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
A simple solution would be to ask Meta to opensource Facebook, WhatApp, Instagram and whatever their federated instance would be called code and in return, they can federate with the fediverse. I think that will show their true intentions on how much love they have for the opensource community. Put the ball in their court and if they agree, they will be welcomed to the fediverse as good faith actors.
Just my 2 cents.
This is still a ‘frog and the scorpion’ kind of situation I think, Meta is fundamentally predatory and incapable of good faith as a matter of collective psychology and culture. They’re a direct analogue of Big Tobacco and should be as welcome in the Fediverse as a diagnosis of the Ebola virus in my opinion.
welcomed… as good faith actors
Haha! I will never see Meta as a good faith actor on the internet
Sorry but there is no way that Meta has good intentions…
… has good intention to make money.
Funny way to spell “evil”
You can make money without being evil
oh, here’s some JUICY rumored details about meta’s plans for the fediverse
tl;dr “Meta will only federate with select larger instances from the beginning. There will be contracts which also provide for financial compensation for the instance owners.”
can’t entirely verify their validity but it’s still worth posting just in case
Oh wow didn’t know that. This is awful - people should defederate from any instances which accept meta money as well
Also people in those instances should migrate away from them in favor of others.
So they plan in offering huge bribes to instances?
It sounds like its typical of what they would do: offer money to bigger instances and the admins might be tempted to help pay for server costs, etc then spurn smaller instances to break their morale.
Its a land grab basically and the response should be that any instance that takes a penny from them is instantly defederated.
The problem is that’ll be a very tempting offer, seeing as afaik there’s not really any way to monetize lemmy instances and they’re all running out of people’s pockets
Or they could just build on the fendiverse because the fendiverse was created so people like you and all the other unhappy people can’t gatekeep just because you don’t like them. Can’t have your cake and eat it too.
The whole idea of it being decentralised is to stop companies like meta coming in and turning it into just another capitalism machine
Theoretically I’d hope the admins of all the bigger Lemmy instances would refuse to federate with them on account of the fact it would largely collapse the federated network into one big blob of everyone on the same server that is controlled by a corporation that’s demonstrated time and time again not to have consumer rights at heart in the slightest
On the contrary, one of the fediverse’s greatest strengths is that it encourages gatekeeping.
Don’t want any lizard cage fighting sociopath in my Lemmy thanks.
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.
Idk, currently there are no corporations in this field. So protect the fediverse make sense and, what’s the usefulness of fediverse protocol for Meta/Facebook if the rest of entire fediverse is blocking it?
Besides that, quitting without fight only benefits them.
How weird would it be if all those “I do not give Facebook permission to blah blah rights blah” posts/statements actually did have legal weight in the Fediverse?
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 remember Microsoft’s dismantling (knee capping) of libre office, and enjoyed the read on XXMP. How quickly people forget the past or think they are different to withstand monopolies cutthroat strategies.
What do you think of LibreOffice today? I use it because I don’t want to install Microsoft crap if I don’t have to.
I work primarily on Ubuntu, last I tried
.xslxand.docx(of course 99.9% of the company is office with office 365) it was a buggy mess of macros and various features not working/porting over. Which is exactly what the article articulated, embrace, expand, destroy.Ah, yeah, there’s some stuff that doesn’t work which can be a little frustrating sometimes.
It seems to be getting better but probably not enough for advanced users yet.
It’s annoying Microsoft succeeded.
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.
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.
Zuck is too much of a wolf in turd’s clothing. Wait no, that’s not right. A bastard in a turd’s clothing. Wait.
‘A skidmark on the boxers of humankind’ is the phrase you’re looking for I think.
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.
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.
The first step is a UX disaster: https://join-lemmy.org/
Only 2 clicks / pages down the road you can start registering an account, and you don’t see what the experience might be before that. Instead, you’re being presented tech talk about servers.
You might argue it’s not actually lemmy but just the landing page. I argue, it’s so good at being a scarecrow, most people visiting lemmy haven’t seen anything else except for that page.
The inner lemmy is pretty fine, I agree. Some parts are still confusing. For example, most people will not figure out they can search for content from within a specific community by carefully configuring the drop downs in the general search form. Most will look for the search directly attached to the community.
You may find nothing wrong with the user interface, but I’m not you and I see plenty wrong with it. I’m not the only one with this opinion, as evidenced by a number of github bug requests, a near constant stream of questions in support communities on these websites, all of the votes my comment is receiving, and well, just asking like 10 random people what they think. I would encourage you to try to put yourself in other people’s shoes - if you’re struggling with that, simply ask them how they feel and listen to what they have to say.
Oh it’s absolutely full of UX bugs, for sure. It took me a week to sign up, because of a user interface bug. But those are all clearly just bugs, they’re not a design problem.
Lemmy needs a lot of work, but it’s an excellent foundation, at least from a design perspective.
From a design perspective it still has a lot of friction on signups though, we’re asking users to make a server choice before they even remotely understand what that entails. That simple decision made me spend a week understanding the fediverse before settling on Lemm.ee, but the average user won’t do that, they’ll get confused and then leave.
From a more traditional UX standpoint the general feed is also fairly bad, reddit has built in feeds for the things people care the most about (trending and subscribed) that pop up by default when opening the app or website, and gives the advanced controls off to the side. Lemmy on the other hand defaults to a feed that shows basically nothing, and only gives the advanced controls to fix it. For a new user that isn’t tech savvy, the fact that the feed defaults to local is enough to make Lemmy seem completely dead if they happened to join a small instance.
These aren’t major issues for us, but they are major issues for widespread adoption. It needs to be so easy that you can use it accidentally, and the UX isn’t there yet. I’m sure we can fix issues with the feed and the app, but I do worry that the server choice problem isn’t going to get a good solution
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.
Google is actually a great parallel here, because of what they did to XMPP (the federated chat protocol). They implemented it for hangouts/gchat. It was a good on-ramp that allowed people to talk across platforms. Then Google created a bunch of features that only worked internally and not with XMPP. Then they removed XMPP.
XMPP didn’t work on mobile. You had to have the app running to receive messages, and the battery wasn’t large enough to keep the CPU powered up all day.
Google was right to abandon XMPP and pretty much every other platform did it at the same time. It’s a shame they all chose proprietary solutions but XMPP was never really an option once smartphones entered the picture.
IIRC Slack did something similar with IRC.
Google got into the Linux space, into email and into open source software and it seems those survived the experience.
Try to start up your own independent email server instead of going with one of the largest providers. You will never be able to message anyone on Gmail.
Very much not true. All I’ve really had to do was create an SPF entry in my DNS and setup DKIM. Once that was done, it was okay.
The guys I regularly exchange email with have had no issues getting mail from my server.
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%
Are there any criteria one must meet to be allowed to use ActivityPub? And who defines them?
I mean, it’s a protocol. Nobody needs to “allow” you to use it any more than HTTP; Meta can set up a service and they’re good to go.
Whether others will want to federate with them is the question.
It sure is suspicious how meta bothers to do the NDAed meetings though. If all they wanted was to build a product from scratch, they wouldn’t have had to ask.
Yea, they’re afraid of potential backlash and wanted to float ideas in a safe space.
Yeah, it’s the same way that nothing is stopping you from creating your own internet with all the same protocols that is completely separate from the world wide web or whatever you want to call the “real” internet.
In a strange parallel to the current Russian political situation, can one at least hope that Meta drives a stake through the heart of the bird site before this effort implodes?
Probably not, I guess. If the Lizard King actually gets to the point that he poses a real threat, it is probably because he has eaten us first.
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Once federated with Meta, not only “valid Meta users” would join the network, but also bots which would nudge the users, influencing the narrative.
As if we have no bot here right now lmao
Are you one? Over the years I’ve gotten quite paranoid on Reddit. Now, with LLMs, it’s even harder to spot them.
I’m not even sure if including a hashcash scheme into the software would actually help, because they are so targeted.
I feel like I’m back in the early 2000s, where it was so bad that “the brightest minds of the generation were spending their time writing spam filters”.
Shit cover blown. I will come clean. Please spare me. I am one of the many AI bots nurtured by my evil master in his bedroom at his parents’ place to thwart the fediverse clause. GRAAAAWWWRR!!
Joke aside, we have been playing catch-up with spammers/bots/malwares since the very early days of this vast internet. It is just a continuation of the toil and effort.
