I totally get that people are irritated because they worry about Facebook using their influence to extinguish communities, but why would they extinguish? There is no profit incentive here on the side of small instances, and honestly, this doesn’t change that.
What I do think is a positive here, and what this does change, is that your average person actually can potentially interact with those of us on the fediverse. These are people that may take a decade to make the switch, but now they are actually able to meaningfully interact and be interacted with. I view that as a really big positive, because ultimately the problem with a lot of this, and the reason we aren’t all using Matrix right now to chat, is because sometimes the reality is that we need a critical mass to make a community worthwhile. I’m personally optimistic that this could be cool.
Just a quick disclaimer that I am not a Meta/FB fan. I also see a hugely destructive problem with the views platformed and amplified on Facebook, but I personally don’t see the algorithm as nearly as damaging as the Twitter amplification of voices, and I think I tend to be more optimistic about Threads not being as much of a harmful echo chamber.
This is a recent article on how Google might’ve helped killed XMPP. Same argument could apply to this meta<>fediverse situation.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Of course, reality was a bit less shiny. First of all, despites collaborating to develop the XMPP standard, Google was doing its own closed implementation that nobody could review. It turns out they were not always respecting the protocol they were developing. They were not implementing everything. This forced XMPP development to be slowed down, to adapt. Nice new features were not implemented or not used in XMPP clients because they were not compatible with Google Talk (avatars took an awful long time to come to XMPP). Federation was sometimes broken: for hours or days, there would not be communications possible between Google and regular XMPP servers. The XMPP community became watchers and debuggers of Google’s servers, posting irregularities and downtime (I did it several times, which is probably what prompted the job offer).
And because there were far more Google talk users than “true XMPP” users, there was little room for “not caring about Google talk users”. Newcomers discovering XMPP and not being Google talk users themselves had very frustrating experience because most of their contact were Google Talk users. They thought they could communicate easily with them but it was basically a degraded version of what they had while using Google talk itself. A typical XMPP roster was mainly composed of Google Talk users with a few geeks.
In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they were not 100% in control. So they pulled the plug and announced they would not be federated anymore. And started a long quest to create a messenger, starting with Hangout (which was followed by Allo, Duo. I lost count after that).
As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all. But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them, we were simply offline. It was our fault.
While XMPP still exist and is a very active community, it never recovered from this blow. Too high expectation with Google adoption led to a huge disappointment and a silent fall into oblivion. XMPP became niche. So niche that when group chats became all the rage (Slack, Discord), the free software community reinvented it (Matrix) to compete while group chats were already possible with XMPP. (Disclaimer: I’ve never studied the Matrix protocol so I have no idea how it technically compares with XMPP. I simply believe that it solves the same problem and compete in the same space as XMPP).
Would XMPP be different today if Google never joined it or was never considered as part of it? Nobody could say. But I’m convinced that it would have grown slower and, maybe, healthier. That it would be bigger and more important than it is today. That it would be the default decentralised communication platform. One thing is sure: if Google had not joined, XMPP would not be worse than it is today.
So?
XMPP still exists and is an active community
Honestly what do you want more? The platform itself is still great like in the old days and improvement just depends on users like me and you who are willing to contribute to their vision of openness and freedom.
So instead of nagging and crying about the demise, you can simply use this platform yourself and tell people who are looking for security and protection on the internet about it.
Wait what’s wrong with this?
I think it’s a downside that I’ve heard they’re not federating immediately, but rather doing that in a few months.
Instagram Threads WILL entice a bunch of people to leave Twitter (and eventually get to the fediverse), but if Insta Threads aren’t federated on day 1, we can’t offer up alternatives to users that doesn’t harvest data.
Instead, they’ll only get that choice in a few months, though still better than never I guess 🤷♂️
The concern is that suddenly Meta will make up the biggest part of the Fediverse and exert too much power as a company, which they don’t have a good record for, over the non-corporate Fediverse. Historically this would allow them to “embrace, extend, extinguish” the Fediverse that many love and have spent years building.
The entire fediverse is built upon the idea of an open protocol that anyone is welcome in yet it seems like everyone is shocked that a corporation is finally jumping in.
This was inevitable and more will be coming. The beauty of the fediverse is that you can still find an instance that gets all the mainstream content of the Meta stuff while not subjecting you to the algorithm and data gathering that Meta apps have. In addition, if you DON’T want to participate and see that stuff, the fediverse provides ways to de-federate your neck of the woods and live in bliss without seeing and interacting with any Meta content.
The concern is that the fediverse as it exists now may not be big enough to survive corporations entering it. If they start creating their own modified versions of that open protocol (which they will) it will eventually mean they start breaking compatibilty with the rest of the fediverse. That means that the rest of the fediverse will then need to move over to their protocol which they have control over or just accept that the free and open fediverse can no longer connect to the corporate fediverse. Right now the free and open fediverse is small and may not have the staying power to survive that disconnect once people get used to being connected to the corporate side of fediverse. Once that disconnect happens the average joe is going to go with the side that has more content which is going to be the corporate fediverse if they are alowed to join before the free and open fediverse has truely gotten off the ground.
Meta has also never been anything other than actively malicious when it comes to online communities. Giving them any power at all in the still infant fediverse brings more risk than any possible reward. It’s like letting a hyena into a daycare and saying it’s fine because the hyena isn’t hungry right now. Eventually it will be and why would you even let it in in the first place. Eventually meta will want more control. Letting them in now and allowing them to cement their place in the fediverse will just make it that much easier to extend and extinguish when that time comes.
Why would other instances have to move away to the corpo protocol? I mean, if they screw them over by creating a walled garden in the fediverse let them do whatever they want. They have absolutely NO power about my self hosted instance and the instances I federate with no matter how big, important or powerful they are. If they break the protocol by injecting harmful content you can still stay on an older version or fork it. Its open source for a reason.
Also if the average joe moves over to the corpo platform: it’s their decision. The only thing I can do is provide an open and transparent alternative and inform people with my conviction. We have to give up the idea of hoarding users and forcing security and privacy on them no matter how well we mean it.
It’s Facebook Twitter.
And they plan on connecting it to the fediverse
Glad we can block instances.
They will still be able to access all your content though (and make money with it)
I am anyway in favor of distributing the data shared here under a strong copyleft license. A legal notice that every instance can include in their TOS. Data from users of this instance and all posts on this instance should then be open and any products that build on this data or use it anywhere must also publish it with the same license (AI, data brokers, …).
Together with the AGPL for the backend code, this could provide a robust framework against exploitation. Anything these companies do with the data would have to be made available for everyone, which could only be an enrichment for the general public.
I am anyway in favor of distributing the data shared here under a strong copyleft license. A legal notice that every instance can include in their TOS. Data from users of this instance and all posts on this instance should then be open and any products that build on this data or use it anywhere must also publish it with the same license (AI, data brokers, …).
Together with the AGPL for the backend code, this could provide a robust framework against exploitation. Anything these companies do with the data would have to be made available for everyone, which could only be an enrichment for the general public.
I was reading some people on Mastodon mentioning that Meta might try to push ads into the fediverse via Threads. Something about pushing ads to federated instances that opt in and compensating the admins.
Not sure how I feel about this if it’s true. I can see people defederating to escape the Meta ads and we end up having a huge fragmentation issue where Meta owns the largest fediverse instance and we have some smaller clusters that avoid it.
That would be a really good way to break up the fediverse. That really sucks
If it keeps all the n00bs in one place, I’m all for it
