A warning and a perspective from an insider who has been through this before.
Maybe I’m bitter, and I know a lot of people wouldn’t agree with this, but honestly? I think the non-corporate part of the Fediverse should just assume malice from the get go and preemptively defederate from whatever Meta put out. That way nothing’s changed - Meta would essentially have a private / proprietary / isolated network, as far as users are concerned (much like Facebook already is), and even if the Fediverse will see less growth in the short term because of that, there will be no confusion on where everybody stands.
E: Well, thankfully and as expected, I’m not the only one to think this way: FediPact is an Organized Effort to Block Meta’s ActivityPub Platform
It baffles me that so many don’t see it for what it is.
Meta contacts their competitor, and says that they want to build a competing product, and want us as competitor to help them with that. How can you possibly fall for that. Meta can already use activitypub for whatever they are building without any need to contact anyone from the Fediverse. The only possible reason they contact instance admins is because Meta wants to dictate the terms on how to Fediverse operates.
I sure hope that Meta doesn’t try to integrate ActivityPub into their apps. As a user that feels like they finally found their home (Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy/kbin), please, go away Meta. lol
Great fucking article. Nice look into the history of proprietary software. This part stuck out to me:
But there’s one thing my own experience with XMPP and OOXML taught me: if Meta joins the Fediverse, Meta will be the only one winning. In fact, reactions show that they are already winning: the Fediverse is split between blocking Meta or not. If that happens, this would mean a fragmented, frustrating two-tier fediverse with little appeal for newcomers.
We need to convince instance owners not to federate with Meta. History tends to repeat itself and I’d rather not see this nice little corner of the internet die.
That should be in the FAQ
I’ve never really understood the EEE argument here. XMPP was an open proptocol, Google embraced it and attracted users, then extended it and took those users away. But according to this article, Google didn’t extinguish XMPP. It’s still around and serving its niche community.
That’s already the situation the fediverse is in. This is a niche community and there are already existing social media companies that the majority of internet users are on. If Facebook joins the fediverse, it brings billions of new users to the fediverse. If they then leave the fediverse, ActivityPub will still be here and all of us on the real fediverse will still be here, in a niche community. Everyone here has already chosen the fediverse despite it being a clunky, unpolished, niche network. How is EEE a relevant fear for the fediverse?
It’s in the article but to paraphrase it:
When a large company takes an open protocol, embraces it using adding users to the network through heir platform, then extends it using proprietary means, they have full control over how the protocol runs in the network.
When the open standards are forced to make changes to be functional with the dominant proprietary app that is poorly (and sometimes incorrectly) documented, open source groups are constantly on the backfoot in order to maintain compatibility, and that makes it harder to compete on their own right.
A second example given is LibreOffice, whose documents are made to fit the XML standard by Microsoft, but there are quirks in their documented standard that if you follow it too closely it isn’t formatted quite the same as the document produced in Microsoft Office, so they were pressured to effectively copy MS and deviate from the standards MS claims to follow.
Ironically XMPP is a counterexample to your argument. They made the switch to mandatory TLS even though GChat didn’t.
That’s a neat fact!
Well, isn’t that sort of mentioned in the article?
If fediverse development slows down e.g. because adoption of inofficial Facebook extensions takes time it will harm the whole platform. Not by directly taking away users but by blocking progress.
I don’t think the Fediverse is small enough for this to be a serious concern. Especially once multiple companies (Tumblr?) are invested in the fediverse I don’t see this happening anymore.
Yes I read that and explained why I don’t think its relevant. Facebook can’t slow down progress on the fediverse because:
- progress is already slow. The fediverse has been in development for 15 years and still is a clunky, niche network and likely will always be less polished than large corporate networks.
- Every developer on the fediverse is aware of the EEE playbook and next to none of them will try to remain compatible with any corporate extensions.
- What do you mean? Progress is already slow so any additional slow down will seriously harm the fediverse precisely because of the limited resources IMHO.
- I’m not quite as optimistic as you but yeah, I don’t think it will be easy for Facebook and if they misjudge it they will end up making a competitor stronger by bringing more attention to it.
But #1 is predicated on #2. If developers are aware of the risk of EEE, then they won’t try to remain compatible with Meta extensions, which means development of the open AP ecosystem will continue at the same pace.
Okay, sure. Still a bit skeptical about point 2 but we will see.
Should be mandatory reading for anyone who wants this to succeed. I hope we don’t make the same mistakes as doomed so many other open source open protocol projects in the past.
The solution is to simply ignore the corpos
The solution is to simply ignore the corpos
I envision- its not that simple.
They will likely offer the one thing we are missing here-
Ease of use, for normal people. Ie, your grandma using her facebook app, can interact with you via the fediverse.
That being said- most of us will know, the temporary boost to the fediverse will not be worth the long-term consequences. But- to your average user, they will love this idea.
So- only time will tell. Although, Mastodon has quite a following and has been holding steady so far.
