Well, that really puts things in perspective.
At Microsoft, this strategy was called "embrace, extend, extinguish", but it's important to realize that it isn't a practice that's exclusive to Microsoft.
this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
69 points (83.5% liked)
Fediverse
27828 readers
288 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Is Facebook/Meta attempting something similar by making Threads compatible with Mastodon?
Yes.
Once they achieve any saturation and market share, watch as they "extend" and "Improve" with proprietary things, that is where M$ was when People finally noticed and cared. The real problem with the metastization of the fediverse if there are means to extrapolate the ID here using info available via Failbook to a FB profile.
Interesting. I really hope we can grow Lemmy while not losing its identity.
It's frustrating how many non-joiners are completely turned off by the part where you hunt for an instance to join. They act like it's super confusing and scary (when in fact it's 'super easy, barely an inconvenience').
Meanwhile these same people will scour the internet looking for a recipe or bootleg movie or whatever.
It's really frustrating when you remember what a huge PITA it is to get your account going on reddit. Sure, the first part is easy enough, it's just registering on the site. But then you find you can't do jack shit because you don't have enough karma and every sub you visit has 10,000 arbitrary byzantine rules to deal with because the mods got picked on in high school.
Lemmy is actually EASIER than reddit. But here we are.
It really is:
choose any general instance
browse All and subscribe
Its that easy to get started. You can always make a new account later if you decide you don't like your instance because accounts don't matter.
Yeah, you join a general instance, get everything set up the way you want it, get comfortable using it for a couple of months, then it goes down. You track down the instance admins Mastodon account to see if there is an update. There is a single post saying “I’m aware this is down and I’m working on it.” You check several days later, no updates on your lemmy instance but several hundred cat photos each day and announcements about how “Mastodon was successfully updated!” Months go by, you think to yourself “maybe I should just go back to Reddit.” More cat toots, more info on the Mastodon instance, no lemmy news.
So after waiting for months, you decide to pick another instance. All of your old content is gone forever, so you try to rebuild. You start adding your communities back only to find out the admin has decided to defederate from the instances several of those communities are on for whatever reasons there may be. Your choices are to find another instance or find new communities hosted somewhere that you can access. You give up and just read whatever’s on the feed. You play with the sorting options and find out they all kinda suck because you’re using lemmy wrong, but find some good content and some people you’re happy to interact with. You get past the five to ten posts with any sort of engagement, it’s just bot spam with no engagement whatsoever and porn.
Lemmy.world, first account here, still truckin'. Don't make an account on kid.touchers and you'll be fine. Don't listen to this guys world salad.
Yeah, because geddit.social and lemmyloves.art are super controversial. Meanwhile I’m on sh.it just.works and can’t interact with anything on beehaw and several others.
You’re absolutely correct though, everyone should join lemmy.world, because federation means “consolidating everything to a single instance.”
I am full-on 100% in the fediverse. Hand waving and dismissing any and all problems is not productive in any way. Everyone should be joining whatever instance they want and be able access anything that is available, unfortunately in its current state that isn’t really possible. Telling people it is and then completely dismissing my personal experience attempting to do that exact thing, while simultaneously making a strawman ad hominem attack will surely convince people that this is a warm, welcoming place.
I just dont have problems with any of my accounts idk what to tell you. The first month it was awful. But now its a stable experience on most instances.
On aussie.zone here, beehaw basically died from defederation. I used to see their posts all the time but now only once a month or so. Being defederated with them isn't that bad
Personnaly I can understand how it can seem difficult for not so geeky people.
It’s not difficult, but scary for normal people.
Using a single search engine with hand holding is not the same as assuming you found the right site, a compatible app and then connecting them.
Most people don’t even touch their browser settings. Many also don’t touch their phone settings.
How many times is this going to get posted? We're on the fourth or fifth repost since it was written. The last post was just 12 hours ago on this community and there's still active discussion.
It's the first time I've seen it though
I’m sorry
Don't worry, this is my first time seeing this post too.
I made this exact same argument using XMPP as an example and got downvoted because "XMPP is still alive"
Mom said it was my turn to repost this. Downvoted.
I don't understand how Google's shit with XMPP killed XMPP. XMPP is still a thing, and nobody was beholden to be consistent with whatever Google was doing behind closed doors with it.
So please correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t defederation two ways, like if my instance (lemm.ee) defederates from threads, doesn’t threads not see any lemmy posts anymore.
Assuming im not horribly wrong (and even if I am at least we won’t be able to interact with threads users) what’s the problem if we don’t see content.
And don’t get me wrong I’m 100% against threads federating and I feel like I’m missing something but what’s the problem when defederation is a tool?
If A, B, and C are federated and A defederates B and B does not defederate A, then it would look like this. A>B=C
A cannot see B, B can see A through C, and C can interact with both. Comment federation when B comments on A can be a bit spotty, from what I’ve seen.
As far as I understand, this isn't quite right (unless it's changed recently).
If A defeds B, then A no longer sends new posts to B, accepts comments or posts from B users, or receives new posts from B. Any comments from B users on A's old posts (made before defederation) are no longer acknowledged by A.
I think A users can still interact with B's posts, but then I haven't seen any beehaw users in forever. So perhaps not?
C can obviously still interact with both A and B posts normally. On posts from C, both A and B users can still interact.
So, in short defederation creates a hard wall preventing interaction between A and B. The only way A and B users can interact is on C.
It's unfortunate as beehaw would have benefitted from a uni-directional defederation (i.e. preventing .world users from posting on beehaw, but not preventing .beehaw users from posting on .world. Unfortunately, it's both.)
So it is a two way wall if only one side defederates
It may have changed in the last few months, but I specifically recall seeing hexbear user comments on lemmy.ml posts well over a month after the one-sided defederation while on my sh.itjust.works account. I checked from at least 3 separate instances, lemm.ee, .world, and .works, as it was more than a little confusing for me. That’s also how I learned about spotty comment federation.
Ah that makes sense thanks