I’ve seen that article and no, we still don’t need to be worried. Just defederate and that’s all. As evidenced by the final paragraph:
Fediverse can only win by keeping its ground, by speaking about freedom, morals, ethics, values. By starting open, non-commercial and non-spied discussions. By acknowledging that the goal is not to win. Not to embrace. The goal is to stay a tool. A tool dedicated to offer a place of freedom for connected human beings. Something that no commercial entity will ever offer.
Just keep using it as the community building tool it is, defederate and protect those communities and we’re golden.
The microblogging corner of the fediverse definitely needs a bit of restructuring to make it robust against something like this. A lot of people are on larger servers that are openly inviting Meta, even excited about their arrival, and believe very strongly that the space should be completely open.
They actively speak of people not wanting to federate with everyone as trying to “destroy” the Fediverse by making people who are totally married to a non-distributed service model fear or detest the space. There are many people on their websites who think they want something like this to happen, so that “everyone” will be here, and it’ll be just like on Twitter (or something). But I don’t think they’re actually going to like it once the space is flooded with people who are jacked up on psychological manipulation and who don’t even know the rest of space exists.
The people who come to the Fediverse and stay all end up saying the same thing: “It feels like what X used to feel like”. And X used to feel that way because corporate interests weren’t pushing their anger and aggravation buttons every 15 seconds, nor that of everyone they interacted with. But the space will be dominated by people getting poked and prodded for profit, and things will turn sour.
And they might not even ever recognize why it happened, because they believe they want this.
Explain how they would impact our communities if we defederate their instances from ours.
Spoiler: They can’t.
There is zero reason to freak out. If you don’t want to be affected by Meta then don’t join an instance that federates with them. Boom. You’re done. Problem solved. That’s the beauty of the fediverse choose your flavor.
They are going to have more users, that’s just a fact. They already have more users than us, but we still have these healthy and active communities. They could have 30 billion more users and we still don’t lose as long as we have the communities we’ve built on our own instances.
Edit: Why are all these doomer accounts from kbin.social? Open registration is a mistake.
Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.
Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the “simple” standard.
Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.
Remember when Microsoft tried to take over the web standards? Remember how that turned out for them? I’m not saying you shouldn’t have concern but the take over and extinguish takes a true majority adoption and in this age we get more fragmentation than we really see true consolidation. Not that it can’t happen. But possible vs probable and all that.
There’s a lot of evidence to be worried about this.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
I’ve seen that article and no, we still don’t need to be worried. Just defederate and that’s all. As evidenced by the final paragraph:
Just keep using it as the community building tool it is, defederate and protect those communities and we’re golden.
Everybody relax.
The microblogging corner of the fediverse definitely needs a bit of restructuring to make it robust against something like this. A lot of people are on larger servers that are openly inviting Meta, even excited about their arrival, and believe very strongly that the space should be completely open.
They actively speak of people not wanting to federate with everyone as trying to “destroy” the Fediverse by making people who are totally married to a non-distributed service model fear or detest the space. There are many people on their websites who think they want something like this to happen, so that “everyone” will be here, and it’ll be just like on Twitter (or something). But I don’t think they’re actually going to like it once the space is flooded with people who are jacked up on psychological manipulation and who don’t even know the rest of space exists.
The people who come to the Fediverse and stay all end up saying the same thing: “It feels like what X used to feel like”. And X used to feel that way because corporate interests weren’t pushing their anger and aggravation buttons every 15 seconds, nor that of everyone they interacted with. But the space will be dominated by people getting poked and prodded for profit, and things will turn sour.
And they might not even ever recognize why it happened, because they believe they want this.
Yeah, it is very possible for us to not let Meta win. Acting like the Fediverse is doomed isn’t productive at all.
I’d say it’s exactly as productive as saying “It’s no big deal if Meta joins the fediverse, It’ll be fiiiiiine”.
We should watch everything very carefully.
Explain how they would impact our communities if we defederate their instances from ours.
Spoiler: They can’t.
There is zero reason to freak out. If you don’t want to be affected by Meta then don’t join an instance that federates with them. Boom. You’re done. Problem solved. That’s the beauty of the fediverse choose your flavor.
They are going to have more users, that’s just a fact. They already have more users than us, but we still have these healthy and active communities. They could have 30 billion more users and we still don’t lose as long as we have the communities we’ve built on our own instances.
Edit: Why are all these doomer accounts from kbin.social? Open registration is a mistake.
I just read this article and what Meta is doing then triggered all the alarm bells!
From the Wiki (quite enlightening):
Remember when Microsoft tried to take over the web standards? Remember how that turned out for them? I’m not saying you shouldn’t have concern but the take over and extinguish takes a true majority adoption and in this age we get more fragmentation than we really see true consolidation. Not that it can’t happen. But possible vs probable and all that.