OK, been looking at this thread and one thing jumps at me: are we reinventing commercial social media algorithms from first principles here?

Correct, it's worse, you can very much argue that Google had good faith intentions, you cannot even pretend that Facebook does while keeping a straight face

I wasn't talking about our users, i was talking about theirs, a direct mirror of what the author described with XMPP

Fuck, that's how it's gonna go, and i hate it

At this point it wouldn't matter, all they need to do is to mess with the protocol and it'd achieve the same thing, Meta and everything in it's sphere would "work well", but connecting with true ActivityPub servers would work just glitchy enough to annoy their users and point the fingers towards our side, just like it happened with XMPP

But we DO have strong precedents of previous decentralized services/communities destroyed by the presence of huge corporate networks!

This is not just people going "Meta bad! Blocked!" as you seem to be arguing, this is the only possible reaction if we want to keep what has been build alive and not be razed to the ground, many of us saw this with our own eyes, me included, either we stop Meta at the door or the Fediverse is going to die, they have zero intentions or incentive to play the good guests here.

Meta made a secret meeting with signed NDAs with the admins of multiple Matodon instances in preparation for their upcoming Twitter alternative. This of course wasn't taken lightly by people and has caused divisions. This is what i think the best summary of some of the inter-instance drama that happened, maybe the best summary of events in general ever made on the history of the Fediverse

After all the drama revealed on Mastodon by this weekend's shitstorms this feels so damn real now...

Here's the video version for future shitposting

Did a quick check and the admin of your instance maintains privacyguides.org, so it stands to reason to sign

We old-timers are not warning because "it might happen", we're doing it because it has already happened multiple times before

The core of the strategy was delineated by Microsoft when they tried to kill Linux and failed because the strategy was discovered, it's known as Embrace, Extend, Extinguish . And it only failed because of active pushback for years by Linux users.

Have you tried to run your own email server these days? Many have tried for a long time, and end up throwing the towel, because email is now dominated by a few corporations who can decide to reject your small server at a whim, as a sysadmin i've seen this a lot. And email too is an open federated standard, supposedly resistant to failures.

Or XMPP, which was to be the future of chat clients. It was enthusiastically embraced by everyone including Google and Facebook, then once everybody was dependent on their clients they quietly killed support from it.

Let's envision a future where Meta has the biggest share of the Fediverse, the most convenient clients, the most features, like they used to be. That's when enshittification step 2 starts, and they start slowly cutting off anything not under their direct control. Just like they did with XMPP, just like it was done with email. And like WhatsApp and various other things, you don't want to stop using it because you now rely on it for your communication, and when you try to tell people to follow you to the free part they look at you like you're an alien. They won.

This is not flights of fancy, this all has happened before. Yeah, Charlie Brown, Lucy is not going to take away the ball this time. And we continue to warn it because it's bonkers to us that you cannot see it.

Apparently he has a history of behavior that led to mastodon.art defederating from Universeodon, seems to be a true techbro (P92 is the Meta thing, he seems to have dollar signs in his eyes at the mention of it)

Essentially at some point in the past few days (we don't know when for reasons that will be clear), it was revealed that Meta had a meeting with unnamed admins of big Mastodon instances, presumably about facilitating their entrance on Fediverse, making them sign an NDA.

Seems like Eugen Rochko, admin of the biggest Mastodon instance (mastodon.social) and maintainer of the protocol was in it, and we suspect that the maintainer of mstdn.social and of Universeodon were in too. We don't yet know who else. I made a post about it with some evidence and more info.

Of course people in the Fediverse are about the least Meta-friendly people you'll find, so that petition sprouted as a reaction, looks like people will outright wall-off any instance connected with Meta.

Since this shitstorm is barely a day or two old there hasn't been that many developments but i imagine that there will be consequences, maybe premature defederation of these instances, forking of the Mastodon code, we don't know yet, we'll see.

Seems like it, the fact that Rochko deleted the message AND purged it from Internet Archive is concerning, saved here.

It's frankly a bullshit excuse, the devs of a handful of apps don't make any sort of megabucks. The prices given were Fuck Off prices, the ones you give knowing they're exaggerated and unreasonable to someone you want to go away. They wanted to just kill them off. The fact that this happened after Reddit out and out neglected mobile access for years until 3rd party apps existed, then bought out one, stripped it for parts and threw it out to make their monstrosity is specially jarring.

I think you mean Digg

And that too is an achievement unlocked! 😄

Been there, done that, got some premature white hairs :P

From what I've seen no one will welcome them

Why hasn't it been done yet?