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- cross-posted to:
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- technology@beehaw.org
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It’s all fun and games until Facebook starts adding features, then eventually starts defining what the fediverse should do to maintain federation with Facebook.
Embrance, Extend, Extinguish. Enshittification. Call it what you will, but i don’t think this will end well for us.
This is my biggest fear. The hidden weakness of the fediverse is that the largest implementation gets to set the rules of federation
I disagree. Mastodon does not “set the rules” for federation of Kbin, Lemmy, Funkwhale, BookWyrm, Pixelfed, Peertube, or any other platform in the Fediverse. The platforms are interoperable when it makes sense, but they are designed to fill different needs and it makes no sense for them to follow some centralized “rules of federation”.
Welcome to FOSS software. It’s constantly evolving and forking itself. If Facebook wanted to fork ActivityPub RIGHT NOW, they could.
How would that impact your life at all? You could stay using lemmy and mastodon like you have been.
I think meta just wants to captailize on twitters demise.
I don’t see how crushing activtypub would help them in anyway.
Mastodon is already massive and many companies (and the EU) have their own instance.
You don’t see how crushing their competition would help them?
No? Up until very recently, Mastodon essentially was the Fediverse, and it was laughably tiny compared to Meta. It cracked 2.5 million active monthly users in January, which sounds like a lot until you realize Instagram has 2 billion active monthly users. More importantly, the active user count for the whole Fediverse was in decline since that January number, down to 1.4 million monthly users at the start of June. The Reddit drama drove an increase in users, but no way Meta is agile enough to shove this out the door in response to something that recent. Its not like Mastodon has a glowing public perception outside of the Fediverse, either.
Truthfully, I don’t think Meta gives a damn about the current Fediverse; it’s too small to matter. Whatever their goal, I don’t think we were a consideration.
Activity pub is more than just mastodon, there is book ratings, and also peertube.
I don’t see meta ever going there.
I don’t see meta ever going there.
out of the goodness of their collective hearts? They already sell books (through ads) and host video, why do you think they’d stop after only crushing federalized social media? Because they can’t be bothered?
No I just don’t see meta wanting to compete in those fields
Meta gets paid a fortune to spread disinformation. That’s why they’re doing this.
That is a very real thing they do. I like this reasoning
XMPP did not exist on its own outside of nerd circles, while ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.
Jabber was widely used in the early 2000s and not just among “nerds.” But Rochko would have only been 7+ years old at the time so how would he know that.
The “brand recognition of Mastodon” part makes me think this has to be a joke… right?
yeah, honestly, i think the optimism is somewhat misplaced. we must ensure that proprietary solutions, like threads, are not the main way people interact with the fediverse. it’s better to defederate early and continue in smaller communities while we still can, than to let them seep into every community we have, only for them to pull the plug later and lock everyone into threads.
i think it’s alright to federate with them a little bit, but we cannot allow threads to become the most popular fediverse app
I may be speaking in defense of something I don’t know, but I don’t see a direct problem with other apps (e.g., Threads, Twitter if they change up what they’re doing) to start talking with the fediverse.
The bigger problem is when they start throwing their weight around. The W3C (and groups like Mozilla) have had many strong battles with Google trying weird stuff because they’re the biggest guys in the room (e.g., FLoC).
As long as we can rally behind the loyalist FLOSS geeks, we’ll always be alright.
Yeah, it’s actually a welcome change that they’re federating. However, the way they killed off the last federation we had with XMPP was through the EEE model – they first acted friendly, joined our federation, then they ensured their client would be the best featured, capturing a majority of the people in their user base, and after that they defederated and the community collapsed in their favor. People on non-proprietary solutions had to switch to the proprietary one.
To avoid this, we need to defederate while we’re still ahead. I’d personally draw the line at 25%, but the point is just having it significantly less than 50%. If they defederate before they reach a majority, the community will collapse in our favor, and people with proprietary accounts will be the ones forced to come over here. Worst case, we’ll just exist beside each other as competitors, and in the best case we’ll snuff them out.
We need to be willing to do this to them, because they absolutely will do this to us. Threads is developed by the same Meta who helped kill XMPP a decade ago. (And “helped” only because the main culprit was Google – regardless, they’re not our friends.)
To avoid this, we need to defederate while we’re still ahead. I’d personally draw the line at 25%, but the point is just having it significantly less than 50%
With Meta, the line needs to be drawn at 0%
To avoid this, we need to defederate while we’re still ahead. I’d personally draw the line at 25%, but the point is just having it significantly less than 50%.
Mastodon has 13 million users. In the first few hours, Threads already had 10 million users. That battle was lost before it even started.
Threads is now at 30 million users.
bring on the nukes then
So how do people go about defederating? Is it just a matter of making new servers, or does it require anything else?
I’m happy to stand up against The Man, but it seems like once the masses get involved they don’t feel personally responsible to preserve what they enjoy. They seem to give general consensus to [Big Tech Company], then [hard-working FLOSS developer] comes in later to fix it.
If I’m going to get “political” here, I almost think people need to be sold more on the importance of self-reliance. One prior historical precedent was around the 1750’s about taxation, and that’s had a nearly non-trivial impact on society. People intuitively grasp land ownership, so it should translate to data ownership as well.
it’s a call to instance admins in the first round, they can just add meta’s platforms to their blocklist and be done with it. some will definitely do so, others may refuse. then if you’re not happy with their decision you may switch instances or even spin up your own
Wouldn’t threads be able to garner users just by existing? Meta has enough funds to advertise it effectively to people. I do not see how they could end up with small number of users.
Man who signed NDA with Meta is suddenly gushing about Threads. I know, I know, this isn’t just anybody.
He addressed a few issues very topically but side stepped a major one. What happens if Threads takes off and Meta decides to enforce a trusted partner network by defederating all but a handful of instances unless they conform to Meta’s demands?
After all, if we allow Threads to grow to a successful size, that is where almost everybody will be. It is why Lemmy was a tiny project for a long time until Reddit and Twitter fucked up too badly and for too long. Twitter sucked all the air out of the room for Mastodon. Arguably still does despite itself. And Reddit did the same with Lemmy by simply existing.
Now imagine if Reddit made a Lemmy instance, kept policies around to make it grow large, then cracked down with an iron fist once they had the dominant position?
Eugen considers what would happen if Meta abandoned ActivityPub. But I don’t think would need to happen. They just need to wall off. They can keep the standard.
Another example: Google and RCS. The RCS Android users have isn’t the open standard. Google built a layer of proprietary middleware around it. They fiercely guard API access, which is why only a few “trusted partners” get to use it. And now Google is RCS. There are no more competitors even though it is open.
Because Google sucked all the air out of the room and became the dominant player able to dictate to the rest.
And so, too, will happen with ActivityPub and this whole shebang unless we stop them from being interoperable first. I get Eugen wants this tech to grow and prosper. But you don’t do it by making deals with the devil.
The one thing that you can trust 100% in all of this is that Meta’s intentions are evil, because Meta’s intentions are always evil. They see a new community finding its footing as prey to be seduced with features and then slaughtered for profit. They meet leaders behind closed doors and make them sign NDAs. Next, they’ll start throwing around their unlimited resources to take over.
Immediate and universal defederation is the only answer. It’s the only defense.
From what I recall, it was FB & Google federation of XMPP, and a huge number of various IM bridges that made XMPP usable at the time. I did have my own server, and all the nerd/geek friends I knew (so the vast majority of my friends) did the same. I even set up a servers at $job[-2] for intra-office communication, but still couldn’t get decent buy-in.
These days, aside from a few die-hards, I don’t personally know anyone using XMPP. I even ended up removing my server a while ago, because it had been years since I even launched a client to connect to it and not chat with anyone…
Google Talk was using XMPP from 2006-2013. Facebook Chat was using XMPP from 2010-2014.
It was these two services that killed all the prior messaging apps (and eventually XMPP too), and I was referring to the before-times.
What’s your definition of widely used? Because Jabber definitely wasn’t widely used lol. Like a handful of companies adopted it for internal communication, but other than that it was all tech enthusiasts. MSN Messenger was widely used in the early 00s.
XMPP did not exist on its own outside of nerd circles, while ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.
I love Mastodon and the Fediverse, but to pretend that we are not a nerd circle is a bit disingenuous.
Yeah, it’s a bit naive to think this can’t go the exact same way XMPP did.
Yeah, if he thinks Mastodon is mainstream, he should check again.
Yeah I only hear about Mastodon last year. Found out it’s been a thing since 2016 lol
Textbook hubris.
His blog post will be another cautionary tale to tell in the near future.
Ultimately, people are selfish.
Whatever meta promised him is worth him selling out of his scruples to the community.
I don’t hate him for that, but the dude should at least have the balls to be honest with us that that’s what’s happening here.
Meta joining the fediverse is not a good thing for the fediverse. To say otherwise is to invite ruin.
There’s just more of us this time, but then the rest are also more.
There’s way more nerds these days though, and a more normalized distrust for corporations.
This reads as incredibly condescending, naive and duplicitous, filled with hubris.
For starters, the whole “yeah sure XMPP got EEE’d but who cares, only nerds cared about that, lol” is not only false (e.g. Jabber), but also does nothing to quell concerns.
Here’s an account by someone who was in the XMPP trenches when Google started adopting it.
Notice something? The “omg so cool!”, this is exactly the same as Rochko.
It’s the hubris when you’re a FOSS maintainer who toiled away for years without recognition and now a $700B+ corporation is flattering him by wanting to use/interact with his work.
The blog is a far cry from the anti-corporate tone in the informational video from 2018.
Then there’s the fact that Rochko is extremely tight lipped about the off the record meeting with Meta and consistently refuses to deny having received funds from Meta and refuses to pledge not to accept any funds from Meta.
There’s also the unsatisfactory answer he gave to people who started questioning some dubious sponsors and the fact that he rushed to lock the thread, killing any further discussion.
I genuinely think the dude is just so hyped for the perceived recognition, that he lost the thread.
So much so that he thinks Mastodon is untouchable.
And it’s extremely naive to think that Meta has benevolent motives here or that Mastodon will survive any schemes Meta might have.
What’s more realistic is that Mastodon will die because people will flock to Threads if their social graph has moved over.Similarly these lofty and naive ideas that people on Threads will make the switch to Mastodon once they get a taste of what it has to offer.
So now all of a sudden the “difficulty” to get started in Mastodon, that is keeping people who want a polished corporate experience away isn’t going to be an issue?
Especially when in the “extinguish” phase Meta will have siloed off from Mastodon and its portability function, having to leave their social graph behind?
It’s all so increasingly naive, one can’t help but wonder if it’s intentional sabotage at this point.
Mark my words, this’ll be the end of Mastodon especially when Meta can outspend Mastodon all day every day to add proprietary functionality.
Sure perhaps years from now a few hundred to a few thousand people might still use it, but it will be as irrelevant as XMPP is to most people, and Rochko with it.
@remindme@mstdn.social in 2 years.
I read your comment before I read the blog post and I have to say, I am finding it hard to align it with what’s in the blog.
Aside from the hand-waving comment about XMPP, he does a great job of explaining how everything works, and based on my understanding of the fediverse and its architecture, its all true.
I dont understand what people think should happen here. If a large corporation wants to join, then there is nothing anyone can do to stop them. Its an open protocol. If you want to use Threads, join. If you dont, don’t. If you want your server to defederate, tell your admin or join a defederated instance. If you want to federate, tell your admin or join an instance that’s federated. If you want to control your own destiny completely, self-host.
There is tons of choice here and the way it’s architected, several layers of protection. I dont get this moral panic everyone has. This is quite literally the point of a decentralized social network.
At the end of the day, if a large corporation joining the network, kills it, then it was destined to be destroyed from the beginning.
The problems I personally have with Meta are:
- Data scraping Meta is an ad company and tries to collect as much data from anyone. They are known to make shadow graphs of people not even in their network to try and know as much about as many people possible. This is their business model so they will do it to the fedi.
- Moneyed interests They are going to compensate instances that federate with them, which turns people that run instances from volunteers into business owners. From there they can try and dilute admins further into showing ads etc.
- Sucking users from the fediverse They will make it easy to get in (import with history when mastodon does not support it), hard to get out (if you go, you can’t take your posts) and will hold your connections hostage against you (we will stop fedarating with the other instances now, so if you want to connect to your friends you have to have a threads account, sorry not sorry).
That and basically all the shit big corps do like make people angry and hacking people’s brains to stay on the site for as long as fucking possible. Which they are 100% going to try to do here regardless of our intentions.
They can, and are probably already doing, #1 right now. As are Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, Apple, DuckDuck, OpenAi, etc. All of the comments and profiles are public information which means literally anyone on the web can see it and do <insert nefarious or not nefarious thing here> with it. As the blog post says, they don’t get anything else though like IP or email–only your home instance gets that. Everything else they can already get with their webcrawlers.
#2. There is no evidence that they plan on doing that. This is a slippery slope argument (which is a logical fallacy). And so what if they do that? Don’t join that instance. Migrate to a different instance. Ruud could add ads to lemmy.world today.
#3. Then let those users go. How does that impact you or the fediverse? Are all of your friends on Mastodon or Lemmy now? I seriously doubt it. Do they all need to be? If people leave to go to Threads…then what? They could go to Tildes, Bluesky, or any other service right now. If the service is more appealing and aligns with their values then they’ll leave for it (or join it as well). Who cares? The value proposition of the fediverse is that no one entity controls it and you have nearly infinite choice to do whatever the hell you want. Threads may never federate at all. Part of me wonders why they would. Why would they care about the 12M people on mastodon right now vs the 2.3 BILLION instagram users? If they convert 10% of those into Threads users, they’ll dwarf Mastodon, so what incentive would they have to federate? It seems like it would be more of a headache for them than a benefit.
You can tilt at every windmill you see or you can enjoy the fediverse and make it a place you and your friends want to spend time.
Ultimately the fediverse is still an experiment. It clearly works, and in isolation many of the services (Lemmy, Matrix, etc.) work well enough on their own.
I’m not optimistic about anything at this point. The fediverse might die; it might not.
There could be huge incentives for them to convert Mastodon users over to Threads, based on their internal analytics, in which case the headache would be worth it.
Meta won’t be dead anytime soon, but it’s clear that they’ve made some risky plays, which means their decisions are going to continuously be less risky.
Can’t make money with the information that is public, they need the social connections to people that will see ads. They want to know our interests, and the interests of all the people we interact with. They don’t give a duck about IPs or emails, they can’t monetize those. So they will keep databases on all users and their connections and their interests all so they can show more appropriate ads. If they’re on the connected fediverse they’ll keep all that too, just in case. And any government can get this info if they ask for it.
#2 there is evidence of them wanting to do that. I’ll look up the thread on mastodon later (I’m on mobile rn).
#3 is a difficult one. I really don’t know why they even want this. I suspected it was to get active users on their initial timeline, but I guess that wasn’t that important to them after all. But there is a real chance of them stopping the growth of the fediverse or even minimizing the size and influence, simply to remove a competitor. Everything is better to them than having users calm down in a relaxing social media environment that is non toxic and could make them all obsolete and kill the whole social media industry’s MO
couldn’t they data scrape without creating a new social network platform
Far too many people in this thread seem to not understand that everything they post here is on the open, public internet, and it’s infuriating.
The data is already public. The cat pictures are already public. Those pictures of food you posted on Instagram are public. All of those posts you put on Facebook with your real name and political beliefs and pictures of your family and social security number are public.
It’s only not public if you choose to lock it down with permissions, but all that does is make it public to the corporation you don’t trust. The Fediverse doesn’t have that feature because they already know it’s fucking pointless. Everything is a third-party server and nobody should trust any of the servers they post on.
If you don’t want it to be public, don’t post the message!
Aside from the hand-waving comment about XMPP
“Aside” is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here, it reeks of a nauseating amount of hubris and makes one wonder if they’re suitable to maintain the project at all if they’re so oblivious to potential threats to the project.
I don’t understand what people think should happen here
Not roll out the red carpet for starters, and not engage with the company under NDA would be a good second.
Especially for a FOSS project that receives a healthy amount of contributions from others and likes to tout that it’s co-owned by all contributors, it could be argued that it’s highly objectionable for one person to engage, essentially as a representative, in non-transparent dealings that are sealed under NDA.
It really isn’t rocket science, here’s how the admin of the Fosstodon instance handled it.
Notice the lack of red carpet, the unwillingness to participate in an “off the record” event and the abundance of transparency towards the people he’s responsible for.I’m not saying that Rochko should’ve adopted the same abrasive “lol, get rekt” tone, its up to him if he’s comfortable with that, but the points I’m hammering on about above can be achieved in respectful manner as well.
There is tons of choice here and the way it’s architected, several layers of protection.
There is no protection. As I’ve stated in a different comment, t doesn’t take more than 2 seconds of thinking to see how empty the words are that Mastodon is not at risk.
- Threads federates with Mastodon instances
- Threads uses its massive engineering resources to implement proprietary functionality that’s incompatible with Mastodon instances
- A non-trivial number of Mastodon users jump over to Threads, this is the first wave of people that leave Mastodon
- Threads drops support for federation and silos itself off
- The majority of the remainder of people on Mastodon jump over to Threads because they want to be able to continue to interact with the people that jumped over to Threads and/or because they want to be able to continue to interact with normies now that they’re used to that
- Mastodon is effectively dead, safe for a select few that stick to their guns
3 and 5 will happen in a cascading manner, the more people switch to Threads, the more others will also want to switch.
At the end of the day, if a large corporation joining the network, kills it, then it was destined to be destroyed from the beginning.
Perhaps it is destined to be destroyed.
The concerns and ramifications of a large corporation, or any entity that vastly overshadows the “organic” Mastodon user base in orders of magnitude for that matter, federating with Mastodon have been brought up numerous times by many parties, with the goal of looking for a solutions.
These concerns weren’t only brought up in light of a possible EEE strategy that lead to the death of Mastodon, but also in light of a more Google-esque play where the market share isn’t necessarily used to outright kill, but instead to exert control1.
Every single time it fell on deaf ears (i.e. Rochko ignored it, if not outright killing the discussion), often shrugged off matter of factly that it isn’t a risk.
Also make no mistake, we’re talking about a layered issue here.
A network that can destroy Mastodon against its will due to its sheer size is bad enough.
Mastodon, by virtue of Rochko, facilitating this from within, adds an entirely new dimension to this.1 Google famously bypasses standardization bodies and simply implements their in-house developed standards, leaving other browser engines to get with the program and implement what Google wants, or become irrelevant
Its obvious you have some strong feelings about this and it sounds like they come from you wanting Mastodon and the fedivserse to thrive. I respect that. I’ve enjoyed my time here so far. It would be a shame if it got torpedo’d by a big corp (especially a shitty one like Facebook).
That said, I don’t think anyone has rolled out the red carpet. The FOSS guy’s response is great, but meeting with them cost Eugen nothing(except maybe your goodwill). The fact that there was an NDA is a nothingburger. People sign those ALL-THE-TIME. It doesn’t mean anything nefarious is happening and it doesn’t mean Eugen has “gone to the dark side”. It’s definitely not “rolling out the red carpet”.
I’ve also seen a lot of jumping to conclusions and fantastical strawmen at the bottom of everyone’s slippery slope arguments. A few of your numbered points would fall into that conclusion jumping bucket, and some of your other points are based on an, imo, misunderstanding of the users of the fediverse.
For instance, #3 and #5 don’t give this community enough credit. The bulk of the people on the fediverse are big proponents of free and open internet, privacy, foss, etc. Most are refugees of Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook to begin with–they aren’t just hopping back in bed with Facebook.
And to that point, why would they all of the sudden care about the social media all of their friends are on? I can almost guarantee that their “normie” friends aren’t on the fediverse. The core crowd on Mastodon aren’t going anywhere. The crowd that Threads will attract were never coming to Mastodon to begin with.
Like I said, I just dont get the outrage. Keep on trucking in the fediverse with the community thats here and stop spending so much time Chicken Little-ing.
edit: Oh for what its worth: https://jogblog.substack.com/p/facebooks-threads-is-so-depressing Thats a hilarious read about Threads and why its already pretty lame.
ts obvious you have some strong feelings about this and it sounds like they come from you wanting Mastodon and the fedivserse to thrive. I respect that. I’ve enjoyed my time here so far. It would be a shame if it got torpedo’d by a big corp (especially a shitty one like Facebook).
Of course, I wanted Mastodon and the fediverse to thrive, if only because it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to dethrone corporations that have a complete disregard of people’s wellbeing as long as it turn them a profit.
Mastodon’s figurehead in particular has squandered the opportunity and if not outright self-sabotaged himself.
My main focus thus far has been Mastodon as oppose to the fediverse as a whole, because Mastodon has a unique challenge that other fediverse projects don’t have, namely the social graph.
People visiting Lemmy don’t care and don’t know who the person above and below them is, at most they might care that they’re not straight up Nazi schmucks and preferably they’re someone who has an interest in the topic of the community they’re posting in, but that’s about it.
On a “twitterlike” the identity of the people present is of more importance. Which is why I think in particular Mastodon will suffer the most, without knowing exactly if and how the other fediverse projects will be affected by Threads.
That said, I don’t think anyone has rolled out the red carpet.
I fail to see how this is the case.
Even if we ignore everything else, ignore the severe lack of transparency from the side of Rochko, his refusal to deny that he has received funds from Meta and his refusal to pledge not to accept funds in the future, ignore what could’ve transpired during the meeting with Meta, literally pretend like we are in a vacuum and the only thing related to Meta from his hand is the blog, then the blog alone is a perfect top of the line red carpet that has been rolled out.
I mean he hails it as a victory and ends with a tacit invitation for other corporations to do the same.
Just this quote alone is enough of a red carpet being rolled out:
This is a clear victory for our cause, hopefully one of many to come.
How much more does someone need to be inviting to be considered to have rolled out a red carpet?
I’ve also seen a lot of jumping to conclusions and fantastical strawmen at the bottom of everyone’s slippery slope arguments. A few of your numbered points would fall into that conclusion jumping bucket, and some of your other points are based on an, imo, misunderstanding of the users of the fediverse.
For instance, #3 and #5 don’t give this community enough credit. The bulk of the people on the fediverse are big proponents of free and open internet, privacy, foss, etc. Most are refugees of Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook to begin with–they aren’t just hopping back in bed with Facebook.
And to that point, why would they all of the sudden care about the social media all of their friends are on? I can almost guarantee that their “normie” friends aren’t on the fediverse. The core crowd on Mastodon aren’t going anywhere. The crowd that Threads will attract were never coming to Mastodon to begin with.
Respectfully, this is difficult to read with a straight face after having experienced first hand the effects the Threads launch have had on my Mastodon timeline.
I follow close to 2k people on Mastodon and it used to be that at any given time I could open my timeline and 400+ posts were waiting on me to peruse.
It’s completely dead now, no more than 20 or so posts showed up in total for the entire day, this after a day where there was a sea of people posting a link to their Threads profile.
Safe for a few holdouts I can count on one hand, nearly everyone created a Threads account and they’re more active there than I’ve ever seen them on Mastodon.
If anything, it seems like I gave the people on Mastodon too much credit and I’ve underestimated how strong the network effect is, since I thought it would at least take until the actual “embrace” phase of it all i.e. until Meta would be ActivityPub compatible.
And it’s not like the vast majority of people I follow are normies or anything.
About 90% of them are software engineers like myself not afraid to tinker with things and deal with the “difficulty” of making a Mastodon account.Hell, about a 100 of them run their own instance, one of which is the one I’m on and a good chunk of them are very active in the FOSS community themselves.
Sure, some of it might be because of the hype and novelty, so some might come back, but if anything that proves my point that they’ll happily jump ship if Meta does decide to nix the compatibility in the future.
And this is me being generous, like I said activity by people that moved to Threads has skyrocketed, not only did entire social graphs migrate to Threads, they were made whole again.
People that weren’t seen for ages since leaving Twitter popped up there much to many people’s delight.Most people that migrated to Mastodon wanted a 1:1 Twitter replacement first and foremost and took the ideology as a nice bonus.
These are people that built a support network on Twitter, people that built a professional network on Twitter, people that built a network of peers, in short, a network that was important if not essential to them.
If I take myself as an example, an indie iOS dev, before I left Twitter I used it to stay in touch with friends I had in my industry, other indie devs, engineers at Apple, journalists covering and reviewing apps, local organizations and affiliated people working towards social justice, national organizations and affiliated people working towards social justice and then the rest was purely to ingest information and news.
The purpose of being in touch with these people varied, from comparing notes on how to best do my work, socializing with friends, arranging collaborations on projects, keeping track of what others were working on, promoting my own work, getting help from Apple engineers when I hit a snag, helping people get a job at places that were looking for someone, staying in the loop in case I wanted/needed a job, staying in the loop about local organizing and coordinating with organizers, etc. etc.
I was lucky that I happened to work in a field that is tech savvy and so most of my social graph, but not all, transitioned to Mastodon.
Many people weren’t this lucky and even the people in my social graph that transitioned had a considerable chunk of people that wasn’t entirely enamored by Mastodon.
Personally I welcomed the change of pace, but I couldn’t deny that their gripes were valid.So to circle back to your comments about the core crowd and the crowd that Threads attracts:
The core crowd on Mastodon aren’t going anywhere. The crowd that Threads will attract were never coming to Mastodon to begin with.
Unless you by “core crowd” you refer to what Rochko called “nerd circles”, then I’m afraid you’re wrong on this.
Just as you’re wrong on the crowd that Threads attracts, because not only “were” they coming on Mastodon, they literally were on Mastodon until recently.Somehow this statement by Rochko is now even more laughable in hindsight:
Well, even if Threads abandoned ActivityPub down the line, where we would end up is exactly where we are now. XMPP did not exist on its own outside of nerd circles, while ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.
Not only was Mastodon already heavily slanted towards “nerd circles” at the time these words were published, but it will only become more of a “nerd circle” from here on out.
ActivityPub hasn’t even been enabled on Threads and Mastodon isn’t “where we are now”.edit: Oh for what its worth: https://jogblog.substack.com/p/facebooks-threads-is-so-depressing Thats a hilarious read about Threads and why its already pretty lame.
While a funny writing style, it comes across as uninformed.
As much as I wish it was the shitshow as depicted in that blog post, I’m sad to say that those were for all intents and purposes just placeholder posts, as soon as you start following people you won’t really see those anymore.
Call it Chicken Little-ing, call it FUD, call it whatever you want.
My timeline is dead and pretty much my social graph is happy they’ve found their precious Twitter replacement, so other than a very niche group, I’d say Mastodon is dead.
I might not like it, but I’m not gonna pretend like the blog you linked is based in reality while I stare out the window at the cool kids having fun like I’m Squidward
I disagree with your threat assessment, but thanks for that link, it was indeed a good read.
The sanest comment here.
Excellent post, and it is truly heartbreaking stuff. We know Eugen signed an NDA with Meta which just seals the deal for me given the other refusals to answer basic questions. I think he is probably a person who is finding validation for something he’s worked on for a very long time, and Meta is blinding him. But that’s what they do. They are emotional manipulators by trade.
Mark my words, this’ll be the end of Mastodon especially when Meta can outspend Mastodon all day every day to add proprietary functionality
This is exactly what happened with RCS. Sure, it is an open standard. But Google EEE’d it by adding proprietary functionality using their near unlimited budget and influence, then built it all around their own proprietary middleware, like Jive, to lock out others. Some of the most popular messaging apps, including Signal, had been begging Google for RCS access for years. Google refuses, because they firmly control it now. Only a handful of partners get to access the supposedly “open” standard which Google has co-opted. Sure, you could pour resources into the old, unmaintained RCS standard from over a decade ago. Before Google essentially killed it by moving proprietary and snuffing it out. But then it wouldn’t work with Google’s RCS, and Google’s RCS is what people know as RCS at this point.
Meta will do the same thing with ActivityPub specifically, and decentralized social media in general. They will EEE their way to the finish line. They will wall it all off and prevent account portability and cross-communication outside of a preferred partner network. I could see them walling it off to the Meta-owned properties as they seek ways to further tie Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp together under a common protocol which they’ve EEE’d.
Only a handful of partners get to access the supposedly “open” standard which Google has co-opted.
This is why God invented GPL. With GPL, you don’t get to do that.
For example, right now, IBM is in the process of learning very hard lessons why they don’t get to do that.
Could you explain more about IBM? I’m not as tech literate and I’ve been barely keeping up with the conversations about federation and EEE, what’s going on with IBM?
IBM bought RedHat, and recently decided to take ther code repos for RedHat Enterprise Linux semiprivate. They still have to offer the source code to people they give the compiled product to, but they don’t have to give it publically, even though it is open source. Their claim is that they didn’t like others profiting off their work by rebuilding the source an selling it. Of course RedHat seems to now be ignoring the rather large amount of open source code they didn’t write that they are selling, like the Linux kernel.
Yup, and very little people realize that almost all RCS implementations are by Google (often via their Jibe service).
They are emotional manipulators by trade.
You could say this about literally any big tech company.
Ultimately it’s up for humanity to decide what it values most.
A lot of people are sick of BT, but so many are locked into their services and they don’t have much capacity to change at the moment, so until that infrastructure for switching evolves it’s going to be a while before anything really changes.
It’s just as likely though that there are enough people who are indifferent too, which then implies that BT has a higher likelihood of doing what it does.
Too much is happening right now for any real projection to be made. Best we let this settle for a minute.
The whole XMPP was used by nerds thing really showed how full of hubris he is, agreed.
This is going to end in a disaster, and this blog post from him will be linked at for decades to come to try and warn the next generation the next time we need to do something like this.
And the cycle will repeat.
@remindme@mstdn.social 1 year
For me, I don’t need new fancy features to communicate. I don’t need video chat rooms. I don’t need constant notifications. I just need a simple place to post my social expressions and read other people’s social expressions. I don’t want my experience to be shaped by algorithms designed to keep me engaged and present. For me, social media is like going down to the pub and talking with some regular friends. The BIGGER a platform is, the less it’s about being social, and it’s more about promotion. Promotion of self, events, clubs, companies, etc.
Threads will take away people from Mastodon, but that’s a good thing. Because it will appeal to people who desire a different social media experience. They can take the foam off the top, leaving us with a smaller group that prefers a simpler, less invasive, social media. I don’t have to share all my contacts, my browsing history, my health data or my financial data to Mastodon (or any service in the Fediverse) in order to use it. You cannot say the same about Thread.
I will always side with something like Mastodon over Thread. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe Mastodon cannot fail. It certainly can. But it won’t be Thread that kills it.
My problem is a smaller Lemmy/Mastodon/fediverse means no niche communities. For example, I want to chat about all the individual specific video games I’ve played and I can’t reasonably do that if there aren’t sufficient people on Lemmy to do that with.
As for integration vs no integration with corporation’s bittersweet pill I don’t know my stance in that case. I seem to be getting conflicting information on how healthy this would be for the fediverse. Whatever gets me my niche topic chats, in a solid and usable UI, while avoiding corporate data harvesting, advertising, and political manipulation is what I want.
Can someone explain to me why people are so violently opposed to this?
If Threads blows up, and ActivityPub is integrated, you’ll have access to all of it through any federated instance. No need to let Meta sap all your data to view it or communicate with it’s users. Meta can’t kill ActivityPub or force us onto Threads, just abandon it and leave us back where we are today. If you don’t like the Meta users, just make or join an instance that isn’t federated.
Anyone can scrape the metaverse data and use it for whatever, Meta included. Them implementing ActivityPub doesn’t change anything about that.
Look I don’t like Meta as much as the next guy, but this all just seems like illogical gatekeeping
Edit: I understand now, see: XMPP and Google. Good article someone replied to me with, down below.
Step 1: Threads starts federating with mastodon
Step 2: mastodon users happily engage with threads, letting it become the biggest fediverse instance
Step 3: threads stops federating with mastodon
Step 4: mastodon users switch over to threads where all conversation is happening, leaving the fediverse deserted
More than 5 million people signed up within hours, let’s assume they will have 30 million users by the end of the month. I’m sure there are Mastodon users will consider switching to Threads.
https://www.marketing-interactive.com/meta-threads-garners-5-million-signups-in-first-few-hours
And not to mention the Threads app is a privacy nightmare. I’m sure they can figure out any fediverse user, If fediverse server remains federated with meta server.
One more thing, this mastodon server admin declined an invitation from meta
51 million already
Plus knowing meta, they’ll problary select a handful of instances to federate with. Meaning this plan is stupid.
I’ve spent way too long thinking about this.
I also might be underestimating people’s ability to actaully use a platform. Idk
It’s already happened in the past, it will happen in the future.
But Mastodon has less users than Threads already, if someone wanted to jump ship for more conversation wouldn’t they do it already? Heck, wouldn’t they have stayed on twitter?
Plus if all a lot of people who you follow are on threads then it might be a more attractive option to just switch platforms so you can see their content again after meta defederates
Mastodon.social is the biggest instance
There’s plenty of conversation already existing. Even my single user instance is barely keeping up.
Its not like this is how federation works, federation happens in 3 ways: a person follows a user, thus getting their posts, an instance follows a relay, which gets sent posts and spreads them back out like a vaccum, and 3rd boosting posts.
I don’t see threads changing all that much if people don’t follow those accounts, and or meta doesn’t follow relays and send their posts out through relays.
I can’t figure out what meta wants to actaully do.
I can’t decipher fully.
If your a big instance and don’t want to waste bandwidth, just block them.
If you want meta, block them from the federated timeline if you desire.
No one will guide you in what to do with your fedi instance.
Plus this isn’t like its XMPP or something where people actaully care who they’re talking to. I really don’t.
This article sums it up very well: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
A monopolistic corporation joining a free (not gratis, free as in free software) network is always a hostile takeover.
That was a good read, totally changed my position. Thank you.
Would you consider editing your original post to reflect that :)
I hate this article since it compares to XMPP. A much more accurate comparison would be seething like E-mail, I believe.
I get it… I’m likely going to block meta instances from the servers I have whenever I have time to figure out how to.
I don’t see threads providing any value
How is the comparison to XMPP lacking?
Anyways, the same thing is starting to happen to E-Mail as well: http://www.igregious.com/2023/03/gmail-is-breaking-email.html?m=1
not suprised, E-mail has been on that downward spiral for a while. The only thing keeping that alive is many independent E-mail servers.
Burn me once, shame on you. Burn me twice, shame on me. Big corporations want mainly one thing: gobble up as much value exclusively to themselves. They will take whatever means necessary to get there. The strategies to privatize public resources (XMPP, ActivityPub, etc.) are known. They look great for the public on the outside, but over the years will erode the value for everybody BUT them. In order to not let it get as far, many (including me) are of the conviction to not even give them a finger, let alone the whole hand.
not even give them a finger
i’m willing to give them the “finger”
🖕=👍
It’s only been a few hours and they already have more users than the entire Fediverse did during its peak by yesterday after all of this recent drama. We are already fucked, I salute every one of you as the fediverse sinks.
Oh really?
Still don’t get how their do that while there is already a big coperate backing with mastodon gbmh.
I think what people don’t want is the audience and culture that Threads is likely to bring to the fediverse, not so much Meta itself.
The audience is not the problem. Meta’s mere presence on the network will be. We are now at a critical point in the struggle to survive as a network, and it’s not looking good.
If we continue like today, the network effect (Google it) would eventually lead to ActivityPub being the de facto too-big-to-fail standard in all of the web. We aren’t there yet, though. Meta knows this too and doesn’t want it to happen, because extracting value from a diverse network is way harder than from a centralized user base. The fact that they even want to federate in the first place (shouldn’t be in their interest!) rings alarm bells.
So what do you suggest? Mass defederation from them?
Honestly, there isn’t much else we can do. Spread the word that there are better alternatives to Threads and don’t let them join us. If you prevent “If you can’t beat them, join them.” then that’s a step in the right direction (survival of the network).
I agree. There’s absolutely no way Meta is a good faith actor in this situation (based on, well, everything they’ve ever done up to this point) and if we give them an inch they’ll take the whole thing.
The only thing to be done is an immediate, full−scale shunning by as many communities as possible. Make it abundantly clear that they’re not welcome here, and they can go lie in the cesspool they already made of traditional social media.
I guess the fear (and probable strategy for Meta) is to first establish themselves as just a reliable instance with a closed app (Threads). From there, it’s a slow crawl to bring in the users, from outside but also from other instances. They have multiple tools for this: the infinite budget to develop Threads with exclusive features, just a better app, maybe influencer friendly ad models. The list is infinite.
So where’s the rub? Meta is just introducing activity pub to more users.
The problem is two step: They’ll eventually will lock in the platform from rest of the fediverse. It’ll might be years from now but it’ll happen (unless it’s killed first if course). This hurts rest of the fediverse by making it smaller: They will hook in users that would’ve otherwise chosen another instance and now are in Meta’s side fence which has turned into a wall.
Note: Not an expert, I just like to speculate.
Because history shows big tech companies fuck over competition and that competition is us, regular people.
We’ve gone from not interacting with them to now being their rival and a direct threat to their profits.
Do you remember what happened with gtalk and facebook messenger? They both were based on xmpp. After moving away from xmpp (what both did), I didnt have use for xmpp anymore. Honestly, Meta has given me no reason whatsoever in their whole record of existence to earn my trust.
People are mainly afraid of EEE (Extend, Embrace, Extinguish) playing out agian.
don’t know about you folks but this sounded so arrogant to me:
There was a time when users of Facebook and users of Google Talk were able to chat with each other and with people from self-hosted XMPP servers, before each platform was locked down into the silos we know today. What would stop that from repeating? Well, even if Threads abandoned ActivityPub down the line, where we would end up is exactly where we are now. XMPP did not exist on its own outside of nerd circles, while ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
This is a great read for anyone curious about what happens when a greedy platform that grows at all costs “helps” an open platform.
It’s weird to hear someone say “Google Chat killed Messenger apps” when it is so very clear that cell phones did that all on their own.
I respect this person’s passion, but his history is slanted, to say the very least.
That era was still too early for widespread self-hosting and people were barely discovering all that internet tech. So what Jabber/XMPP offered was still neither appealing nor user-friendly enough.
Moreover, it was Whatsapp that fixed your mobile number as your username that ruined Jabber’s momentum, not Google. Google Talk or Chat had never reached a notable market share.
Same. This was an incredibly weak defense of why this is “totally not the same” as XMPP
Yea, I don’t think the original poster understands why google hurts XMMP, because by that logic once google left XMMP is also let at where it is at before google joined.
The issue with cooperations joining federation is they almost always have better infrastructure, they will siphon users out of the wider network with convenience. Then eventually they will forcibly leave the network with its users, because that makes them more money, at the cost of their user and everyone else on the network as we get less connectivity.
Right, the problem is more the new users - who might even have been on Mastodon/Pleroma/etc. if they didn’t hear about threads - will just go to threads. The EEE stuff comes later, and the article kind of realizes this without realising it - the EEE stuff will come maybe even years later and yet Mastodon will be where it is now. Their growth will be stunted.
Totally sniffing their own farts. The “brand recognition of Mastodon”, someone might want to look at the scoreboard before saying they’re going to win the game.
What we know
Threads is a separate app from Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. This means Threads’ user base will be separate from their existing platforms.
Well that aged like milk…
Aged? The article is recent.
It is a pretty dumb comparison, though. Dude should have done his homework.
Which corroborates Eugen either being really damn naive or a paid shill.
FOSS is the ultimate form of software. It’s like life, it will just get copied and forked and modified, and it will continue to evolve because it’s been set free in the world.
Yeah, Facebook might embrace-extend-extinguish the Fediverse. But on the other hand, it’s not the end of the world if they do. Right now, we have a decentralized platform to post, talk and interact on. If that changes, we will create another one
To me, the most interesting part about this is that the Fediverse is even on
Facebook’sMeta’s radar. It’s tiny. Do they see it as a possible competitor?They see it as free data. Meta will always suck data wherever they can. Remember they have a LLM engine too and lots of money and lots of data to train it on – but more’s even better. They can have swarms of bots trained to spread whatever the highest bidder wants them to spread. They can PR whitewash a brand or a celebrity, they can twist events, they can influence elections.
It was free data to begin with. It’s always been free data. All those internet posts you posted from some lame message board 25 years ago are still there. It’s probably still on Archive.org.
If you’re concerned about your privacy, don’t post shit you don’t want out there on a public forum.
They probably don’t need to make a whole platform to do this, though. Couldn’t they just slurp the data right out of ActivityPub without making Threads? Either way, I’m dismayed that meta is managing to YET AGAIN convince people that this time they’ll be good
Facebook never operated misleading bots. Companies that ran those bots utilized Facebook as their delivery method.
I think it could be a way to get around privacy laws.
Those laws quickly becomes difficult to apply when everyones posts are no longer on central servers owned by meta and instead is copied across thousands of instance owners.
But I think their primary objective is to take on Twitter and get people to use Meta instead. It doesn’t cost them much to start experimenting with the tech, and being first somewhere is always an advantage.
Defederate. Meta would do nothing but rot the fediverse from the inside
The instance I’m on already took that step, and I was thrilled to see it.
Meta needs to be split up at this point, as do many other tech companies.
Yes, once a company is a certain size it has too much power to exploit and do a crappy job of customer service while they do it.
The problem with trying to break it up is that the FTC already allowed the mergers that let them get so big. They approved the purchases of Whatsapp and Instagram. Thankfully the new chair of the FTC seems to understand letting companies get this big is not good and is trying to block these things from happening in the future.
This is why we can’t have nice things. It was nice to be on platforms with no corporate stink for a brief moment.
If you’re on another server, you still have that freedom. Nothing changes unless you want it to.
Yeah, right.
tHeRe’s No fUCkInG waY FaCEBooK wOULd EVER SUcKed Up aLL liFE FRom soMETHinG GOoD aNd tHEN LefT iT tO DiE WheN it’S nO LONgeR uSEfuL U guiZ!
You might want to get your shift key serviced.
When has this happened?
I had heard, of course, that Rochko was in confidential talks with Facebook abiut something. This is disheartening. Facebook is toxic and must be kept out of the Fediverse.
Confidential is something which is not meant to be disclosed, but people gossiping call anything as such that has not been yet divulged to the public.
Partially correct. Your point?
Remember what Google Groups did to Usenet? We should be wary.
Breathe life into an almost-dead format and worked hard to retrieve as much post history as possible? Yeah, I remember what Google did to Usenet. Do you?
I remember it filling groups with non-text posts which could not be read by Usenet clients, among other things.
It didn’t do anything. Usenet still exists and is active in some circles. It’s not very popular, but it’s as alive and well as it always was.
Usenet is still my primary source for uh…discounted media. I’ve had it for so long now I couldn’t even imagine not using it
I’ve looked into doing that myself before, but it seemed like a lot of work and research to get it set up
It’s pretty easy, especially if you have someone (me) that will let you see their setup or help out with any questions. Highly, highly recommend running your server on unRAID.
Can you recommend any good walk-throughs for noobs? I didn’t even know you needed a server lol
You only need a server if you plan to serve the content in a sophisticated way (like Plex). If you just watch movies on your laptop then it’s as simple as downloading the files and opening them.
Unfortunately, getting into usenet is actually not as technically hard as it is practically hard. First, some things to know about usenet:
- You pay for access to a usenet server, which has incredible speeds and doesn’t rely on uploaders. There are many out there, and good ones are easy to find.
- Because it isn’t P2P like torrents, there’s no way for the studios to know who’s been downloading anything. Typically the most they can do is send a DMCA to the servers, who auto-comply. Because of this near-anonymity, a VPN usually isn’t used. The corporations would need to subpoena the server to get any of your info, and they’re usually deliberately hosted in privacy-friendly countries.
- Now the hard part: knowing where the files you want to download exist on that usenet server, because even a small TV episode is often divided into 50+ smaller files. This is where NZBs come in. NZBs are small files that tell your usenet downloader where to find all the parts that create the bigger file. The usenet server you pay for doesn’t provide this service for legal reasons.
- Therefore, you need to also subscribe to an NZB indexer, which is where you search for NZBs for shows, movies, games, etc. Some are one lifetime payment, some are recurring. Good ones usually only open their enrollment during very small windows, so it can be really tough to get into one. This is the biggest hurdle for most people. Even finding out which indexers are out there can be tough, as people generally don’t blab about them in open forums, because they’re the most piracy-adjacent and vulnerable to being shut down.
That said, once you have a usenet server to connect to, and an indexer to find what you want, then it’s as simple as downloading the NZB file with a program like Sabnzbd, which will feel very similar to a torrent client. It downloads the various parts and combines them, so what you end up with is openable by windows (either media or exe). Everyone starts this way, and most users are probably content stopping at this stage too.
From there, however, some people get really advanced with it, like the person above running it on a separate server. There’s software out there that automates TV and Movies downloads based on your preferences and which shows you subscribe to, same with music and even ebooks. Then there’s Plex, which you may already be familiar with and which allows you to use your laptop or whatever to stream your content to phones, chromecast, etc., as well as share your content with friends to stream (requires paid sub I believe). It can be a little daunting to set everything up, but you’re mostly just following guides because it’s the same setup for everyone, minus changes in server URLs, username/password, etc. And once it’s running, it really is beautiful. A show that I subscribe to that airs on say, Wednesdays 8-9pm, is available on my Plex by like 9:30 typically, without me having to lift a finger. I even get a notification on my phone that a new episode is available.
But to be able to transcode streams to multiple people in the house? Requires a somewhat beefy processor. And to keep your huge library of shows for years and year? Requires a lot of storage. Even more so on both counts if you want everything in 4K bluray quality. And it probably needs to be a dedicated machine–can’t be gaming and transcoding from the same rig. But boy is it addicting building up your own enormous streaming service for friends and families haha. I hope you can see now why some people would get carried away with it.
Wow thanks that’s the best breakdown I’ve read! I’ve been torrenting for maybe 15 years and used to collect all the shows I watched until one day my external hard drive died and I lost everything :(
Nowadays I just delete a show after I’ve watched it, so Idon’t think I’ll worry about making my own server yet. I’ve had a look into it and think I’ll start off with NZB Geek as indexer and Frugal Usenet as a server. Drunken Slug seems pretty popular too but they don’t seem to be open for registrations atm
Not much different than torrents. With torrents you’ll need a VPN to connect through, with usenet you need a news server to connect to. Torrents need a client, so do nzbs. You have to go to an indexer to search for torrents, same thing with nzbs. Really the biggest difference is you connect to a dedicated, paid for server instead of a connection of peers.
I should think there are many people who think Google Groups is Usenet, and they have to register with google to post on there. Recently I think they have removed the option to view the source of an article.
Usenet powers my fully automated piracy server still to this day lmao what are you smoking?
Usenet used to do more than just piracy tho. But I don’t think Google groups killed that side of Usenet, did it?
