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> 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-q

> 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.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  I believe you. On the flip side, ActivityPub will never be a successful protocol without big players. If those players aren't pre-established names like Meta or Tumblr, then you're relying on an unrealistic number of third parties to manage and host content. Bigger instances are a part of that, and dealing with their consequences is practically inevitable. In the worst-possible scenario I can imagine, Meta breaks compatibility with ActivityPub and forks it into MetaPub, using their userbase as the incentive for other instances to switch. In that case, I'd imagine most instances would happily defederate from them and let Meta run whatever funky app they desire. It's really not an endgame scenario for most users. > I guess it's possible that decentralization eats the world and Facebook fades into irrelevance Sure. It's also possible decentralization eats the world and Facebook is the only one prepared for it.
  - jrockway 3y ago
    > It's also possible decentralization eats the world and Facebook is the only one prepared for it. Hmm, that sounds surprisingly functional to me. Choose the social media provider you frequent based on the quality of the product, instead of the quality of the people you talk to, because every system has the same people. That worked pretty well for email for many years. People were always jumping around, but they could always bring their contact list with them. Mobile phone providers are similar; you can port your number, and the one you choose is mostly based on where their network is and the price. It could work!
lapcat 3y ago
> 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. Untrue. The community is divided. A lot of people are open to this, including Eugen Rochko himself (in charge of the largest Mastodon instances in addition to the Mastodon protocol), who agreed to an NDA meeting with Meta.
vladxyz 3y ago
> As soon as Microsoft became the largest Git provider in the world, they didn't stop people from using other Git hosts. Well, no, but yes. Git itself is a decentralized piece of software, but github's centralized extensions to it (pull requests, issues, discoverability, etc) make it less appealing for me to host the repo myself. If I want to "play with the others", I'd need to, at the very least, mirror to github.
- gochi 3y ago
  Github isn't the only git host. So in this example you would be specifically wanting to play with other github users. Many have made it their thing to avoid Github entirely.

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.

smoldesu 3y ago
I believe you. On the flip side, ActivityPub will never be a successful protocol without big players. If those players aren't pre-established names like Meta or Tumblr, then you're relying on an unrealistic number of third parties to manage and host content. Bigger instances are a part of that, and dealing with their consequences is practically inevitable. In the worst-possible scenario I can imagine, Meta breaks compatibility with ActivityPub and forks it into MetaPub, using their userbase as the incentive for other instances to switch. In that case, I'd imagine most instances would happily defederate from them and let Meta run whatever funky app they desire. It's really not an endgame scenario for most users. > I guess it's possible that decentralization eats the world and Facebook fades into irrelevance Sure. It's also possible decentralization eats the world and Facebook is the only one prepared for it.
- jrockway 3y ago
  > It's also possible decentralization eats the world and Facebook is the only one prepared for it. Hmm, that sounds surprisingly functional to me. Choose the social media provider you frequent based on the quality of the product, instead of the quality of the people you talk to, because every system has the same people. That worked pretty well for email for many years. People were always jumping around, but they could always bring their contact list with them. Mobile phone providers are similar; you can port your number, and the one you choose is mostly based on where their network is and the price. It could work!

lapcat 3y ago

> 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. Untrue. The community is divided. A lot of people are open to this, including Eugen Rochko himself (in charge of the largest Mastodon instances in addition to the Mastodon protocol), who agreed to an NDA meeting with Meta.

vladxyz 3y ago

> As soon as Microsoft became the largest Git provider in the world, they didn't stop people from using other Git hosts. Well, no, but yes. Git itself is a decentralized piece of software, but github's centralized extensions to it (pull requests, issues, discoverability, etc) make it less appealing for me to host the repo myself. If I want to "play with the others", I'd need to, at the very least, mirror to github.

gochi 3y ago
Github isn't the only git host. So in this example you would be specifically wanting to play with other github users. Many have made it their thing to avoid Github entirely.