this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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Dumb. Federation is how we escape from every cloud-based service being a dictatorship of the person who owns the platform. That includes federating with privately own orgs to provide them an exit.
By all means make good tools to allow individual users to block Threads (or other private instances ruled by amoral coporations), but doing it at instance level is just dumb.
edit: also, number of instances doesn't matter. Number of daily active users matters. Most users are on mastodon.social, mastodon.cloud, lemmy.world, hachyderm.io, lemmy.world, etc. And all of those are federating. The only large instance that is not federating with threads is mas.to
What I hate to see, even in this thread, is people turning on each other in this "us vs. them", "you're either a part of the pact or you're against us" nonsense
Let's all remember why WE ALL CHOSE to get on the fediverse and build it. The strength of the fediverse comes from the freedom for each instance to choose how to run things. My understanding is that no one in an instance is harmed if some other instance chooses to federate or defederate from Threads.
I hate Meta. I also know that Meta doesn't need to do anything to take down the fediverse if we do it ourselves.
Part of it is just today's polarized political climate, especially since the popularity of the Fediverse is partially a backlash to reactionaries taking over Twitter and the corporate enshittification of Facebook and Reddit.
Everything is a war now, and solidarity and boycotts are basically the only weapons that small, independent actors have. So people apply "don't cross the picket line" thinking to everything, even where it doesn't make sense.
Want to act properly? Contribute money and labour towards your instances. Help them build better moderation tools so they can handle the flood of crap from Threads, and onboarding tools and better UX so they can steal away the Threads users.
Yes, yes and yes (I contribute money).
"The flood of crap" isn't what people should be worried about. They should be worried about Meta embracing, extending, and extinguishing the Fediverse. There's a good article about this here. People are worried about the wrong things and don't realize what's at stake.
The Ploum article again. Please explain how the circumstances with XMPP and ActivityPub are remotely similar.
Both are open protocols for communication over the Internet. Both have been adopted by a large corporate interest.
Now, how are they different?
I asked how the circumstances are similar, not vague descriptions that suit your existing views. But sure.
XMPP was dogshit back in 2004. A good idea, but nowhere NEAR what it needed to be to actually get mainstream acceptance. ActivityPub is light years ahead.
There were very very few XMPP users in 2004. There are millions of ActivityPub users. If meta was to pull the plug on federation it wouldn’t kill ActivityPub, there would still be millions of us here. We joined Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon because we don’t want to live in a centrally controlled/owned social platform. That won’t change just because we can suddenly interact with Threads users. In fact, if anything, once Threads users hear that we get the same shit they do without the ads, they might decide to join us instead.
Google killing off XMPP integration didn’t kill XMPP. It did that all on its own.
It's not about pulling the plug. It's about introducing proprietary features that break communication, forcing people off of an independent server and onto Threads.
If most of your IRL friends are on Threads and your experience with them has gotten janky due to Meta fucking with the protocol, it's going to be very difficult to not switch over to Threads.
Oh, and good luck trying to get your friends to switch over to some indie server they've never heard of. If you can do that, then you should run for president.
Well that and the story while not "wrong", is definitely hyperbolic. The author even stated after stating that Google killed XMPP that they didn't. So which is it? I'm not a dev, but an avid open source fan. i first tried Linux in 1995. Started using jabber itself in 1999 through Gaim. Later pidgin and psi clients in 2001-2. There were a ton of problems beyond Google. As far as clients were concerned there was no reference version. And there really were no large professionally run servers like mastodon.social or lemmy.world. People, myself included put too much hope in the Google basket. It was a massive unearned win in user count. That was just as easily lost. And kept people from focusing on the core service. Yes Google was never a good steward. Corporations never are. But the lack of official clients and servers, plus their decision to persue IETF standardization had as big or bigger impact on the services development and adoption.
The moral of the story isn't that Google or anyone else can kill an open source project. Microsoft Google and many more have tried and failed. The moral is that we shouldn't cater to them or give them special treatment. They aren't the key to success.
I'm not personally in favor of preemptively blocking threads on my instance and I don't find the EEE argument at all convincing in this case. But other instances doing that is no problem at all, it's fine!
a house divided…
Meta has no interest in being part of the fediverse, it only wants to eliminate any posible competition.
The usual MO of buying the competitors isn't posible on the fediverse, so the way to do it is embrace, extend and extinguish
Defederating is important because is Metastasis is allowed in the fediverse it will consume the fediverse, and then we'll be right back at the corporate social media we're trying to break away from, with the surveillance, ads and nazis being welcome as long as it's profitable
How?
I've seen the article about Google and XMPP, but I don't agree with its analysis. It wasn't easy to find service providers offering XMPP accounts to the public in 2004. I do not believe that Google embraced, extended, and extinguished a thriving ecosystem; there never was a thriving XMPP ecosystem.
There is a thriving ecosystem for federated microblogging, and federated discussions. While I'm sure Meta would like us to join their service, I'm not sure how allowing their users to interact with us will have that effect, nor how blocking that communication protects against it.
I was nearly 20 years younger than I am now and was definitely ignorant of free, public XMPP service providers, which is kind of the point. If someone tech-savvy enough to be running Linux on a laptop in 2004 and liked the idea of XMPP tried and failed to get started with it, what hope was there of attracting a mainstream audience? You could argue I didn't try hard enough, and you'd be right in a tautological sense. I did later use third-party XMPP clients for Google Chat.
I don't expect a Pony from Meta. Meta is a face-eating leopard and I expect it to try to eat my face. If blocking their users from seeing the pictures of birds I share on Mastodon prevents that, please tell me how it does. This isn't a rhetorical question; I self-host and can block, or not block whatever I want.
I've yet to see a convincing argument in favor of preemptive defederation or an explanation of what "Embrace Extend Extinguish" means in this particular scenario. There seems to be a lot of thinking that defederating "punishes" or handicaps Meta in some small way, which from my understanding is just not how it works at all.
I'm almost 50 myself. I'm logged in to XMPP right now. I've used it consistently since the early 2000. 20ish years minimum. There was never a thriving ecosystem of XMPP servers. There was a lot of choice, but nothing with a big name that would appeal to the average consumer. No jabber.social or jabber.world. And no critical mass of users. The transports were ultimately a frustrating gimmick. That Microsoft and AOL constantly broke. Leaving them unreliable and undesirable to recommend others to use.
When Google rolled out Google chat based on jabber/XMPP there was a lot of hopium going around that they'd be that big name to bring critical mass. Surprise! Hindsight says no. They "defederated" their servers. The jabber/XMPP development group themselves decided to persue standardization. Which largely meant an end to the active development of the service. Standards move much slower. Imperceptibly so. With Google out, the XMPP group pursuing standardization, no "official" servers, and the advent of services like Skype discord etc. The buzz and momentum behind XMPP imploded on it's own. Stymied by no one. Suffocated by it all.
No one killed XMPP. It simply stopped being relevant to most people.
Exactly. Any analysis of "embrace extend extinguish" WRT Google/XMPP needs to answer a simple question: how many daily active users did XMPP/Jabber have in 2004?
the same can be argued about the fediverse. the approximate number is 1.5 million of monthly active users, which is just an ant compared to Meta's.
So yeah, one could argue that it's pretty much the same situation in terms of numbers if not worse (I don't know the numbers but I'd bet that Meta has more users than Google talk ever had)
Utterly idiotic.
Facebook has for 20 years proven time and time again that it cannot be trusted and it is not beneficial for Internet users.
Yet still dumbarse cry over how mean we are to not want them here.
Get this through your fucking head people, Facebook does not have your best intentions at heart. You exist in this space purely for them to exploit. And they will find a way to do so here because that is their whole existence as a company.
It is not dumb. Thinking that this time it will be different is dumb:
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
When this was happening I was a huge proponent of Google, and Google Talk, recommending everyone I knew to switch to it, because Jabber with the help of Google will remove monopoly from AIM, MSN, YIM etc.
Google fucking killed the network and I contributed to it (maybe not in a significant way, but I still feel very bitter about it)
If you federate with something too massive though it has undue weight on the entire system. It is likely to be Embrace, Extend, Extinguish again, and it's reasonable to want to avoid that.
For people who don't remember, the pattern would be something like:
It depends whether 2 actually succeeds at pulling users in. Arguably most people already on the Fediverse are unlikely to jump ship to Facebook, but you have to consider what happens in a few years if it's grown, but Facebook is a huge name which makes people less likely to join other instances.
Personally, it's the implausibility of 2 that makes all of this seem like no big deal to me. In fact, I think federating openly with Threads might signal to Threads users that they can use alternatives and not lose access to whomever they follow on Threads, thus growing the user-base of other federated instances.
I think people who are going to use Threads for Meta-specific features are likely going to use Threads anyway, and if any of those features are genuinely good (i.e. not simply Instagram and Facebook tie-ins) they will be replicated by the various open Fediverse projects which already differ from one another in terms of features.
The moderation issue is entirely different and there are some instances that have an understanding with their users about protecting them from seeing any objectionable content or behavior as defined by whatever culture they have. Defederating from such a large group of people makes sense, perhaps even preemptively, no different from when they defederate existing large instances now.
The super cool thing is that you're more than welcome to start your own instance where they don't block it. Or move to an existing one. Because you know, the entire point is that instance admins are allowed to run their instance how they see fit.
And the users are allowed to have opinions about it.
Correct, but that doesn't change who has final say over it. You're more than free to change instances if you no longer agree with how your current instance is being run.
I think the fear is that this turns into an "embrace, extend, extinguish". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
I don't know if the fear is well rooted, but I can definitely understand how Facebook is perceived as not having established a history of trust.
They are a private company, which have placed profits above the best interests of its users.
Edit: I think you can draw a parallel with another scenario: an open and free market requires regulation. There should be rules and boundaries, such that a true free and open market exists. Similarly, there's an argument to be made than we should restrict the fediverse for it to keep existing in the way we want it to.
Jabber was much smaller than the Fediverse when Google launched Talk.
Users are more aware of the risk now. "Oh you should go use Google Talk, it's an open standard" is stupid in retrospect. Likewise, "you should use Threads, it's an open standard" would be absurd. The value here is "you should use Mastodon/Lemmy/whatever, it's a good open platform and still lets you interact with Threads users".
It's important to remember that the most famous example of embrace-extend-extinguish ultimately failed: Microsoft's tweaks to Java and Javascript are long dead, Microsoft having embraced Google's javascript interpreter and abandoned Java in favour of their home-grown .NET platform.
If we let corperate avithilea gain a foothold they'll EEE us. Learn from history, Meta's not doing this for our sake
If you just want a hassle-free way to view as much content as possible, there are instances that are federated with pretty much everyone - just have to do a little research. If you want to guarantee keeping post history AND have absolute control over what you can see, you're gonna have to put in the work to make your own instance.
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Yeah, I wonder how many of those instances are primarily enthusiasts self-hosting.
Feel free to removed when we block Flipboard or Automattic. We're only blocking Meta, because Meta's interests are not the Fediverse's best interest.
Then change instances to one that doesn't block threads. It's that easy.