Why doesn’t the article write about the actual threat to the fediverse? Embrace extend extinguish is such a common tactic it’s hard to imagine this isn’t what Facebook is doing.
Especially since they’ve already done it with XMPP
It’s been detailed already and obvious that Meta plans to financially compensate and federate with the largest instances while shutting out smaller ones and instituting a “reputation based” system to federate with them so it’s pretty clear that the goal is to incorporate the largest Mastodon instances and then slowly buy them out while cutting everyone else off.
Good! Meta has proven time and time again that them and their services are not to be trusted. Deplatforming that trashfire before it even starts is a smart move.
I’m going to assume you misspoke there, but the notion of fediverse instances “deplatforming” Meta is… quite the notion.
Defederating from Meta is not so much “deplatforming” them, as refusing to be in their platform.
Maybe not the right word to use, but the fediverse coming together in agreement to not federate with “Threads” takes away a lot of the benefit Meta gets from creating a federated service in the first place. It’s basically pulling the rug out from under Meta before they’ve even taken a first step on it. It’s a smart move and I support it 100%
Every time a big company gets into an open source space, they try to take it over. Hopefully everybody in the fediverse recognizes that.
It kind of doesn’t matter whether everyone in the fediverse recognizes it or not. People around here often forget that they are in the vast minority when it comes to tech literacy in the world. Most people are not interested in the experience that lemmy currently offers, because it’s far too complicated and people asking simple questions are often met with scoff and scorn, because the question has been asked before and they should have just searched for an answer or because it’s so simple, obviously it’s just <insert complicated technical explanation here>.
The fact that none of this is approachable to a tech naive person is precisely why microsoft killed OSS in the late 90s, why google killed XMPP, and why it’s extremely likely a place like meta or another company might succeed in effectively killing off a platform like activitypub (altho I don’t think it’ll kill it entirely, I do suspect that they will slowly kill it by bleeding users over to their platforms). You see, what these large brands have is recognition - people who are not tech literate still know what google is, what facebook is (they may not know they’ve rebranded to meta), and what microsoft is. These companies have the resources to throw actual designers at this space and provide a front end interface that is friendly to just about anyone. Combine good UX design with a company that people recognize and a huge platform from which to advertise to users (imagine logging into facebook and being presented with all the cool new things you can do on the fediverse) and you’ll get normal people trickling into the platform.
Here’s where things succeed - these platforms will start as open, and so all the normal people will now be able to talk with their tech friends who are also in the fediverse, and slowly these platforms will become monoliths. They’ll start curating the experience more as user reports roll in, and as they tighten the reigns. Over time you’ll find that you can’t reach these users unless you’re also on their platform, and your non-tech literate friends will ask you to migrate to their platform so you can continue to interact through the same channels that they’ve been interacting with you. While you may be unwilling to migrate, some people will be, and slowly but surely the platforms will dominate the space. They might be sunset eventually as a way to kill off the protocol, or they might just simply turn into their own walled garden.
The only way forward I can see which is resistant to attacks of capital of this nature are when an open source protocol actually starts to center design during the development of the platform. You can’t just tack a user design expert onto a platform like lemmy and ask them to make things make sense, because federation itself needs a whole new set of terminology, designed by people who understand how non-tech literate people think, and a whole new backend to support a front end that’s truly user friendly. But user design is not friendly to github and most developers aren’t designers, so this isn’t something I see being accomplished anytime soon. The best that can happen right now is for better dev platforms to be designed for front-end and UX designers (something akin to github but useful to designers), to work on implementing these kinds of people from the beginning, and for open source projects to start reaching out more to designers, to start spending donated money on designers, and to center design as an important principle to OSS protocols.
There’s nothing wrong with Lemmy’s user interface design.
It has bugs, for sure, but if you just go to an instance, sign up, and browser the fediverse within that instance it’s a great experience.
There’s nothing wrong with Lemmy’s user interface design.
as a not-tech-savvy (relative to other users here, anyways) person: i have absolutely no idea how you can say this with confidence. Lemmy’s UI and UX is probably still on the worse end of FOSS projects i’ve used and i’ve had a year and a half to get used to it. i still have to double back to find certain settings that i use literally every day in moderating the site! i hang with it because i know the developers are slammed, but this would not fly with even most of my friends, much less my mom or someone who has extremely low computer literacy and mostly learns by repetition.
So hold on, is this an open source space, a protocol or “like email”? Which of the poor analogies people use to convey excitiement about AcitivityPub are supposed to apply here?
Because, you know, Google got into the Linux space, into email and into open source software and it seems those survived the experience.
Yeah but these examples are all bigger than Google. The fediverse irrelevant in comparison. Additionally at least Linux doesn’t have such a strong network effect, since it’s not a social network. I mean I’m going to let myself be surprised. But I kinda doubt that anything good will come from it.
The Meta business side isn’t nice folks that try to do good in general.
[Google got] into open source software and it seems those survived the experience
Not really. Google is responsible for the open source browser Chromium, which is the base for Google Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, etc. They dominate the browser market, and they use their position to implement features outside the web standard. Their competitors (mainly Firefox) are not able to implement the non-standard features, driving them out of the market. Classic Embrace-Extend-Extinguish.
Google got into the Linux space
Technically, both Android and Chromebok are Linux-based. But Google has done everything possible so that they aren’t part of the “Linux space”, to the point that Android uses a fork of version 3.x of the Linux kernel (regular Linux is now at version 6.x).
Google is responsible for the open source browser Chromium
Pretty sure that was Apple, not Google. Google joined the WebKit party later. By the time Google forked WebKit the other rendering engines (used by the FireFox and old versions of IE) were pretty much gone.
Also, Now that Google has forked WebKit, we’re back to two competing engines. And at least on the websites I run our traffic is about 45% each (and 10% other). That’s actually more healthy than it used to be (95% IE).
Private companies embracing open source browsers fixed a broken platform, it didn’t embrace/extend/extinguish.
Yes, FireFox is struggling for marketshare. Personally I think their biggest problem is they have a legacy code base that dates back to Netscape. It’s got nothing to do with Google.
Meta is that annoying little sibling that wants to be a part of everything when nobody wants them around. Except instead of a sibling, it’s more of a disease.
I don’t see what there is to gain from this, I don’t want mega-corporation in my social media anymore. especially not after what has been happening to their platforms. if their users want to join the fediverse, the account creation process is always open as long as they can follow the rules!
And of course there’s always the fact that their end goal will not be good for any of us, no matter what it is there is a 0% chance our interests align
What do you think the odds are this platform was put together with react?
Edit: have a better informed opinion after reading this ariticle. Support every instance that doesn’t federate with them, shun those that do.
I think fighting this will be a mistake. Instances ran by the likes of Tumblr and Meta can only bring more people into the fediverse, and when they’re in it will be easier for them to move around.
The great thing about AcitivityPub is it lets the people who want to be in larger more centralised servers connect to those who don’t fairly seamlessly.
Your sentiment though well placed seems to be incorrect, there is a big risk.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Yea I mean, I don’t think anyone could actually believe that Meta is acting in good faith here, or even capable of acting in good faith in general. As much as it’s exciting to think about plugging a billion new users into the Fediverse, it would no doubt be done in a way designed to enrich Meta at our expense.
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
Surprised actually they beat Microsoft to the punch
they would have to prove that they are in good faith to be able to gain our trust in federating with them. but with their past bullshit, its hard to do so.
Yes, please. We can’t expect anything good coming from them.
Last time we were burned (or at least I am aware of) was with Jabber and Google Talk.
It helped them bootstrap their instant messaging, and once everyone was using it they simply blocked access.
It is pretty much guaranteed that Facebook will do the same thing.
Agree–keep off. Meta can just build their own Twitter.
Interesting that it doesn’t mention how Vantablack is gatekeeping FediPact and keeping certain instances from joining because she doesn’t like them
Don’t want any lizard cage fighting sociopath in my Lemmy thanks.
Let them! There’s nothing saying other instances have to federate with them. Kind of the beauty of the whole thing, really.
Not exactly. What Facebook is expected to attempt here is an embrace, extend and extinguish strategy.
That only works if we care about the bells and whistles they add. Nobody here does or else we’d still be on those platforms. That strategy just doesn’t work with a federated network that doesn’t connect to your instance.
They’ll have their own instance with bells and whistles that nobody connects to and we’ll have our federated network. It’ll be exactly like the current structure but they’ll have an instance instead of a dedicated platform.
Meta has a monetary interest in divering from the activity hub standard. They will use it to stand out from all other federated instances with cool features you can only use on meta instances.
New people will join metas instances because they are “clearly better” and it will be difficult to deny. Sure there will be ads, privacy concerns etc. but most people don’t care about that.
The rest of the federated network will over time lose users to meta because people want to stay connected and that’s difficult to do when two instances don’t share the same features.
The end result is meta oficially forking activity hub and disconnecting from the rest of the federated network.
It’s the death of activity hub and what we are trying to build here.The only way to prevent it is by preventing meta instances from taking off. The main way to do that is to not allow their instances to benefit from the rest of the federated network and to inform meta users of better alternatives. It’s impossible for a disorganized opensource project to keep up with the features that 1000’s of meta developers are paid to do.
That only works if we care about the bells and whistles they add.
Like accessibility features? Moderation tools? Profile migration? It may be different in beehaw.org, but here on kbin.social those are features we’re lacking. To my knowledge, moderation is explicitly undefined by the entire ActivityPub spec.
Just in case it wasn’t clear, I hate Meta. I hate them with a burning passion. I don’t want to see them burn down the fediverse like they’ve done to online privacy and democracy as a whole. But they’re not something we can afford to scoff at and ignore.
They won’t be offering bells and whistles we want, they’ll be offering features we need. They’ll run their own troll farms, brigading their way across the fediverse, and say “look at all these trolls! We’re gonna create moderation tools to stop these ne’erdowells! And we’ll integrate them into the spec, and give them to you! For free!”
We’re all proud to say we wouldn’t fall for such a Trojan horse, but we need to be ready to recognize whatever that Trojan horse looks like.
Like accessibility features? Moderation tools? Profile migration? It may be different in beehaw.org, but here on kbin.social those are features we’re lacking. To my knowledge, moderation is explicitly undefined by the entire ActivityPub spec.
Which are already being developed as the r/blind community has migrated to Lemmy and is getting those taken care of or at least getting the ball rolling. I’m sorry Kbin doesn’t have that traction yet, but it too will get there. Again, we’re still in alpha/beta stages of these platforms. These things take time.
Just in case it wasn’t clear, I hate Meta. I hate them with a burning passion. I don’t want to see them burn down the fediverse like they’ve done to online privacy and democracy as a whole. But they’re not something we can afford to scoff at and ignore.
It is something we can ignore because it literally can’t happen unless nobody defederates them when they get it going. Which, looking at all the community discussion isn’t going to happen. You can relax.
They won’t be offering bells and whistles we want, they’ll be offering features we need. They’ll run their own troll farms, brigading their way across the fediverse, and say “look at all these trolls! We’re gonna create moderation tools to stop these ne’erdowells! And we’ll integrate them into the spec, and give them to you! For free!”
They’re all attached to Meta still, it’s a moot point. Nobody who deliberately moved to decentralized platforms is going to go back to a centralized instance to use tools they haven’t been using all this time, it doesn’t make sense.
Let them make instances and hundreds of bots on them, we’ll defederate those too. Which is the beauty of the fediverse design, we get to keep control of our communities and keep them safe. Just like beehaw defederated from lemmy.world (temporarily) until moderation tools get more powerful.
Okay, someone explain to me cus i apparently don’t have the critical thinking skills to figure it out on my own.
What does Meta want from joining the fediverse? What is the draw for them???
There’s a business strategy called embrace, extend, extinguish that they’ll try to use to snuff out the fediverse.
They’ll make a bespoke federated service, collect all the data of their users (and all the people on other networks their users interact with), make it all shiny and fancy and add a ton of improvements most networks don’t have yet. And if they can reach a critical mass of users, they can track a huge cross section of federated activity, and force networks to play by their rules or lose access to their entire userbase. It’s the same thing google did to email.
(and all the people on other networks their users interact with)
This reminded me of the fact that Meta creates “ghost” profiles for people who they know exist, but who don’t use Facebook
Um, isn’t everything everyone does on the fediverse public? I assume it’s all being tracked already. By search engines as a bare minimum, but anyone else (including Meta) who does any kind of research/etc. And they don’t need to be federated to do it, they can just crawl the network with HTTP.
As for “forcing networks to play by their rules” I don’t see that happening, and Google hasn’t done it with email. Gmail doesn’t have enough marketshare for that. At best they’ve forced people to make sure they have good outbound spam filtering. That’s not just google, every email provider (including small on premise office mail servers) has that policy.
I’m not saying we should federate them (personally I’m undecided) but your explanation hasn’t convinced me.
Instance owners (can) see way more info about you. A rando scraping public posts can’t tell what device a user is connecting from, what posts they’re looking at and for how long, where to most effectively inject ads, and then correlate all that with gps and sound recordings they collect via their app they’ve convinced people to install.
The social media part of social media apps has always been the secondary feature. Something like 90% of users lurk anyway, the only way they’re getting data on lurkers is a man-in-the-middle attack.
Also, Gmail is very strong in the email space. It doesn’t matter whether your server ever sends a single piece of spam, Gmail has a history of throttling mail servers’ ability to send to Gmail accounts.
Facebook will never know any of that about me, since I won’t ever sign up for their instance.
On top of that, you’ll also have to make sure that your instance admins defed with Meta
I think most people currently on lemmy would agree, but most people aren’t on lemmy. Like it or not, if Meta started a fediverse instance tomorrow, 90% of the fediverse would end up going through it. They would just make it so easy that most people wouldn’t even know they were in the fediverse (which I still believe is a better world than how it currently is).
Then your choice isn’t just “do I join a meta instance”, but also “do I interact with users/communities” on a meta-owned instance? The upside will obviously be the amount of content (ex. populated niche communities) available. The downside is that Meta will mine anything and everything they can from you. I do think lemmy is architected in such a way that they won’t have lurking data because your local instance “clones” threads for lurking by local users, so maybe it’s not that big of a deal. DMs would still not be encrypted though, and meta certainly won’t endorse communication over matrix.
This was a very illuminating view from another post
They were bleeding users so they want some ways to tap into existing user pool and they think it is easy to get that by simply federating, but they are about to find out the hard way why it won’t go the way they want.
Meta apps have a couple billion users. The fediverse has maybe ten million.
I really don’t think that’s the reason they’re considering ActivityPub.
I assumed over the years that users count would have been evaporated, so do we have current user counts for it?
Why would you assume that? I think Facebook has reported a loss of users maybe one quarter, ever? They’re flirting with 3bn these days, as far as I can tell.
Just that I don’t bother to care about them for years until now that they are trying to mess with Fediverse.
Well, like we’ve said elsewhere in this, they are orders of magnitude larger than the fediverse. Absorbing users or data is almost certainly not their motivation here.
I think the plan should be bracing for impact, and how to deal with the after-effect. Because let’s be honest, we are in a late stage capitalism, and Meta megacorp will get what it wants.
I don’t currently see it spilling it’s poison to Lemmy/kbin. I’m hopeful rather, but I may be misunderstanding how the fediverse works.
But for mastodon, I would say the outcome is a segregation, as it’s safe to assume that communities that integrate wirh Meta will be consumed. Unfortunately that likely means starting from scratch, with a even nichier community, as far as I can see. Not exactly from nothing, but content loss will be inevitable, which is the Fediverse greatest weakness imho.
