Join or ignore the anti-meta fedi pact
Join or ignore the anti-meta fedi pact
This is a bit political but i feel this should be looked at. Whatever it's on on the Lemmy instance or the Mastodon instances.
My main concern is about the concept of Embrase Extend Extinguish they could use.
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TL;DR: I do not support joining any "Anti-Meta" pacts, nor do I support defederating from them, unless it becomes truly too disruptive.
I really don't understand the angsts that have arisen from this, or when Tumblr announced they would consider joining the Fediverse.
No one "owns" the Fediverse. The Fediverse is a decentralized network built on a W3 consortium protocol, ActivityPub. You could build the largest application for the Fediverse, be the single and only one to have an application for it, and you still wouldn't own it. Having Meta launch a Twitter clone on it is overall a good thing, this is the exposure that the Fediverse needs to continue growing. Meta's reasoning likely comes down to costs, since it's already established and they won't have to remake the wheel again. Also, assuming they setup federation properly, it'll allow more people to interact across the network and be exposed to more content outside of Meta's control. I see that as a huge positive overall. It would be far better media that everyone flooding to it after Twitter began imploding and not having exactly a soft introduction to it. In that regard, the transition to lemmy seems to have been a bit softer after Reddit imploded, but it's still on a smaller scale thus far. We at least haven't had any of the "I had to join Lemmy because Reddit died, and it made me cry" sort of articles yet about it...
The Embrace, Extend, Extinguish reference comes from what Microsoft tried to back in the 90's when they were attempting to establish themselves as a monopoly. I'm a Linux user, I know this story well... The differences are that Meta launching on the Fediverse doesn't give them control over it. They can either federate properly and have people see content elsewhere, or they can not do so properly and eventually wind up like Gab. They can also fence-sit too, having some features of the Fediverse and their own platform-specific ones, but that will mostly just be an annoyance for people on Meta's platform, and not the other way around. A good example is some of the stuff Mastodon does isn't, or at least wasn't, 100% compatible with the Fediverse either. But, it seems as time goes along, those angsts become less of an issue. I suspect if Meta tries that, it'll ultimately just prove more of an angst for those on Meta's platform than it would for any of us.
Personally, I think having Meta get people introduced to the Fediverse in a soft-landing style is honestly good. But, it'll be up to Meta whether they play the game properly or not. If they do, then we should all benefit from having more people interact across the Fediverse. If they don't then the only ones it ever really harms is those using Meta's service. It's up to Meta to make that choice, let them decide if they will choose the right or the wrong path.
They dont need to control the fediverse, they just need to control the users and content. If everything important starts appearing on meta people will want to federate with them. Fighting against it will be as pointless as trying to get redditors off reddit for more than 1 week. Once they have this monopoly they can change AP to suit them and others either fall in line or lose access.
You bring up windows vs linux but that's not a reassuring thought, despite all efforts put into Linux it's still the second child playing catch up while everyone develops and adjusts for windows first. And Linux has the advantage of being ancient, used by devs everywhere, and recently being backed by valve for gaming, which the 'old' fediverse won't have. Meta just wants to step over old instances and become the @hotmail of email while everyone else goes on the 'unknown' blocked list.
they can change AP to suit them
Not even close to how that works. ActivityPub is a W3 Consortium protocol. It no more belongs to Meta than it belongs to you or I. Meta can either play by the standards of the ActivityPub protocol, they can fence-sit and cause angsts for their own users, or they simply won't. It's as simple as that.
And with regards to Linux, we won the war with servers, with enterprise, with supercomputing, and now Linux is rapidly gaining ground in workstations for the arts. And in the PC marker, Linux hasn't taken off to a massive degree yet, but Windows is currently losing regardless. On track to fall below 50% market share in the next year or two in the US, and fell below 70% market share worldwide earlier this year. Interestingly, there is no clear victor in this, with Apple being the perhaps the biggest vainer, but far from a majority of it, which is perhaps for the best, there need not be one computer OS to rule them all. Regardless, one doesn't win such wars with single sweeping actions, it's the slow and gradual grind advancing towards something better.
You mention Hotmail, yet it's sorta the sad child of email nowadays. That's why I have no fear of Meta being on the Fediverse. They either will play by the standards of ActivityPub and it'll be a net gain for us all by having people be introduced to it in a soft-landing, or they won't, and the only ones who lose are those on Meta's instance. Remember Gab? The only ones affected by their actions to stop Federation (aside from like... 90% of the Fediverse blocking their instance) were those on their instance, the rest of the Fediverse remained unaffected. That's the beauty of the Fediverse, and federation overall. The ultimate loss for not playing by ActivityPub standards is for the instance/service itself, not the rest of the Fediverse.
ActivityPub is a W3 Consortium protocol.
Same as browser standards that google adjusts as it suits them and everyone else like firefox has to fall in line or be incompatible?
And I just used hotmail as an example, it can be gmail or even protonmail. The point is, you will not be hosting an email service from your rpi at home. The same could be true for fediverse if in 5-10 years it is dominated by meta, google and ms. I think that's the potential fear with them coming here, not just stealing data that is already public anyway.