Kev Quirk, one of the admins of Fosstodon (a Mastodon instance), destroys Meta in an email exchange.
fosstodon.org
The exchange is about Meta's upcoming ActivityPub-enabled network Threads. Meta is calling for a meeting, his response is priceless!
You are viewing a single comment
I mean worst case you'll see @meta.com accounts in your Federated feed in Mastodon (which for pretty much every instance is already a complete mess), I don't even really see how it'll affect Lemmy or Kbin, as they're community driven rather than user driven. I follow users with Mastodon, I follow communities with Kbin.
I dunno, maybe I'm being necessarily optimistic, but I do have friends and family who are posting on Insta/FB, and I basically maintain an account there to keep up with them. I'd love to be able to keep that connection without having to actually be locked into Meta's platforms. And I do think at least a few of my tech savvy friends would be willing to give a client like Ivory a go if they're able to do the same.
Their idea is likely to eventually present themselves as the "better part of the network" and make migrating to their servers very easy.
This must be prevented at all costs.
I was talking about this with someone here the other day, and this seems like the logical direction for them. They'll create a cloud of instances that users are able to utilize and create their own communities with relative ease compared to compiling the code and doing the base level software management, and also develop Meta-specific featuresets on those servers to lock people onto their platform. Oh, you want to break away from us and manage your own instance? Have fun doing it the hard way, and without features XYZ that are only available from us!
That is not the worst case, by a long shot
And you’re not just being optimistic, you’re being naive
Since you clearly didn’t read the article the commenter linked I’ll sum up the important point:
Corporations routinely infiltrate and integrate with open source in order to destroy it.
Meta will implement federation, then they will “extend” the specification with a bunch of new features that the other places of the fediverse can’t put out as fast, making anyone talking to a meta user at a disadvantage, just like how Apple calls out non-iMessage participants in a group text.
They’ll also likely implement a different specification than they publish, so that anyone implementing the meta features fails due to bad instructions
It’s been done multiple times before, for decades
Ffs, I’m just waiting for Microsoft to start pulling shit with the Linux foundation now that they have majority seats
these corporations are not your friends, they are not on your side, they don’t even see you as slaves, you are livestock
A majority?! Fucking hell!
Using the iMessage analogy, we're currently in a state where green bubbles can't interact with blue bubbles at all. Nobody should be expecting full interop with a corporate platform, but for the long run I'd rather have partial interop at arms length.
Embrace extend extinguish only applies if platform is so focused that it cannot sustain itself without the extend phase, and the extend phase cannot happen without something to embrace.