Meta's decentralized social plans confirmed. Is Embrace-Extend-Extinguish of the Fediverse next?
Meta's decentralized social plans confirmed. Is Embrace-Extend-Extinguish of the Fediverse next?
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I think among other issues would be the Gmail-ification and iMessage-ification of the fediverse. What I mean by that is open standards like email are dominated today by many people using Gmail accounts as it is popular, “free”, and comes with a ton of features. Then google started “walling off their garden” by adding features that only work between gmail accounts. Similarly, apple also took the open standard SMS and started adding on features only available between other iPhones.
What we might see is some of the coolest features the fediverse has ever seen, but it will come at the cost of most users ignoring or dealing less with "irrelevant" things not on meta ran instances.
Hope we can resist such a change, but that is what I am concerned about.
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Even though email is supposedly "open", and federated, is no longer is really the case. Big services like Gmail are suspicious of non-big-name servers, and often flag email coming from them as spam.
About a year ago I came across an article from a guy who'd been running his own email server since the 90s, and finally gave up. I couldn't find that article in my quick search, but I did find this:
https://twitter.com/greg_1_anderson/status/1425113874722820100
"I run my own email server. It's no longer a good idea, because the anti-spam arms race makes delivery from small independent servers very difficult, even when you keep yourself off the block lists, so it's a continuous struggle. Would switch, but I have too many domains/addresses"
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This is very true, I have hosted my own email before and if you are doing it yourself and not going through a big player like google to host it then your stuff sometimes gets treated as suspect by filters. Used to beg people with Gmail accounts to flag my emails as "not spam" whenever it showed up in the spam folder.
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We have the power over ActivityPub
Who is 'we'? And who doesn't say that there's something on top of activitypub?
Plus, if they do create cool features, why would we not also add them?
Because we don't have multiple thousands of paid developers.
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@Helix we have a legion of trans coders in pink striped programmer socks. They can do anything!
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Because we don't have multiple thousands of paid developers.
Having worked at a company with thousands of developers, that's a significant advantage for us.
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One of the "powers" of OSS is that the license usually required changes to be fed back upstream.
If Meta were not to do that the authors of Lemmy could ask someone like EFF to take legal proceeding against them.
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If there are some big players (like in email), i think the biggest risk is that the big players would end up only talking to each other.
Similar to email, where a random host is likely to be spamming, that might happen here too. (Although I'm not that familiar with the protocols here)
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In the Fediverse you are still 100% under the control of whoever runs the server. Your user accounts can't move between servers. There is no easy way to export communities and import them on other hosts. On top of that, all the federated features are completely optional and can be switched off.
Fediverse really doesn't offer any securities beyond what a plain old Web forum does, all the federation aspects depend on everybody playing nice with each other.
At the moment even basic GDPR conformity isn't given, as there is no way to export all your data from an instance, a deletion request for your data also doesn't seem to be guaranteed to make it to other instances.
If Facebook builds something with ActivityPub and it gets popular they can play the whole embrace, extend, and extinguish game from start to finish.
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Plus, if they do create cool features, why would we not also add them?
Limited developer time.
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@CanadaPlus this is referring to far in the future. In the long scale of things, developer time is not so limited. Fedi doesn't necessarily have a time limit after all, it's just going to go stronger over time. I don't see a stopping point.
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Ah. Yes, in the asymptotic future limit everything can be implemented twice as long as there's social opportunity to do so. I wonder if that applies back to Gmail as well, will we see an open-source federated G-suite?
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