Meta does not want to “consume the fediverse” , it’s not worth it. Threads has been up for a day and it already has 10x the number of active users than mastodon. Mastodon and the fediverse as it currently stands, is a blip compared to instagram and Twitter. They’re doing activitypub so they can claim there’s a free market and avoid any anti-trust litigation for owning the three largest social media platforms. If that means a relatively small number of people stay on mastodon instead of threads that’s a small price to pay.
I could see that it would cause a problem if half the content came from one instance and then that instance de-federated.
People might move to that instance to join the communities that they were previously following which could reduce the content on other instances as they would probably only use one main account.
“There are rumours that Meta would become “Fediverse compatible”. You could follow people on Instagram from your Mastodon account”
Are there examples of this? Or is this just the fear? This all seems like a knee jerk reaction to something we are already avoiding by being on Lemmy/mastodon. The point of having decentralized instances isn’t popularity. It’s to avoid the corporate bullshit, which is inherently less popular.
If any instance becomes large enough to have an undue influence, which Meta would likely have, then they effectively control the entire ecosystem. At that point, it effectively stops being decentralized (See: The 51% Attack, although this wouldn’t happen at a certain number/ratio). When it becomes convenient to them, they can pull the plug, and destroy the rest of the ecosystem that isn’t theirs.
It’s exactly what happened with XMPP and Google Talk.
Yes, because it was a decentralized messaging protocol, like ActivityPub. The problem in the end was not the ‘OG’ XMPP Users but the new Google Talk users and how Google treated the protocol. This, theoretically, could happen with ‘the fediverse’, too.
XMPP was and still is a buggy mess, and the reason Google unlinked it was that while it had a fraction of the legit traffic, it was like 80% of trolling and spam and other crap.
And Google killed xmpp? No, xmpp killed xmpp, if you can kill something that’s already dead.
People started using other networks because they got used to
Messages arriving
Messages being readable by the recipient
Media like images actually being shown properly.
With xmpp messages frequently got lost with no error, different clients having different encryption and encoding settings, different ways to encode and decode media… A complete mess.
People using that as an EEE example are clueless, or stupid.
Also, if meta starts federating, it will eventually stop it for the same reason Google stopped talking with other xmpp servers. Because it’ll be the source of most of the crap, but very little legit content.
Meta wants to consume the fediverse.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Meta does not want to “consume the fediverse” , it’s not worth it. Threads has been up for a day and it already has 10x the number of active users than mastodon. Mastodon and the fediverse as it currently stands, is a blip compared to instagram and Twitter. They’re doing activitypub so they can claim there’s a free market and avoid any anti-trust litigation for owning the three largest social media platforms. If that means a relatively small number of people stay on mastodon instead of threads that’s a small price to pay.
Just wondering, how does that affect other instances? The whole point of the fediverse is that it’s decentralized.
I could see that it would cause a problem if half the content came from one instance and then that instance de-federated.
People might move to that instance to join the communities that they were previously following which could reduce the content on other instances as they would probably only use one main account.
Lots of coulds, mights and maybes there though.
“There are rumours that Meta would become “Fediverse compatible”. You could follow people on Instagram from your Mastodon account”
Are there examples of this? Or is this just the fear? This all seems like a knee jerk reaction to something we are already avoiding by being on Lemmy/mastodon. The point of having decentralized instances isn’t popularity. It’s to avoid the corporate bullshit, which is inherently less popular.
Corporations generally try to follow the three Es which is bad for the community as a whole
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
If any instance becomes large enough to have an undue influence, which Meta would likely have, then they effectively control the entire ecosystem. At that point, it effectively stops being decentralized (See: The 51% Attack, although this wouldn’t happen at a certain number/ratio). When it becomes convenient to them, they can pull the plug, and destroy the rest of the ecosystem that isn’t theirs.
It’s exactly what happened with XMPP and Google Talk.
Xmpp was a messaging protocol though, is that really comparable to decentralized forums?
Yes, because it was a decentralized messaging protocol, like ActivityPub. The problem in the end was not the ‘OG’ XMPP Users but the new Google Talk users and how Google treated the protocol. This, theoretically, could happen with ‘the fediverse’, too.
XMPP was and still is a buggy mess, and the reason Google unlinked it was that while it had a fraction of the legit traffic, it was like 80% of trolling and spam and other crap.
And Google killed xmpp? No, xmpp killed xmpp, if you can kill something that’s already dead.
People started using other networks because they got used to
With xmpp messages frequently got lost with no error, different clients having different encryption and encoding settings, different ways to encode and decode media… A complete mess.
People using that as an EEE example are clueless, or stupid.
Also, if meta starts federating, it will eventually stop it for the same reason Google stopped talking with other xmpp servers. Because it’ll be the source of most of the crap, but very little legit content.
I’m not sure I totally buy the conclusion here. It might have been the goal, but Google Talk or whatever died too.
If EEE is the end game, what can we do to fight back? Universal defederation probably isn’t going to happen.
Google stuff generally dies quietly due to Google’s corporate attention deficit in running product lines.
Meta, on the other hand, is sleazy but full of determination.