5 ms·

Let's welcome Meta, not block them

56 points by ingve 3y ago

gardenfelder 3y ago
The author of that piece has a github repo, which includes a draft of a book "indie microblogging" [1] [1] Draft of a book on microblogging https://github.com/microdotblog/indie-microblogging/tree/master https://github.com/microdotblog/indie-microblogging/tree/mas...
PaulHoule 3y ago
I am concerned about the load on servers if the fediverse expands 100x in a year, that is, will current servers be able to handle all the API calls that “Threads” could generate. On the other hand, one thing you notice right away with the fedi is that there is a lot of blocking going on and people saying things like “don’t use Lemmy” because they don’t like something that happens on the main Lemmy server and it can be pretty offputting to the newcomer…. And makes me wonder if everybody is going to block everybody else if it goes on long enough.
- pgeorgi 3y ago
  Load on the servers scales by messages processed for the users on any given server. As long as these are mostly humans, there's a limit in the amount of activity per user and so the worst case would be that servers stop accepting new users.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  First on Mastodon, now on Lemmy, quick growth was followed by a wave of defederation because the moderators couldn't handle the load of new users. Mastodon eventually got better moderation tools and with the attention put on Lemmy and Kbin I expect those to get better tools soon as well. If Facebook does join the Fediverse, only the largest instances with sufficient moderators will end up federating with them, or the servers that just don't care (and probably already got defederated because of that). Facebook definitely won't moderate their users sufficiently. In the end, I think the impact will be minimal. Based on current rumors (actual talks are under NDA), Facebook is currently arranging unidirectional federation with only the very largest servers out there. Small servers that can't moderate the influx of users won't be federated with in the first place.
RobotToaster 3y ago
I'm doubtful meta will actually implement activitypub support. They do a lot of protect their walled garden, just trying to get basic facebook API access is a pain. Activitypub support would effectively remove all the walls they have in place.
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  This is a new service, and Facebook wants to beat Twitter. They're not removing any walls because there isn't a garden yet.
  - RobotToaster 3y ago
    Oh, that makes more sense, I've seen a few articles that implied they were just going to bolt it onto instagram or facebook.
    - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
      Sorry, to be clear I have also read (and I expect that) it's going to be a part of Instagram. But it's a new offering, something Instagram hasn't done before. I don't expect standard Instagram image posts to be federated.
- vidarh 3y ago
  The rumour is that lots of big instance admins are being courted to sign up to work with them, so it seems they're very much still trying to protect their walled garden.
  - delfinom 3y ago
    I feel their entire goal is to use Mastodon to seed their service with content. Within a few years they'll cut off Mastodon to maximize profit.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
TheCycoONE 3y ago
At one point everyone was supporting xmpp in their closed chat platforms too (including Facebook) - until they weren't. Cynically this is either required to show compliance with the Digital Markets Act or it's embrace,extend,extinguish to launch their new product.
- warning26 3y ago
  I do remember how FB supported XMPP until it didn't, and I was pretty annoyed when they dropped support. At the same time though, I don't understand how this is an argument against them supporting ActivityPub. Isn't it better that they supported an open standard at all? At least we got to enjoy that brief golden era when we could FB Chat via Adium.
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    Because the connections with people using the facebook client died when they dropped support. Now you have to experience the loss of connections or move platforms to continue the conversation. Most moved, many tried to use many protocols at once while other friendship just died.
    - warning26 3y ago
      > Because the connections with people using the facebook client died when they dropped support Right, but those connections never would have happened anyway if they never supported XMPP, so by killing it they just reverted to the status quo.
  - srgpqt 3y ago
    Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
tsuujin 3y ago
Have we leaned nothing from XMPP? If Meta comes in now it’s far more likely that it isn’t going to enhance ActivityPub, it’s going to eat it.
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  I want to be able to use Mastodon to talk to as many people as possible. I'm really failing to see how that's a bad thing. I'm not going to stop using Mastodon.
  - WorldMaker 3y ago
    That was the brief glory of XMPP ("Jabber") mentioned above. There was a couple years where you had nearly every Gmail user and Facebook user (and more) available in the IM client of your choice via XMPP, and then the "next day" where everyone was gone, XMPP was a ghost town and declared "dead" and you again needed separate apps to talk to "Google friends" versus "Facebook friends" versus the other two nerds that even knew what XMPP was in the first place and were too strong advocates of open standards to install new apps. Sure, it was mostly just the three of you that knew what was lost when you had to install new apps when XMPP "died", but it was clear what murdered it was the dozen or so friends that used XMPP before all that but "chose a side" and were now "Google friends" or "Facebook friends". You may not plan to leave Mastodon, but there's lots of people "just waiting on that Bluesky invite" or "I'd prefer to use Facebook if they supported ActivityPub" and there is a real fear that "everyone" will choose sides again and the sides won't really include Mastodon because Mastodon doesn't have a marketing budget and Mastodon isn't "cool" and Mastodon is "too nerdy". We can't say for sure that it would happen again that way, but it is dark reminder that it happened once in a big way and that some of the same culprits were there when it happened.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      > "I'd prefer to use Facebook if they supported ActivityPub" This seems a very unlikely thing. The relatively few people on Earth who might say that seem unlikely to say it.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tedunangst 3y ago
How in the world would a direct message leak to Facebook if you don't send it to Facebook? Seems like a pretty serious security issue that should be addressed regardless of how you feel about Facebook.
- Zambyte 3y ago
  Direct messages are between you, the recipient, and the admins of your server, and the recipients server. The latter two are not obvious, and are a security flaw in ActivityPub.
  - kibwen 3y ago
    > The latter two are not obvious, and are a security flaw in ActivityPub. Any message system that is not end-to-end encrypted is going to have this property. By all means, inform people of the importance of end-to-end encryption, but there's no reason to conclude that this is the fault of Mastodon or ActivityPub, nor is there any reason to conclude that somehow they are uniquely responsible for informing users of this thing that has been obvious for ages to anyone who knows anything about encryption. Facebook can read your Facebook DMs, Reddit can read your Reddit DMs, Twitter can read your Twitter DMs, GMail can read your emails.
    - Zambyte 3y ago
      > Any message system that is not end-to-end encrypted is going to have this property. Yes, but in a different sense. I use Mattermost for some chatting. Mattermost is not E2EE, nor is it federated. I only have to trust my admins with my private messages, because the recipient has the same admins. In a federated environment, I may trust my admins, but it is not particularly obvious that I must also trust the recipients admins. > GMail can read your emails Only if I send an unencrypted email to someone who uses GMail. Which yes, is the same security flaw that is being described in the post. None of the other things you listed are federated. They should also not be trusted, but that's more obvious.
ineedasername 3y ago
This is justified in the post by: 1) saying it could help mastodon achieve much more significant growth And 2) privacy issues are somewhat moot because much mastadon content is already public I strongly disagree with these two premises being sufficient to justify the claim that meta should be embraced. Addressing #2 first: there is so, so much more to Facebook’s negative activities and data gathering than harvesting public-facing data. As such, #2 does not come anywhere near to justifying #1 as being worth the huge downside risks if such a move.
- WorldMaker 3y ago
  I'd add to point 2: I like the "restaurant" analogy. Sure the "restaurant" (most of ActivityPub) is "public" but that doesn't make the conversations inside the restaurant any less private to their participants. In a real restaurant eavesdropping without consent could get you punched or worse. We haven't built the technology to remotely punch corporate employees data gathering for ads and worse so in the meantime, it shouldn't be a surprise that many Mastodon norms are to block/defederate from instances you believe to be eavesdroppers. As for point 1: who cares about growth? Mastodon doesn't need "growth". It's not a single VC-backed entity in search of growth over anything else. Some of my favorite instances are all about restricting growth and being very mindful of the number of people allowed to be around.
  - afavour 3y ago
    IMO the restaurant analogy simply isn’t correct. I don’t sit in a restaurant and shout “I like steak!” as a prompt to see who else in the room might want to talk to me about it. Social networks like Mastodon and Twitter are public (unless your account is private, naturally). Talking to and connecting with eavesdropping strangers is expected.
    - rascul 3y ago
      > I don’t sit in a restaurant and shout “I like steak!” as a prompt to see who else in the room might want to talk to me about it. But have you tried?
lapcat 3y ago
> in Micro.blog we had to disable cross-posting to Facebook after they burned us with API changes Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice... As soon as Facebook becomes the largest ActivityPub provider in the world, it will effectively own the protocol, and then all the tiny servers will have to conform to however Facebook wants to mangle it for its own purposes, or they'll be cut off. Ultimately, they'll probably be cut off in any case, as soon as Facebook has bootstrapped its own microblogging network and has no use for partners anymore.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  > and then all the tiny servers will have to conform to however Facebook wants to mangle it for its own purposes, or they'll be cut off. ...okay? The status-quo seems to be that they're fine with being cut off. This article wouldn't exist if the knee-jerk reaction wasn't to defederate immediately. Hell, as-is every current Fediverse user is fine without Meta integration - it doesn't exist yet. Scaremongering a future without Facebook in the fediverse is not a effective boogeyman. As soon as Microsoft became the largest Git provider in the world, they didn't stop people from using other Git hosts. As soon as Google became the largest email provider, they didn't ruin the spec for personal gain. We assume a lot of ill will because we hear $BIG_NAME, but I don't really see a path forward where Meta strongarms the community into doing something unfavorable. The worst they can do is say "we're doing $BAD_THING with your publicly available posts!" and get shame-blocked by all the major instances. The people who had them blocked from the start won't even have any leverage to barter with.
  - jrockway 3y ago
    I think a lot of people on HN would disagree with your assessment on email. Every other article is how "my startup sent an ad to everyone on HN and now nobody at the company can email Gmail users anymore". That's kind of an extension of RFC8222 that Google made themselves. It's good for end users, but it does make a lot of people mad. Back when there wasn't one central email provider, you could still reach users that had less aggressive spam filtering settings. If you made Hotmail mad, you could still reach Yahoo! With one provider, you screw up once, and you're dead. (As someone who once ran my own mail server on a consumer DSL line, I don't miss this world at all. For incoming mail, I eventually deployed the nuclear option of greylisting and man that broke a lot of stuff. For outgoing mail, all I ever did was send an email, watch it bounce, and then plead my case to the various denylist providers. It mostly all worked though!) "You use Firefox? Oh. It worked in Chrome." is another similar thing; people have to emit Chrome's version of HTML or users won't be able to use their website. And then fixing your site for Firefox's quirks ends up being pushed down the priority list to zero. The Free browser ends up losing out to the Corporate one, even though they both ostensibly support the same HTML standards. That makes a lot of people feel icky. It's reasonable to think that any sort of federated system that gets popular will have rules, restrictions, and quirks put in place that the original creators didn't really think about or care about. I think that's where the comment is coming from, but I also think it's inevitable either way. Right now, people say "Let's use ActivityPub because it's cool", but if it becomes too cool, then it will be "Let's use ActivityPub so that we can reach the 3 billion Facebook users". And then you'll only test your code against Facebook, and will be sad when they block you for spamming. Just like email, just like browsers. It's the way of the Universe. But, that means the only alternative is "let's never become too cool" and that doesn't really work either. You can die in obscurity, or you can become beholden to a behemoth. I guess it's possible that decentralization eats the world and Facebook fades into irrelevance. It's already doing that anyway, as people discover "cooler" centralized platforms. To appeal to the masses, there will always have to be something that appeals to them and "I can self host it!" or "My provider can't be subpoenaed by the FBI" are probably not the sort of features that are making ordinary people beat a path to your door.
redleader55 3y ago
How about a peering contract like ISPs have? Meta pays for peering - unit being posts read by Threads users from a specific instance and that instance pays for posts that a user from that instance pulls from Threads. Costs for hosting will be covered and maybe authors get a share of the instance profit
spacebacon 3y ago
Meta has a history of giving up front and taking with opportunistic timing. FB will absolutely devour ActivityPub. It’s silly to think otherwise.
bhouston 3y ago
Mastodon has a strong hipster-like community which views Mastodon cool only if not everyone can have it. Thus they want to keep it niche and not mainstream. But the future is decentralized protocols for social and this future will happen regardless. I like Mastodon but the exclusive hipster mentality isn’t great.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  The hipster community is what made it possible. It encourages a separate community and provides the fuel to create something without doing it for money. The non-hipster population is much larger but hasn't created a decentralized community.
esbeeb 3y ago
The author was capable of using the word "embrace", but wasn't clueful enough to meaningfully use the phrase "embrace and extend". So I can't accept his essay as "getting it". A better article would be: "How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)": https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-netwo... ...where the historical example of what happened to XMPP - where Google embraced and extended it - was far more relevant.
- mariusor 3y ago
  > embraced and extended it ... but not extinguished it, I see you are careful to avoid mentioning. Yes, XMPP is doing at least as "fine" as it was before Google started using it seriously.
Jerry2 3y ago
Is it me or does this sound exactly like MS's 'Embrace, extend, and extinguish' strategy? >"Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE),[1] also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate",[2] is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found[3] that was used internally by Microsoft[4] to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
- password4321 3y ago
  This phrase needs a 4th 'e' now for enshitify. Always have to squeeze for cash at the end.
DueDilligence 3y ago
[dead]
nokya 3y ago
"I’ve never trusted Facebook either. But..." aaand, window closed.

56 points by ingve 3y ago

The author of that piece has a github repo, which includes a draft of a book "indie microblogging" [1] [1] Draft of a book on microblogging https://github.com/microdotblog/indie-microblogging/tree/master https://github.com/microdotblog/indie-microblogging/tree/mas...

PaulHoule 3y ago

I am concerned about the load on servers if the fediverse expands 100x in a year, that is, will current servers be able to handle all the API calls that “Threads” could generate. On the other hand, one thing you notice right away with the fedi is that there is a lot of blocking going on and people saying things like “don’t use Lemmy” because they don’t like something that happens on the main Lemmy server and it can be pretty offputting to the newcomer…. And makes me wonder if everybody is going to block everybody else if it goes on long enough.

pgeorgi 3y ago
Load on the servers scales by messages processed for the users on any given server. As long as these are mostly humans, there's a limit in the amount of activity per user and so the worst case would be that servers stop accepting new users.
jeroenhd 3y ago
First on Mastodon, now on Lemmy, quick growth was followed by a wave of defederation because the moderators couldn't handle the load of new users. Mastodon eventually got better moderation tools and with the attention put on Lemmy and Kbin I expect those to get better tools soon as well. If Facebook does join the Fediverse, only the largest instances with sufficient moderators will end up federating with them, or the servers that just don't care (and probably already got defederated because of that). Facebook definitely won't moderate their users sufficiently. In the end, I think the impact will be minimal. Based on current rumors (actual talks are under NDA), Facebook is currently arranging unidirectional federation with only the very largest servers out there. Small servers that can't moderate the influx of users won't be federated with in the first place.

RobotToaster 3y ago

I'm doubtful meta will actually implement activitypub support. They do a lot of protect their walled garden, just trying to get basic facebook API access is a pain. Activitypub support would effectively remove all the walls they have in place.

Wowfunhappy 3y ago
This is a new service, and Facebook wants to beat Twitter. They're not removing any walls because there isn't a garden yet.
- RobotToaster 3y ago
  Oh, that makes more sense, I've seen a few articles that implied they were just going to bolt it onto instagram or facebook.
  - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
    Sorry, to be clear I have also read (and I expect that) it's going to be a part of Instagram. But it's a new offering, something Instagram hasn't done before. I don't expect standard Instagram image posts to be federated.
vidarh 3y ago
The rumour is that lots of big instance admins are being courted to sign up to work with them, so it seems they're very much still trying to protect their walled garden.
- delfinom 3y ago
  I feel their entire goal is to use Mastodon to seed their service with content. Within a few years they'll cut off Mastodon to maximize profit.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

TheCycoONE 3y ago

At one point everyone was supporting xmpp in their closed chat platforms too (including Facebook) - until they weren't. Cynically this is either required to show compliance with the Digital Markets Act or it's embrace,extend,extinguish to launch their new product.

warning26 3y ago
I do remember how FB supported XMPP until it didn't, and I was pretty annoyed when they dropped support. At the same time though, I don't understand how this is an argument against them supporting ActivityPub. Isn't it better that they supported an open standard at all? At least we got to enjoy that brief golden era when we could FB Chat via Adium.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  Because the connections with people using the facebook client died when they dropped support. Now you have to experience the loss of connections or move platforms to continue the conversation. Most moved, many tried to use many protocols at once while other friendship just died.
  - warning26 3y ago
    > Because the connections with people using the facebook client died when they dropped support Right, but those connections never would have happened anyway if they never supported XMPP, so by killing it they just reverted to the status quo.
- srgpqt 3y ago
  Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

tsuujin 3y ago

Have we leaned nothing from XMPP? If Meta comes in now it’s far more likely that it isn’t going to enhance ActivityPub, it’s going to eat it.

Wowfunhappy 3y ago
I want to be able to use Mastodon to talk to as many people as possible. I'm really failing to see how that's a bad thing. I'm not going to stop using Mastodon.
- WorldMaker 3y ago
  That was the brief glory of XMPP ("Jabber") mentioned above. There was a couple years where you had nearly every Gmail user and Facebook user (and more) available in the IM client of your choice via XMPP, and then the "next day" where everyone was gone, XMPP was a ghost town and declared "dead" and you again needed separate apps to talk to "Google friends" versus "Facebook friends" versus the other two nerds that even knew what XMPP was in the first place and were too strong advocates of open standards to install new apps. Sure, it was mostly just the three of you that knew what was lost when you had to install new apps when XMPP "died", but it was clear what murdered it was the dozen or so friends that used XMPP before all that but "chose a side" and were now "Google friends" or "Facebook friends". You may not plan to leave Mastodon, but there's lots of people "just waiting on that Bluesky invite" or "I'd prefer to use Facebook if they supported ActivityPub" and there is a real fear that "everyone" will choose sides again and the sides won't really include Mastodon because Mastodon doesn't have a marketing budget and Mastodon isn't "cool" and Mastodon is "too nerdy". We can't say for sure that it would happen again that way, but it is dark reminder that it happened once in a big way and that some of the same culprits were there when it happened.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    > "I'd prefer to use Facebook if they supported ActivityPub" This seems a very unlikely thing. The relatively few people on Earth who might say that seem unlikely to say it.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

tedunangst 3y ago

How in the world would a direct message leak to Facebook if you don't send it to Facebook? Seems like a pretty serious security issue that should be addressed regardless of how you feel about Facebook.

Zambyte 3y ago
Direct messages are between you, the recipient, and the admins of your server, and the recipients server. The latter two are not obvious, and are a security flaw in ActivityPub.
- kibwen 3y ago
  > The latter two are not obvious, and are a security flaw in ActivityPub. Any message system that is not end-to-end encrypted is going to have this property. By all means, inform people of the importance of end-to-end encryption, but there's no reason to conclude that this is the fault of Mastodon or ActivityPub, nor is there any reason to conclude that somehow they are uniquely responsible for informing users of this thing that has been obvious for ages to anyone who knows anything about encryption. Facebook can read your Facebook DMs, Reddit can read your Reddit DMs, Twitter can read your Twitter DMs, GMail can read your emails.
  - Zambyte 3y ago
    > Any message system that is not end-to-end encrypted is going to have this property. Yes, but in a different sense. I use Mattermost for some chatting. Mattermost is not E2EE, nor is it federated. I only have to trust my admins with my private messages, because the recipient has the same admins. In a federated environment, I may trust my admins, but it is not particularly obvious that I must also trust the recipients admins. > GMail can read your emails Only if I send an unencrypted email to someone who uses GMail. Which yes, is the same security flaw that is being described in the post. None of the other things you listed are federated. They should also not be trusted, but that's more obvious.

ineedasername 3y ago

This is justified in the post by: 1) saying it could help mastodon achieve much more significant growth And 2) privacy issues are somewhat moot because much mastadon content is already public I strongly disagree with these two premises being sufficient to justify the claim that meta should be embraced. Addressing #2 first: there is so, so much more to Facebook’s negative activities and data gathering than harvesting public-facing data. As such, #2 does not come anywhere near to justifying #1 as being worth the huge downside risks if such a move.

WorldMaker 3y ago
I'd add to point 2: I like the "restaurant" analogy. Sure the "restaurant" (most of ActivityPub) is "public" but that doesn't make the conversations inside the restaurant any less private to their participants. In a real restaurant eavesdropping without consent could get you punched or worse. We haven't built the technology to remotely punch corporate employees data gathering for ads and worse so in the meantime, it shouldn't be a surprise that many Mastodon norms are to block/defederate from instances you believe to be eavesdroppers. As for point 1: who cares about growth? Mastodon doesn't need "growth". It's not a single VC-backed entity in search of growth over anything else. Some of my favorite instances are all about restricting growth and being very mindful of the number of people allowed to be around.
- afavour 3y ago
  IMO the restaurant analogy simply isn’t correct. I don’t sit in a restaurant and shout “I like steak!” as a prompt to see who else in the room might want to talk to me about it. Social networks like Mastodon and Twitter are public (unless your account is private, naturally). Talking to and connecting with eavesdropping strangers is expected.
  - rascul 3y ago
    > I don’t sit in a restaurant and shout “I like steak!” as a prompt to see who else in the room might want to talk to me about it. But have you tried?

lapcat 3y ago

> in Micro.blog we had to disable cross-posting to Facebook after they burned us with API changes Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice... As soon as Facebook becomes the largest ActivityPub provider in the world, it will effectively own the protocol, and then all the tiny servers will have to conform to however Facebook wants to mangle it for its own purposes, or they'll be cut off. Ultimately, they'll probably be cut off in any case, as soon as Facebook has bootstrapped its own microblogging network and has no use for partners anymore.

smoldesu 3y ago
> and then all the tiny servers will have to conform to however Facebook wants to mangle it for its own purposes, or they'll be cut off. ...okay? The status-quo seems to be that they're fine with being cut off. This article wouldn't exist if the knee-jerk reaction wasn't to defederate immediately. Hell, as-is every current Fediverse user is fine without Meta integration - it doesn't exist yet. Scaremongering a future without Facebook in the fediverse is not a effective boogeyman. As soon as Microsoft became the largest Git provider in the world, they didn't stop people from using other Git hosts. As soon as Google became the largest email provider, they didn't ruin the spec for personal gain. We assume a lot of ill will because we hear $BIG_NAME, but I don't really see a path forward where Meta strongarms the community into doing something unfavorable. The worst they can do is say "we're doing $BAD_THING with your publicly available posts!" and get shame-blocked by all the major instances. The people who had them blocked from the start won't even have any leverage to barter with.
- jrockway 3y ago
  I think a lot of people on HN would disagree with your assessment on email. Every other article is how "my startup sent an ad to everyone on HN and now nobody at the company can email Gmail users anymore". That's kind of an extension of RFC8222 that Google made themselves. It's good for end users, but it does make a lot of people mad. Back when there wasn't one central email provider, you could still reach users that had less aggressive spam filtering settings. If you made Hotmail mad, you could still reach Yahoo! With one provider, you screw up once, and you're dead. (As someone who once ran my own mail server on a consumer DSL line, I don't miss this world at all. For incoming mail, I eventually deployed the nuclear option of greylisting and man that broke a lot of stuff. For outgoing mail, all I ever did was send an email, watch it bounce, and then plead my case to the various denylist providers. It mostly all worked though!) "You use Firefox? Oh. It worked in Chrome." is another similar thing; people have to emit Chrome's version of HTML or users won't be able to use their website. And then fixing your site for Firefox's quirks ends up being pushed down the priority list to zero. The Free browser ends up losing out to the Corporate one, even though they both ostensibly support the same HTML standards. That makes a lot of people feel icky. It's reasonable to think that any sort of federated system that gets popular will have rules, restrictions, and quirks put in place that the original creators didn't really think about or care about. I think that's where the comment is coming from, but I also think it's inevitable either way. Right now, people say "Let's use ActivityPub because it's cool", but if it becomes too cool, then it will be "Let's use ActivityPub so that we can reach the 3 billion Facebook users". And then you'll only test your code against Facebook, and will be sad when they block you for spamming. Just like email, just like browsers. It's the way of the Universe. But, that means the only alternative is "let's never become too cool" and that doesn't really work either. You can die in obscurity, or you can become beholden to a behemoth. I guess it's possible that decentralization eats the world and Facebook fades into irrelevance. It's already doing that anyway, as people discover "cooler" centralized platforms. To appeal to the masses, there will always have to be something that appeals to them and "I can self host it!" or "My provider can't be subpoenaed by the FBI" are probably not the sort of features that are making ordinary people beat a path to your door.

redleader55 3y ago

How about a peering contract like ISPs have? Meta pays for peering - unit being posts read by Threads users from a specific instance and that instance pays for posts that a user from that instance pulls from Threads. Costs for hosting will be covered and maybe authors get a share of the instance profit

spacebacon 3y ago

Meta has a history of giving up front and taking with opportunistic timing. FB will absolutely devour ActivityPub. It’s silly to think otherwise.

bhouston 3y ago

Mastodon has a strong hipster-like community which views Mastodon cool only if not everyone can have it. Thus they want to keep it niche and not mainstream. But the future is decentralized protocols for social and this future will happen regardless. I like Mastodon but the exclusive hipster mentality isn’t great.

ipaddr 3y ago
The hipster community is what made it possible. It encourages a separate community and provides the fuel to create something without doing it for money. The non-hipster population is much larger but hasn't created a decentralized community.

esbeeb 3y ago

The author was capable of using the word "embrace", but wasn't clueful enough to meaningfully use the phrase "embrace and extend". So I can't accept his essay as "getting it". A better article would be: "How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)": https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-netwo... ...where the historical example of what happened to XMPP - where Google embraced and extended it - was far more relevant.

mariusor 3y ago
> embraced and extended it ... but not extinguished it, I see you are careful to avoid mentioning. Yes, XMPP is doing at least as "fine" as it was before Google started using it seriously.

Jerry2 3y ago

Is it me or does this sound exactly like MS's 'Embrace, extend, and extinguish' strategy? >"Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE),[1] also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate",[2] is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found[3] that was used internally by Microsoft[4] to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

password4321 3y ago
This phrase needs a 4th 'e' now for enshitify. Always have to squeeze for cash at the end.

DueDilligence 3y ago

[dead]

nokya 3y ago

"I’ve never trusted Facebook either. But..." aaand, window closed.