If ActivityPub can't survive Meta, it was never going to succeed in the first place
If ActivityPub can't survive Meta, it was never going to succeed in the first place
Corporations don't just sit out on new technologies, and no matter how hard you try you can't force them to. Defederating from Meta's new project preemptively is naive, and will not do much of anything.
Protocols are going to be adopted by corporations, whether we like it or not. SMTP, LDAP, HTTP, IP and 802.11 are all examples of that. If it ends up that meta is able to destroy the fediverse simply by joining it, that is a design flaw on OUR end. Something would then clearly need to be different in order to prevent future abuse of the protocol.
FOSS is propped up by corporations. By for profit corporations. If you want to stop those corporations from killing projects, you put safety guards up to make sure that doesn't happen. You don't just shut them out and put your head in the sand.
If it ends up that meta is able to destroy the fediverse simply by joining it, that is a design flaw on OUR end.
“Simply by joining it” is not an accurate representation of what will happen in the slightest. Meta is not some scrappy little Lemmy instance operator relying on donations to keep the lights on, they’re one of the biggest companies in the world who simply do not care about fair competition or open standards, and they have a proven track record of using that position to either buy out or destroy competition.
When Meta have so much money that they can simply outspend any other fediverse platform and become dominant that way, how is that a design flaw on our end? You can make a project as resistant to corporate overreach as you like, infrastructure to run it still costs money and there is no fediverse operator on the face of the earth that is going to be able to outspend Meta when it comes to infrastructure and R&D. How is defederation not an appropriate response when smaller instances are crippled under the inevitable load stemming from Metas users?
Corporations have been embracing, extending and extinguishing FOSS projects in the tech space for decades now, and their demise has rarely been because of a fatal flaw in the projects themselves. It’s been an intentional play by Microsoft, Google et al to ensure that there is no viable open alternative to their walled gardens. Trusting them in any capacity is naïve at best and catastrophic at worst.
I encourage you to read this blog post which outlines these concerns much better than I can: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
When this was linked a previous time, I wrote up a reply to it which I think applies here as well, so I'm gonna shamelessly copy and paste myself 🙂
I think the big thing to take away from that article is... XMPP developers cared so much about retaining federation with Google Talk that they "became watchers and debuggers of Google’s servers" as it is put there. Google came in and said "this is our house now, adapt or die."
For our current fediverse, it's important I think, as a community, we put our foot down with Meta and say "no, this is our house. If you don't adapt to us, we don't federate with you. If you deviate from the ActivityPub protocol or our other implementations that we do above the ActivityPub protocol (things like boosts/upvotes/downvotes standards as agreed upon by Lemmy/kbin, for example), you will break federation with us, and we will be okay with that." We cannot become the Meta watchers.
ActivityPub is just a protocol and they can use it. It doesn't mean they have to be compatible with us. Let them have their Twitter/Instagram hybrid application. Do we care that much whether we can or cannot see their posts?
To your point, many of us will defederate, either out of politics or financial necessity. There's rumors milling around that Meta / Threads will only initially federate with a few trusted larger instances and be monetarily compensated for it (aka those who will make a deal with the devil to moderate - more on my thoughts on that here).
It may come to the point where a lot of us are running on our own smaller "Fediverse", intentionally divorced from Meta and those instances which have federated with Meta and taken their advertisements and paid posts. If this is the case, we must take the bad with the good - we will always be smaller and niche, and our less techno-idealistic friends will not join our tiny Fediverse because the barrier to entry will remain high.
It will follow the EEE flow along with their normal anti-competition tactics. First, they embrace: their interest in federation is only to give them the access to content that will make their platform not look empty, allowing them to put their coffers to work on drawing the majority share of users. Then they will extend: they will make sure their platform is compatible with ingesting other server content but others will be unable to federate their content (they will become "incompatible" later, due to "features"). Then they will extinguish competition: they'll cut off what little engagement is left with those (inbound only) federated servers because they no longer need them and the majority of the remaining users will move to their platform because that is where the activity is.
Then Kbin/lemmy will be just like all the other random phpbb instances that no one really uses. Being naive won't make things any less likely, yet there will always be gullible people who argue that "of course they will embrace the technology" and that everything else is just non-sense/wouldn't have worked anyway/blah.
It doesn't take long for the largest servers to have operating costs that they will happily allow Meta to burden in exchange for nearly any concession. The main problem is that, while Kbin/Lemmy is federated, it is federated in a manner that still places content in silos and allows single servers to "own" those spaces. It hasn't really fixed the problem yet, it just spreads the problem out over a few more servers. Until spaces are universal (every server owns a slice of that community, spreading out the community instead of just the users), it will remain ripe for EEE.
as a community, we put our foot down with Meta and say “no, this is our house. If you don’t adapt to us, we don’t federate with you. If you deviate from the ActivityPub protocol or our other implementations that we do above the ActivityPub protocol (things like boosts/upvotes/downvotes standards as agreed upon by Lemmy/kbin, for example), you will break federation with us, and we will be okay with that.”
I'm afraid we will lose if we accept them until they do something bad. Given their track record, that's just a matter of time. If we let them become important to the fediverse as long as they play nice, the final decision could be disastrous for the fediverse when they stop playing nice.
So the right thing to say seems for me: "No, this is our house. We don’t federate with you."
Echoing this, please read the linked post. There is a big difference between technology and it's implementation vs the community of users of it and what they are using to do so.
Strongly agree, any instance that doesn't defederate meta should be defederated. Meta will forcefully overrun the fediverse for profit.
When Meta have so much money that they can simply outspend any other fediverse platform and become dominant that way, how is that a design flaw on our end?
It's a design flaw when simply "outspending" other fediverse platforms allows you to dominate them. There are ways to design a system where that's not possible.
The fact that those other fediverse platforms can defederate from the "big money instance" if they don't like what it's doing, for example, is a part of the design of the fediverse that can help counter influence like that. You can't force other instances to federate with you even if you have an enormous amount of money, and even if you did manage it in specific cases other people without that vulnerability can just spin up new instances.
We'll see whether this sort of thing is "enough", I guess, because Meta is coming one way or the other. If it turns out that stronger defenses are needed then there are other technical methods that could be used to strengthen the decentralized nature of the fediverse.
I agree with OP's title on the social side of the problem, not the technical one. If we allow them to destroy the Fediverse, then it was already lost to begin with. It's not a matter of technology, it's a matter of whether the key people are able to keep it out of the corporate control in the long run. If they can't, then it was all just a matter of time.
EDIT: I don't imply it's a particularly useful thought. It might help with coping though if it would ever happen. Let's enjoy it while it lasts and hope for the best!
Similarly, if the Earth can't survive Exxon, it was never going to succeed in the first place.
I just have to keep on hammering this point, because it pisses me off so, so much. Many people seem to believe that, since regulatory bodies can be captured, that regulation shouldn't be done. This is called learned helplessness, and it's something malicious people inflict on people they want to exploit.
It isn't sticking your head in the sand to resist assimilation by an evil corporation.
Similarly, if the Earth can’t survive Exxon, it was never going to succeed in the first place
Actually, yes. The reason Exxon is fucking the planet right now is because of weak regulation. If we can't build a system that is resistant to the threat of earth destroying corporations, we were never going to succeed in the first place.
Meta is allowed to use the ActivityPub standard just as much as any other standard. This does not mean anyone who decides to use it must interact with others who use it. SMTP will block your mail if you aren't from a larger server, have the right signatures and even then. Servers block HTTP over VPNs often, and there are even rules about referencing content via other servers on HTTP (CORS). Just because a standard is open doesn't mean everything using that standard has to communicate with each other.
The beauty of this is that those running instances can't restrict access of other instances to the fediverse. If Meta does start using ActivityPub, every current instance can block it. Other entities could want to run an instance that federates with Meta who has the resources to do so. Currently the biggest issue is the vast difference in scale between current instances and Meta. But if other entities got into the fediverse that federated with Meta this would still be a decentralized system, just with larger nodes between them. All of this still allows those who run small instances to block these larger instances that are more mainstream and keep it the way they want it.
No trying to be explicitly contrarian, but the EEE strategy (embrace, extend, extinguish) is well known by this point and it always ended up with the open standard not being used anymore and falling into irrelevance (as it happened to XMPP after google and Facebook embraced).
I do think it is a design failure, but it’s one that is necessary for it to be open: anyone can enter the space and build features on top of it. So they bring a lot of people, with features exclusive to them and then lots of people migrate because the experience feels broken if you can’t “florp” a post from someone else. It’s the nature of open source vs closed platform that enables the strategy to exist.
It may not happen this time, and I surely hope you’re right, but it would be a shame for the monopoly to win one more time when we had the chance do to something about it but we didn’t. Bringing more people do the fediverse sounds like a dream, but I’m not holding my breath expecting everything will work for the best. There’s a reason they’re doing this, it’s not because they need more users, they already have all of them.
the EEE strategy (embrace, extend, extinguish) is well known by this point and it always ended up with the open standard not being used anymore and falling into irrelevance.
This isn't even remotely true, there are plenty of counterexamples. TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, XML, SMTP, PNG, SVG, OpenDocument, OGG, PDF, FLAC, WebM, Vorbis, I could go on at great length. There are a vast number of open standards that are still open and are used extensively as fundamental parts of our everyday lives. Eg, the IEEE standards and RFCs.
No trying to be explicitly contrarian, but the EEE strategy (embrace, extend, extinguish) is well known by this point and it always ended up with the open standard not being used anymore and falling into irrelevance (as it happened to XMPP after google and Facebook embraced).
XMPP was irrelevant before Google and Facebook had anything to do with it.
Agree.
Listen buddy, I don’t think you understand how important it is that I florp my second cousin’s ex boyfriend’s post on the hot new bug patties at McDonalds on sale for $12.99. If I do I get a free bottle of fresh air and a complimentary upper body rinse in the labor hydration station next to the bathrooms.
That's fine if Meta wants to use an open standard for it's post data. But just because our platform can talk to them doesn't mean we want to hear what their users are saying!
This post is just...so ignorant and unintentionally malicious. Putting in the idea that Fediverse should co-exist with Meta and not treat them like exile when they enter the space is not the way to go for its survival. And the more people there are who just look at the headline without doing further reading is not going to help the situation.
What are we going to do then, everytime a corporation starts up an instance we defederate? All corporations are essentially evil. If we do that, we'll always just be a niche concept that will always fail to keep up with the needs and wants of users.
We need to be able to prevent bad behavior from taking over the project, while also allowing corporations to join and interact with us.
There's nothing wrong with being a separate entity from big corporates. Mastodon is pretty big already and it's going keep growing. Fast growth isn't the point, it's sustainability and providing a haven for people who don't want enshittification and other corporate bullshit. If someone want that they can just use a corporate owned social media, nothing wrong with that. Reddit has never been the biggest fish in the pond anyway, and the whole thing with trying to pull in users is a part of what made the platform worse. Bringing in corporates is gutting the biggest thing that make Fediverse appealing. And for the record, there isn't that many big companies that'd be a threat anyway. Any corporates that aren't big social media corps isn't really the problem. If Nintendo wants to make an instance to be the second Mii verse I highly doubt many people would be against federating with them.
This is a misunderstanding of the issue. ActivityPub the standard will of course survive the extension of use to Meta. ActivityPub is just a protocol. There are reasonable concerns about the distortion to the priorities and focus of the projects development long term if Meta gets more involved but those are not unresolvable, and have been seen in other open source projects when big business gets involved.
People's objections are also due to how federating with Meta's software, content and commercial priorities will distort the existing communities in Fediverse/Federation/Threadiverse.
While the technology allows the Fediverse to exist, one federation is not the be all and end all of the fediverse; it is understandable that existing parts of the Fediverse might not want to federate with Meta. There can be multiple federations within the fediverse; it doesn't have to be one joined up mass and it's not likely it's going to be one single complete federation long term. People will naturally form interconnected communities around different ethoses, priorities etc. I think there will likely be one big "primary" part of the fediverse just due to shear size and mass of content; but it doesn't follow that it needs to be linked with Meta's implemenation nor that Meta's implementation would damage a separate fediverse. That is what people are pushing against - they do now want the main threadiverse or other elements of the fediverse to be subsumed and lose it's identity due to being swamped by Meta's social media platforms.
It's about the separation between the fediverse as a technological solution and the fediverse as a philosophical solution.
"If your body can't survive toxic poison, it was never going to survive in the first place"
We should not be federating with Meta or any other corporate poison factories in the first place.
It's not Meta who is going to want to federate with us, it will be a stealthy instance, for example from a videogame, so popular that everyone will want to federate with it. Including the gamers of our instance. And then this instance (which will be a facade of Meta) will implement a feature in the protocol, for the need of their videogame. Oh something really trivial....then something else. etc. And slowly the federations will diverge toward Meta.
Whats your opinion on Google destroying XMPP.
RIP
Why would I want pushed content from Meta of all places? I don't want to see that.
And no, we don't need to grow the Fediverse that way. It's better to stay independent and develop organically and become the next big thing, not eaten by some overstuffed corporation not able to innovate.Learn from history. Don't repeat it!
more of a question of if activitypub can avoid becoming zucks lapdog and dont allow them to lead the project
If you want to stop those corporations from killing projects, you put safety guards up to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Safety guards like what, do you have some ideas or examples?
I like the concept of copyleft, which has prevented a lot of EEE. As for protocols, the answer is a little more complex. Protocols can't really be copyrighted, so it's essentially going to be what's the easiest to implement, who is using it and what utility it provides.
There have always been competing protocols, and also closed vs open protocols. Most of the time the protocols that win are the open ones, and the trend is that they provide a lot of utility and is easily used by anyone. In my view, the question it will come down to will be: is having a decentralized social network going to provide more utility for the big players, or is the concept doomed because centralization will always provide the biggest monetary incentive?
Something that gives me hope is that social media is not a profitable business venture. This could mean that Meta is exploring the fediverse because it sees something useful in it that doesn't conflict with their business interests, but in fact supports it. The biggest tell to see if this will work out is if other companies start to adopt the protocol, at which point the safety guard is "Well, a lot of big players are using it and if I break activitypub support with them that's bad for business.".