.
They don’t need to kill “every” lemmy/masto instance to kill the ecosystem. You just need to absorb enough of it that the only people left outside of your perversion of the ecosystem are certified weirdos.
E-Mail was (and still is) an open standard anyone could use. But after decades of getting EEE’d, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone using an E-Mail Not provided by the corporate giants, even like, other enterprises have rolled their e-mails into the Google/Microsoft ecosystems, and ALSO if you have an e-mail address that is outside those domains, normies who are inside the corporate ecosystem will have trouble communicating with you as your address will get autoflagged as spam more often than not.
...we already are all certified weirdoes. The average internet user doesn't have a single clue what Lemmy or Mastodon is. There isn't an Established Fediverse Institution that is household name for regular people on social media.
Meta could buy up lemmy.world and mastodon.social and they'd end up... exactly in the same place because most people who got into those got there to avoid big social media companies to begin with, and they'd jump ship immediately. This is the alternative social media movement. The people who are on established protocols are the ones who are already on Facebook and Twitter, and many don't even like those. They only stick around on those because everything else is too complicated for them.
Facebook and Twitter are today's social media GMail and Outlook equivalents. Lemmy and Mastodon are not.
People throw EEE around full of fear but it just sounds like it just became a sort of boogeyman mantra. It doesn't apply. There isn't some magic that can make Meta dominate a whole decentralized ecosystem like this. The only possible way for it to happen is if everyone decided to jump back there, but paradoxically because Fediverse users are so paranoid of even vaguely coexisting in an interconnected vicinity, the odds of that happening are zero.
Definitely on that first one. Normies are all inside the GoogleMetaAmazonMicrosoft panopticon. If they are old they might still have a Yahoo Mail, but that’s as spicy as it gets.
As for the second bit – All evidence I have is purely anecdotal. My ProtonMail account works fine and no one ever complained about not getting mail from me, but I have heard stories of people who use mail accounts not from GMail/Outlook getting flagged as spammers and having trouble chatting with the normies ™.
TwilightVulpine@kbin.social 8 months ago
How would they even extinguish a whole ecosystem of independent instances? What does that even look like?
They could very well make some feature or requirement and demand that every single ActivityPub instance uses their version to remain compatible...
...and instance hosts can just say no, fork it and keep going unbothered.
Even buying up some big Lemmies and Mastodons is not going to get them the whole Fediverse.
ToxicWaste@lemm.ee 8 months ago
from ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-ne… :
Basically keep people from using all the other platforms. Then stop supporting them. Similar like .docx never quite works in the open document editors. At least i refuse to believe that OSS devs are less skilled and motivated.
TwilightVulpine@kbin.social 8 months ago
I've seen people bringing this up, but while they talk of EEE and XMPP, it seems like the analogy here is not being quite finished and formulated.
If we apply that to this, it seems like people are saying "if Meta changed the ActivityPub protocol to favor them and become incompatible with the rest of the Fediverse, Fediverse users would choose to return to Meta-owned platforms."
And that's what I'm questioning. Would you? Would you think others here would? I wouldn't. I'd rather go to whatever fork Fediverse devs favor instead. If anything, all the fear being expressed every time Threads integration is brought up only emphasizes that this is not how it would play out
ToxicWaste@lemm.ee 8 months ago
I hear you. During the reddit exodus i left without having an alternative and stumbled upon lemmy much later. So i am fine going back to not having social media. However, a social network only survives if there is enough content. And if we are honest, lemmy barely has enough content.
Ill give you an example: I like climbing and there is !climbing@lemmy.ml with roughly 2 posts a month and !climbing@sh.itjust.works with less. I am happy to see something about my hobby twice a month. But all my friends still are on reddit, because two posts a month are not enough to them.
If you click on my profile, you will find 4 posts. I am a natural lurker, like most people on the internet, i read, vote and maybe comment. These posts, i made them because i wanted to add some content to this platform. While facebook is federated, there will be much more content. We can see theirs, they can see ours. Sounds like a win-win, right? But it may also make lemmings dependent on facebook content. If there is always more than enough content to endlessly scroll, I don’t need to upload my stuff to the network. However, if facebook pulls the plug after a long time, that leaves barely any content here and lemmy is basically dead.
I would probably still be around: Angrily clicking on some link about random big corpo, once a month smiling because someone shared a picture doing the same hobby as i. But for sure there are still people on old XMPP instances, while motivated dev’s reinvented XMPP: Matrix
Piece_Maker@feddit.uk 8 months ago
The network effect can be strong. Say you’re now able to contact all your friends via your favourite Activitypub instance, you had to previously use Facebook.com or Threads or whatever but now they’re all here. You delete your Facebook and keep your Activitypub account to speak to all your friends who are on Threads.
Now Meta pulls the federation plug, or adds some feature that makes your Activitypub server not able to fully cooperate (Maybe you can talk, but you can’t video call anymore, or you can’t post GIF/images, whatever). Now what? All your friends are over there and getting annoyed with you. So… you eventually succumb and fire up a Threads account.
takeda@beehaw.org 8 months ago
You mention EEE and forgetting how it works in next paragraph.
This exact thing happened with Jabber/XMPP and it was also realization that vast majority of people are not loyal to some ideals and will switch to whatever works for them. Companies absolutely hate to have product they can’t fully control.
VinesNFluff@pawb.social 8 months ago
They don’t need to kill “every” lemmy/masto instance to kill the ecosystem. You just need to absorb enough of it that the only people left outside of your perversion of the ecosystem are certified weirdos.
E-Mail was (and still is) an open standard anyone could use. But after decades of getting EEE’d, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone using an E-Mail Not provided by the corporate giants, even like, other enterprises have rolled their e-mails into the Google/Microsoft ecosystems, and ALSO if you have an e-mail address that is outside those domains, normies who are inside the corporate ecosystem will have trouble communicating with you as your address will get autoflagged as spam more often than not.
TwilightVulpine@kbin.social 8 months ago
...we already are all certified weirdoes. The average internet user doesn't have a single clue what Lemmy or Mastodon is. There isn't an Established Fediverse Institution that is household name for regular people on social media.
Meta could buy up lemmy.world and mastodon.social and they'd end up... exactly in the same place because most people who got into those got there to avoid big social media companies to begin with, and they'd jump ship immediately. This is the alternative social media movement. The people who are on established protocols are the ones who are already on Facebook and Twitter, and many don't even like those. They only stick around on those because everything else is too complicated for them.
Facebook and Twitter are today's social media GMail and Outlook equivalents. Lemmy and Mastodon are not.
People throw EEE around full of fear but it just sounds like it just became a sort of boogeyman mantra. It doesn't apply. There isn't some magic that can make Meta dominate a whole decentralized ecosystem like this. The only possible way for it to happen is if everyone decided to jump back there, but paradoxically because Fediverse users are so paranoid of even vaguely coexisting in an interconnected vicinity, the odds of that happening are zero.
VinesNFluff@pawb.social 8 months ago
I will concede on the “we are all weirdos” bit. Fair point.
(this is a good thing, megacorps corrupt all that they touch)
flora_explora@beehaw.org 8 months ago
Ouch, so I’m a certified weirdo just because I don’t have accounts on GAMAM sites?
And my mail accounts not by big corpos work well regardless…
VinesNFluff@pawb.social 8 months ago
Definitely on that first one. Normies are all inside the GoogleMetaAmazonMicrosoft panopticon. If they are old they might still have a Yahoo Mail, but that’s as spicy as it gets.
As for the second bit – All evidence I have is purely anecdotal. My ProtonMail account works fine and no one ever complained about not getting mail from me, but I have heard stories of people who use mail accounts not from GMail/Outlook getting flagged as spammers and having trouble chatting with the normies ™.