10 ms·

I think the real danger for the Mastodon/greater Fediverse community is that, should Mastodon really become the "next Twitter", it will catch the attention of t

by xg15 4y ago

I think the real danger for the Mastodon/greater Fediverse community is that, should Mastodon really become the "next Twitter", it will catch the attention of the other FAANGs. And the way the Fediverse is structured currently, it appears highly vulnerable to the old Embrace/Extend/Extinguish playbook: 1) Establish a corporate Mastodon server and deeply embed it into your existing platform. ("We love the Fediverse! We love it so much that we've built native support for it into Google mail. That's right! Starting tomorrow, every @gmail address is also a valid Mastodon user! No need to sign up anywhere, you can just follow and toot and boost right from your Gmail app!") 1a) Think influx of a few 1000s of users is bad? How about a billion? [1] 2) Bombard the community with proprietary extensions and attempt to take control of the technical standards. ("We love ActivityPub too! That's why we're planning to add YouTube integration to it! And Google Calendar invites! And Maps locations and advanced emotes and and and... Developers of servers and third-party clients are encouraged to follow our new ActivityPub Extensions living standard. Feedback is encouraged!") 2a) Non-FAANG server admins or client devs now have the choice between continuously playing catch-up on technical features they have to implement or tolerate that a large part of messages become incomprehensible to non-FAANG users. 3) Pull up the drawbridges. ("While ActivityPub is great, we feel that ultimately it limits the platform's potential and does not meet our standards for privacy and security. Therefore, ActivityPub will be sunset at the end of the year for @gmail.com. Third-party clients and servers are invited to implement our web API instead. Just register your server as an app in the API console and apply for a key...") I think the Fediverse community would do good to think up strategies how to counter EEE takeovers right now, because if at some point Mastodon becomes big enough that there is money or influence to be made by controlling the platform, then someone will try a takeover, sooner or later. [1] https://financesonline.com/number-of-active-gmail-users/ https://financesonline.com/number-of-active-gmail-users/

andridk 4y ago
XMPP :'(
- lupire 4y ago
  The kids today don't know that their futurology is actually history.
- anthk 4y ago
  That's for private IM save channels, Mastodon and all of the Activity Pub it's for public showcasing.
- berkes 4y ago
  While I love XMPP, it suffered from being just too early. And therefore lacking crucial features like e2e encryption, voice, video, etc. All of those are "possible" but all as afterthought, plugin or bolted on. Never a natural part of the core.
  - f1refly 4y ago
    xmpp doesn't really have a core - even the messages are more or less an extension. The whole point of xmpp is "each to his own extend", so your "missing features" are in reality "nice addons that most clients have but if you'd like to bring your own homebrew that's fine too" which is how I think more networks should operate. Have the features, but gracefully fall back when the client's don't support them.
  - zaik 4y ago
    The core is deliberately small and is meant to be built upon and not be a opionated and monolithic. Such a protocol will become obsolete rather quickly if standardized. The features you mentioned are not just possible in theory, but have been implemented by more modern clients.
squarefoot 4y ago
Please don't give ideas to the enemy:) Anyway, could they trademark the Mastodon name and logo, so that a 3rd party partially incompatible client should be forced to identify itself as something else avoiding confusion? This would bring the next question: can Mastodon (the real one) nodes protect themselves against "compromised" ones?
- coldacid 4y ago
  >can Mastodon (the real one) nodes protect themselves against "compromised" ones? Yes, you can always defederate from other instances if you want. In fact, a lot of fediverse instances do just that to protect their hugboxes from the rest of us who actually value our ability to communicate with each other. And there are certainly a number of instances that defederate from others on technical grounds rather than social ones.
  - eddieroger 4y ago
    > hugboxes I'm sure there's a nicer way of saying that. I've worried that I would end up in an echo chamber of my own on there, but saying things like "hugbox" are unnecessarily rude to people who have tended to prefer isolation because of the effect the world has on them. We can't choose how others react to content, but we shouldn't chastise them for wanting to protect themselves from harm, even if we don't agree with the definition of harm.
    - mcv 4y ago
      I think hugboxes sound nice. It took me a moment to realise it was meant pejoratively. I guess the most famous "hugbox" in that sense, is Truth Social. In any case, instances full of trolls, spammers and nazis also tend to get blocked by others who prefer to communicate normally. Blocking serves a useful function. If FAANG servers show up, I'm sure some would block them out of principle. Others once they start breaking the protocol.
      - UncleMeat 4y ago
coldacid 4y ago
I would expect that Google would quickly get the Gab treatment if they decided to go fedi (that is, everyone preemptively blocks/defederates from them before they even have AP support enabled).
opan 4y ago
Pixiv already did the first thing, All pixiv users have a Pawoo mastodon handle. I think it helped bring a lot more Japanese people to fedi.
- astrange 4y ago
  Pixiv doesn't own them anymore so not sure if that still happens, but I do know Japanese users can't reach a lot of the rest of the universe because admins like randomly blocking their entire servers. https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1589188383376834560 https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1589188383376834560
  - easrng 4y ago
    It's not "random". Some servers have legal concerns about the art they host, but also last I checked their moderation in general wasn't great (not sure if it was a "no english-speaking moderators" problem or a "we don't care" problem though.)
  - odessacubbage 4y ago
    the reason is because pawoo and baraag are de-facto lolicon servers with neither the censorship requirements of pixiv or the content moderation of twitter. servers in different countries are going to have different laws and different cultural mores so you will no longer have the twitter model of curating the world's content by the standards of California progressivism which will probably also result in a far more fractured set of communities. considering the kinds of harassment artists are subject to on twitter, i don't even know if that is a bad thing.
    - astrange 4y ago
      My average Twitter moderation experience is getting an email back saying my reported tweet from RomanStatue1488 saying “The Jews took this from us” with a picture of 50s nostalgia art didn’t break any rules. (Direct quote.) California has little to do with it. You won’t be nearly as happy with a site run under the laws of a non-US country though.
  - 4y ago
croisillon 4y ago
I love how you wrote the corporate blogs, it sounds so real!
FlyingSnake 4y ago
This sounded like a script of Black mirror, corporate edition.
- r00fus 4y ago
  That's because it's actually not-so-distant history (e.g.: Microsoft)
rolenthedeep 4y ago
While this is an entirely plausible (even likely) idea, I don't think it would play out that way. Fediverse is literally built of, by, and for people who hate this kind of corporate bullshit. In this scenario, Google will be defederated from the rest of the network, along with all their users. Just this week, some random person decided to start indexing every post on the mastodon network. The backlash to this was incredible. A lot of servers blocked this instance, and the guy got banned within hours of announcing his indexer. I think the core culture of the fediverse is sufficiently anti-corporation that it will be extremely difficult for someone like Google to corrupt it.
- jefftk 4y ago
  > some random person decided to start indexing every post on the mastodon network. The backlash to this was incredible. A lot of servers blocked this instance, and the guy got banned within hours of announcing his indexer The next person will do this without announcing it, in a way that just looks like a server full of lurkers. When you have a protocol that's all about broadcasting things to anyone who asks to be notified, it's very hard to enforce "no indexing". I also see Mastodon posts showing up in search results, so it looks to me like indexing is already happening: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22How+I+write+chord+charts%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22How+I+write+chord+charts%...
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    A lot of lurker-only servers tend to get blocked, too. Some instances check every follow/follow request and block if anything looks off, including "lurker only". > I also see Mastodon posts showing up in search results, so it looks to me like indexing is already happening Mastodon has a configurable robots.txt. Some instances are fine with search indexing their public timelines. The big thing is instances can want their public timelines indexed but not their "followers only" timelines.
    - jefftk 4y ago
      > Some instances check every follow/follow request and block if anything looks off, including "lurker only". That's rare, though, right? Since there's often a ton of following going around, especially now? It's probably also not that hard to make something that easily passes those sorts of quick checks? > Some instances are fine with search indexing their public timelines. Which then means anything of yours that gets boosted by someone on a server like that will be indexed.
Adrock 4y ago
Yes! This is why counterantidisintermediation [1] needs to be deeply considered in social systems design. I really enjoyed Dmytri Kleiner’s "You can't code away their wealth" talk [2] introducing the concept. [1] https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Counter-Anti-Disintermediation https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Counter-Anti-Disintermediatio... [2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FEU632_Em3g https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FEU632_Em3g
- LesZedCB 4y ago
  this is really interesting thanks for the links! venture communism isn't an idea i've come across and i'm intrigued. i dont think capitalism can abide being bought out and transferred by a bunch of anti-capitalist actors but its a new project and that's good!
- rusk 4y ago
  Really interesting thanks!
shortformblog 4y ago
This is 100% what Substack is doing to email newsletters right now. It doesn’t look exactly the same, and they’re not doing it with technical standards but with additional features, but the framework is very similar. They’re on step 2.
acheron 4y ago
You can just say "Google". I don't think Netflix or Amazon are going to be trying to take over any kind of social network.
- berkes 4y ago
  I wouldn't be suprised to see ActivityFlow™ or such at AWS, some PAAS activity-pub server that can be connected to lambda, kinesis, etc etc to "add your product to the fediverse - infinately scalable (€0.002 per in- or outbox activity)". Naturally, that would be a proprietary service. Or a service lifted off github and extended - the patches never streaming back upstream.
cf 4y ago
This is kinda what happened with Mastodon wrt to ActivityPub. Lots of what the Fediverse means is how Mastodon chooses to use the protocols. Often in ways that aren't even compliant with the specifications. So yep EEE is highly viable as an attack.
ignoramous 4y ago
> 1a) Think influx of a few 1000s of users is bad? How about a billion? [1] Imo, that's a W for Mastodon, not a L. > I think the Fediverse community would do good to think up strategies how to counter EEE takeovers right now, because if at some point Mastodon becomes big enough that there is money or influence to be made by controlling the platform, then someone will try a takeover, sooner or later. That's exactly what happened with email, but haven't folks at Matrix/Elemental built a nice playbook to tackle this? Mastodon can and should be its own company. Today, it largely remains a work of just one eng, and incredibly so!
- Vinnl 4y ago
  Wait, what's Matrix's countermeasure to this? That sounds interesting.
  - ignoramous 4y ago
    I am possibly simplifying a bit too much, but: Build world-class products around their protocol themselves!
    - Vinnl 4y ago
      I mean, if that's it... Imagine WhatsApp or iMessage allowing their users to talk to Matrix, but not make it as easy to find people there as on their own services. People who might've been tempted to join Matrix before would probably no longer be, because they'll feel they can get all that with their existing service, while they'd still pressure Matrix users to join that service because the experience is subpar from their perspective.
      - ignoramous 4y ago
        True, network effects are hard to beat, but one better hope the network builds around the product one themselves built around their federated protocol.
      - Arathorn 4y ago
FormerBandmate 4y ago
Truth Social, one of the biggest private Twitter competitors with 4 million users (although obviously not appealing to Muskfugees because it’s essentially a playground for Trump and his supporters), is literally just a Mastodon instance with federation removed. It’s already happening
- djvdq 4y ago
  IIRC the same situation is with Gab
  - janv 4y ago
    The difference is that Truth Social never intended to federate, while Gab was defederated and isolated by the community. You can still federate with Gab if you own your server.
    - djvdq 4y ago
      Yeah, of course you're right. I just meant that Gab is also just a Mastodon instance, what people might not know. I should've been more precise in my previous comment.
MR4D 4y ago
While I believe you are mostly correct, a technology that allows for competition is better than one that does not (eg TWTR,FB) Edit added: email is an example. Pain in the butt to not be on MSFT, GOOG, etc but at least it’s possible.
xnx 4y ago
Everyone pointing out the examples to email are exactly right. If Google hadn't botched the Buzz launch, this would've been a perfect time to introduce it.
derangedHorse 4y ago
This is a valid use case for a corporate instance of a server. If a big corporation did invite a mass of users to the platform, it would still be a win for the platform in my book. The platform itself doesn't specify any restrictions on big servers just because the owners of these big servers are bringing in new users that they have influence over. Deeming a valid utilization of a platform as a 'real danger for the Mastodon/greater Fediverse community' misses the point.
- mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
  Do you mean for private internal communications? Like as a slack replacement?

by xg15 4y ago

andridk 4y ago

XMPP :'(

lupire 4y ago
The kids today don't know that their futurology is actually history.
anthk 4y ago
That's for private IM save channels, Mastodon and all of the Activity Pub it's for public showcasing.
berkes 4y ago
While I love XMPP, it suffered from being just too early. And therefore lacking crucial features like e2e encryption, voice, video, etc. All of those are "possible" but all as afterthought, plugin or bolted on. Never a natural part of the core.
- f1refly 4y ago
  xmpp doesn't really have a core - even the messages are more or less an extension. The whole point of xmpp is "each to his own extend", so your "missing features" are in reality "nice addons that most clients have but if you'd like to bring your own homebrew that's fine too" which is how I think more networks should operate. Have the features, but gracefully fall back when the client's don't support them.
- zaik 4y ago
  The core is deliberately small and is meant to be built upon and not be a opionated and monolithic. Such a protocol will become obsolete rather quickly if standardized. The features you mentioned are not just possible in theory, but have been implemented by more modern clients.

squarefoot 4y ago

Please don't give ideas to the enemy:) Anyway, could they trademark the Mastodon name and logo, so that a 3rd party partially incompatible client should be forced to identify itself as something else avoiding confusion? This would bring the next question: can Mastodon (the real one) nodes protect themselves against "compromised" ones?

coldacid 4y ago
>can Mastodon (the real one) nodes protect themselves against "compromised" ones? Yes, you can always defederate from other instances if you want. In fact, a lot of fediverse instances do just that to protect their hugboxes from the rest of us who actually value our ability to communicate with each other. And there are certainly a number of instances that defederate from others on technical grounds rather than social ones.
- eddieroger 4y ago
  > hugboxes I'm sure there's a nicer way of saying that. I've worried that I would end up in an echo chamber of my own on there, but saying things like "hugbox" are unnecessarily rude to people who have tended to prefer isolation because of the effect the world has on them. We can't choose how others react to content, but we shouldn't chastise them for wanting to protect themselves from harm, even if we don't agree with the definition of harm.
  - mcv 4y ago
    I think hugboxes sound nice. It took me a moment to realise it was meant pejoratively. I guess the most famous "hugbox" in that sense, is Truth Social. In any case, instances full of trolls, spammers and nazis also tend to get blocked by others who prefer to communicate normally. Blocking serves a useful function. If FAANG servers show up, I'm sure some would block them out of principle. Others once they start breaking the protocol.
    - UncleMeat 4y ago

coldacid 4y ago

I would expect that Google would quickly get the Gab treatment if they decided to go fedi (that is, everyone preemptively blocks/defederates from them before they even have AP support enabled).

opan 4y ago

Pixiv already did the first thing, All pixiv users have a Pawoo mastodon handle. I think it helped bring a lot more Japanese people to fedi.

astrange 4y ago
Pixiv doesn't own them anymore so not sure if that still happens, but I do know Japanese users can't reach a lot of the rest of the universe because admins like randomly blocking their entire servers. https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1589188383376834560 https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1589188383376834560
- easrng 4y ago
  It's not "random". Some servers have legal concerns about the art they host, but also last I checked their moderation in general wasn't great (not sure if it was a "no english-speaking moderators" problem or a "we don't care" problem though.)
- odessacubbage 4y ago
  the reason is because pawoo and baraag are de-facto lolicon servers with neither the censorship requirements of pixiv or the content moderation of twitter. servers in different countries are going to have different laws and different cultural mores so you will no longer have the twitter model of curating the world's content by the standards of California progressivism which will probably also result in a far more fractured set of communities. considering the kinds of harassment artists are subject to on twitter, i don't even know if that is a bad thing.
  - astrange 4y ago
    My average Twitter moderation experience is getting an email back saying my reported tweet from RomanStatue1488 saying “The Jews took this from us” with a picture of 50s nostalgia art didn’t break any rules. (Direct quote.) California has little to do with it. You won’t be nearly as happy with a site run under the laws of a non-US country though.
- 4y ago

croisillon 4y ago

I love how you wrote the corporate blogs, it sounds so real!

FlyingSnake 4y ago

This sounded like a script of Black mirror, corporate edition.

r00fus 4y ago
That's because it's actually not-so-distant history (e.g.: Microsoft)

rolenthedeep 4y ago

While this is an entirely plausible (even likely) idea, I don't think it would play out that way. Fediverse is literally built of, by, and for people who hate this kind of corporate bullshit. In this scenario, Google will be defederated from the rest of the network, along with all their users. Just this week, some random person decided to start indexing every post on the mastodon network. The backlash to this was incredible. A lot of servers blocked this instance, and the guy got banned within hours of announcing his indexer. I think the core culture of the fediverse is sufficiently anti-corporation that it will be extremely difficult for someone like Google to corrupt it.

jefftk 4y ago
> some random person decided to start indexing every post on the mastodon network. The backlash to this was incredible. A lot of servers blocked this instance, and the guy got banned within hours of announcing his indexer The next person will do this without announcing it, in a way that just looks like a server full of lurkers. When you have a protocol that's all about broadcasting things to anyone who asks to be notified, it's very hard to enforce "no indexing". I also see Mastodon posts showing up in search results, so it looks to me like indexing is already happening: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22How+I+write+chord+charts%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22How+I+write+chord+charts%...
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  A lot of lurker-only servers tend to get blocked, too. Some instances check every follow/follow request and block if anything looks off, including "lurker only". > I also see Mastodon posts showing up in search results, so it looks to me like indexing is already happening Mastodon has a configurable robots.txt. Some instances are fine with search indexing their public timelines. The big thing is instances can want their public timelines indexed but not their "followers only" timelines.
  - jefftk 4y ago
    > Some instances check every follow/follow request and block if anything looks off, including "lurker only". That's rare, though, right? Since there's often a ton of following going around, especially now? It's probably also not that hard to make something that easily passes those sorts of quick checks? > Some instances are fine with search indexing their public timelines. Which then means anything of yours that gets boosted by someone on a server like that will be indexed.

Adrock 4y ago

Yes! This is why counterantidisintermediation [1] needs to be deeply considered in social systems design. I really enjoyed Dmytri Kleiner’s "You can't code away their wealth" talk [2] introducing the concept. [1] https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Counter-Anti-Disintermediation https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Counter-Anti-Disintermediatio... [2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FEU632_Em3g https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FEU632_Em3g

LesZedCB 4y ago
this is really interesting thanks for the links! venture communism isn't an idea i've come across and i'm intrigued. i dont think capitalism can abide being bought out and transferred by a bunch of anti-capitalist actors but its a new project and that's good!
rusk 4y ago
Really interesting thanks!

shortformblog 4y ago

This is 100% what Substack is doing to email newsletters right now. It doesn’t look exactly the same, and they’re not doing it with technical standards but with additional features, but the framework is very similar. They’re on step 2.

acheron 4y ago

You can just say "Google". I don't think Netflix or Amazon are going to be trying to take over any kind of social network.

berkes 4y ago
I wouldn't be suprised to see ActivityFlow™ or such at AWS, some PAAS activity-pub server that can be connected to lambda, kinesis, etc etc to "add your product to the fediverse - infinately scalable (€0.002 per in- or outbox activity)". Naturally, that would be a proprietary service. Or a service lifted off github and extended - the patches never streaming back upstream.

cf 4y ago

This is kinda what happened with Mastodon wrt to ActivityPub. Lots of what the Fediverse means is how Mastodon chooses to use the protocols. Often in ways that aren't even compliant with the specifications. So yep EEE is highly viable as an attack.

ignoramous 4y ago

> 1a) Think influx of a few 1000s of users is bad? How about a billion? [1] Imo, that's a W for Mastodon, not a L. > I think the Fediverse community would do good to think up strategies how to counter EEE takeovers right now, because if at some point Mastodon becomes big enough that there is money or influence to be made by controlling the platform, then someone will try a takeover, sooner or later. That's exactly what happened with email, but haven't folks at Matrix/Elemental built a nice playbook to tackle this? Mastodon can and should be its own company. Today, it largely remains a work of just one eng, and incredibly so!

Vinnl 4y ago
Wait, what's Matrix's countermeasure to this? That sounds interesting.
- ignoramous 4y ago
  I am possibly simplifying a bit too much, but: Build world-class products around their protocol themselves!
  - Vinnl 4y ago
    I mean, if that's it... Imagine WhatsApp or iMessage allowing their users to talk to Matrix, but not make it as easy to find people there as on their own services. People who might've been tempted to join Matrix before would probably no longer be, because they'll feel they can get all that with their existing service, while they'd still pressure Matrix users to join that service because the experience is subpar from their perspective.
    - ignoramous 4y ago
      True, network effects are hard to beat, but one better hope the network builds around the product one themselves built around their federated protocol.
    - Arathorn 4y ago

FormerBandmate 4y ago

Truth Social, one of the biggest private Twitter competitors with 4 million users (although obviously not appealing to Muskfugees because it’s essentially a playground for Trump and his supporters), is literally just a Mastodon instance with federation removed. It’s already happening

djvdq 4y ago
IIRC the same situation is with Gab
- janv 4y ago
  The difference is that Truth Social never intended to federate, while Gab was defederated and isolated by the community. You can still federate with Gab if you own your server.
  - djvdq 4y ago
    Yeah, of course you're right. I just meant that Gab is also just a Mastodon instance, what people might not know. I should've been more precise in my previous comment.

MR4D 4y ago

While I believe you are mostly correct, a technology that allows for competition is better than one that does not (eg TWTR,FB) Edit added: email is an example. Pain in the butt to not be on MSFT, GOOG, etc but at least it’s possible.

xnx 4y ago

Everyone pointing out the examples to email are exactly right. If Google hadn't botched the Buzz launch, this would've been a perfect time to introduce it.

derangedHorse 4y ago

This is a valid use case for a corporate instance of a server. If a big corporation did invite a mass of users to the platform, it would still be a win for the platform in my book. The platform itself doesn't specify any restrictions on big servers just because the owners of these big servers are bringing in new users that they have influence over. Deeming a valid utilization of a platform as a 'real danger for the Mastodon/greater Fediverse community' misses the point.

mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
Do you mean for private internal communications? Like as a slack replacement?