Mastodon's Eugen Rochko in talks with Meta?!😱

hedge@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 125 points –
news.ycombinator.com
159

You are viewing a single comment

There is an ultimate objective point of view: adoption. Network effects matter for social software. Even if you don't like things like DRM, micropayments, region locking or whatever, if you don't build in to the protocol ways to do those things, people and corporations will find ways to do them around the protocol - and that's where abuse of power and EEE risk happens. Adapt or die. I've been around long enough to see this happen many times and know what I'm talking about, so attempting to belittle me by telling me to go read history is kind of pointless. Also Facebook destroyed my startup, literally, so it's not like I'm some big fan. I just know a positive-sum development when I see one.

Facebook destroyed my startup

I know a positive-sum development when I see one

Yeah, sorry you don't mind if I take it with a couple grains of salt please? Those two lines look like they could be in conflict with each other without more information.

I developed an early VR game called Soundboxing. It was a VR beat game before Beat Saber. It was doing hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales on Steam, but Facebook repeatedly denied us access to their store with no explanation, bought Beat Saber, basically took over the industry and shut us out. They even sent us early Quest devkits that we spent 6 months porting to, only to be denied again. I'm super salty about it all tbh. But yeah, this is not that, this I see as an absolute win.

If this is not that, then what is it? Because I don't feel either direction which way it's going. Gut feelings aren't the greatest metric to go by anyway.

People have been burned by companies before, see Reddit, twitter, XMPP and a multitude of other situations. And people feel if we forget that and don't at least take precautions against it that it will happen again.

Also it's been the case where companies have had good intentions, only to backtrack 2, 3, 4, or 5+ years down the track, forgetting their original reasoning - while it might be an absolute win now, the future is hard to tell. And on the internet a lot can happen. In 5 years. Just look how quickly the fediverse became relevant. How quickly Linux became a viable option for gaming. Shit changes so fast that it's hard to predict what happens.