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.
Basically keep people from using all the other platforms. Then stop supporting them. Similar like .docx never quite works in the open document editors. At least i refuse to believe that OSS devs are less skilled and motivated.
I've seen people bringing this up, but while they talk of EEE and XMPP, it seems like the analogy here is not being quite finished and formulated.
If we apply that to this, it seems like people are saying "if Meta changed the ActivityPub protocol to favor them and become incompatible with the rest of the Fediverse, Fediverse users would choose to return to Meta-owned platforms."
And that's what I'm questioning. Would you? Would you think others here would? I wouldn't. I'd rather go to whatever fork Fediverse devs favor instead. If anything, all the fear being expressed every time Threads integration is brought up only emphasizes that this is not how it would play out
I hear you. During the reddit exodus i left without having an alternative and stumbled upon lemmy much later. So i am fine going back to not having social media. However, a social network only survives if there is enough content. And if we are honest, lemmy barely has enough content.
Ill give you an example: I like climbing and there is !climbing@lemmy.ml with roughly 2 posts a month and !climbing@sh.itjust.works with less. I am happy to see something about my hobby twice a month. But all my friends still are on reddit, because two posts a month are not enough to them.
If you click on my profile, you will find 4 posts. I am a natural lurker, like most people on the internet, i read, vote and maybe comment. These posts, i made them because i wanted to add some content to this platform. While facebook is federated, there will be much more content. We can see theirs, they can see ours. Sounds like a win-win, right? But it may also make lemmings dependent on facebook content. If there is always more than enough content to endlessly scroll, I don't need to upload my stuff to the network. However, if facebook pulls the plug after a long time, that leaves barely any content here and lemmy is basically dead.
I would probably still be around: Angrily clicking on some link about random big corpo, once a month smiling because someone shared a picture doing the same hobby as i. But for sure there are still people on old XMPP instances, while motivated dev's reinvented XMPP: Matrix
I hear that, but I see it the other way around.
Like you, I have some niche interests, and to be honest the Lemmyverse is still lacking on that sense. I'm here more in hopes of what it might become someday, than because it appeals to me as it is. Most communities I'd like to participate of simply don't exist here. Yeah I know "why don't you make them", but I don't have the time to cultivate and manage a community. I find myself hopping back to Reddit because as much as that place is on a decline, it has those communities.
Like you say, integration or no integration, if the communities and content isn't there, people will not come, or they will lose interest. This is already happening. Even with the occasional exodus only a few communities manage to be self-sustaining. Facebook can't kill the Fediverse. Obscurity can kill the Fediverse. Your disaster scenario of what maybe could happen with Facebook is something that is on the verge of happening without Facebook anyway, all that might take is that one of the handful of people keeping the little movement there is in some of the niche communities gets tired and gives up.
As much as Facebook may control their platform and integration, they don't control the people, and I'm sure some amount of people will be like "this place sucks" and hop over because they will see there are alternatives. If Facebook sets it up and then cuts it off, there will be people who will miss it and decide to move to the Fediverse for good. A small fraction of Facebook defectors would be enough to make this place much more lively. And again, would people just give up without Facebook content? It still seems like this is underestimating the people who want to make this place thrive or wish not to be beholden by Facebook.
It really seems like we are looking at two sides of the same coin.
The coin has already ben tossed. Let's see on which side it will land - I certainly hope it is the one you described.
And that’s what I’m questioning. Would you? Would you think others here would? I wouldn’t. I’d rather go to whatever fork Fediverse devs favor instead. If anything, all the fear being expressed every time Threads integration is brought up only emphasizes that this is not how it would play out
The network effect can be strong. Say you're now able to contact all your friends via your favourite Activitypub instance, you had to previously use Facebook.com or Threads or whatever but now they're all here. You delete your Facebook and keep your Activitypub account to speak to all your friends who are on Threads.
Now Meta pulls the federation plug, or adds some feature that makes your Activitypub server not able to fully cooperate (Maybe you can talk, but you can't video call anymore, or you can't post GIF/images, whatever). Now what? All your friends are over there and getting annoyed with you. So... you eventually succumb and fire up a Threads account.
That's no worse than you started. The fact remains nobody is going to get 100% coverage of their contact list on the fediverse without Meta, so trading a Facebook account for a threads account is no different, and it ignores the benefits of that time when you maybe able to live without either.
Right? I don't know how to express any more clearly for the people who already are here that being here right now is the proof that there are people will choose a better platform over the most popular one. Unless they are admitting they are personally one temptation away from returning to Facebook.
I agree with you, I'm totally fine federating with them. If they choose to become incompatible with me, THEIR users will lose access to the content on the rest of the fediverse. They have an obligation to get ad revenue. If they can have someone else host the content, then use their interface to put ads and collect data on their users, it sounds like a win, as those users can still interact with me. If they really wanted to EEE and create incompatibilities, the rest of the ActivityPub instances just carry on as normal without supporting those extensions. The ecosystem already exists without the integration, so it'll just go back to being separate again, exactly as it is now.
You mention EEE and forgetting how it works in next paragraph.
Embrace - facebook joins fediverse, existing users rejoice because now the user base was added with threads users
Extend - facebook starts adding proprietary features to their product, many users start switching, because if they use threads.net they can have the new features AND still have access to the entire network
Extinguish - facebook comes to conclusion that there's not many users on fediverse anymore, and being compatible only holds them up, so they disconnect, suddenly it gets very silent on fediverse, some people will jump to threads.net, because their friends are there, others will quit completely eventually making the network even emptier
This exact thing happened with Jabber/XMPP and it was also realization that vast majority of people are not loyal to some ideals and will switch to whatever works for them. Companies absolutely hate to have product they can't fully control.
I'm so tired of this argument. I keep hearing you guys repeating this again and again and again and again and again and it never makes sense. You take way too many conclusions for granted of how it would play out. EEE is not a cursed mantra of inevitable destruction, it's a tactic which relies on public trends, and we are not trend chasers, we are niche users.
Extend - facebook starts adding proprietary features to their product, many users start switching, because if they use threads.net they can have the new features AND still have access to the entire network
WHY?
Would YOU really jump into Threads?
Who is this person that you imagine that dropped Facebook and Twitter, but will jump right back as soon as they so much as see it again.
Such a person wouldn't even be here to begin with, They would already be there.
Extinguish - facebook comes to conclusion that there’s not many users on fediverse anymore, and being compatible only holds them up, so they disconnect, suddenly it gets very silent on fediverse, some people will jump to threads.net, because their friends are there, others will quit completely eventually making the network even emptier
What makes you guys so sure if a shutdown comes everyone will choose to go to Threads?
Because they got more content? Because there are more users?
Guess what, that's HOW IT IS RIGHT NOW. With this logic, how do you even explain that we are here right now? Just because we apparently don't get a single whiff of THE BIGGEST SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM IN THE WORLD?
It does not make sense.
Do you have so little confidence on what we have here? That nothing we offer could compare?
That's where I disagree the most. I believe many people would like the experience they could have in the Fediverse, yet, unlike Facebook, it isn't something widely known or advertised.
This exact thing happened with Jabber/XMPP and it was also realization that vast majority of people are not loyal to some ideals and will switch to whatever works for them.
Jabber is not a community, it's a communication tool. A communication tool is only fit to purpose if it allows people to communicate with those they want to. Social Media is about community. There is appeal in connecting with like minded people even if not literally everyone you know is there.
And yeah, most people aren't loyal to social media either. WE ARE NOT MOST PEOPLE. We are the people who ALREADY CHOSE ideals over convenience. Or, more cynically, functionality. Because Meta's inscrutable algorithms suck for anyone wishing to tailor their own experience, which is why I doubt they can even meaningfully Expand to begin with.
I would bet that if such integration came and went away, the Fediverse will come out of it bolstered. I don't doubt Facebook would try EEE, but what they stand to gain is insignificant and very debatable, and what we stand to gain is enormous.
Don't take their complete takeover as granted. If things played out as they intended so easily we would all be on the Metaverse paying for digital replicas of street art or some other other unexplicable bulshit.
It's silly, you're just thinking that somehow this time will be different.
it’s a tactic which relies on public trends, and we are not trend chasers, we are niche users.
Maybe you are, but most people aren't. With XMPP, I was similar, running my own server. I didn't jump to GTalk, but it still ended up with me shutting it down after I ended up to be the only person on my rooster.
WHY?
Would YOU really jump into Threads?
I don't, but I'm not the most people. I didn't jump with XMPP, but it still killed it for me.
Who is this person that you imagine that dropped Facebook and Twitter, but will jump right back as soon as they so much as see it again.
Such a person wouldn’t even be here to begin with, They would already be there.
I think you believe that everyone on fediverse is for the same reason as you are. Though I even doubt that, it's ironic, since you're here for 9 months, so you arrived here because of the API change. Don't you think if it was about principle you would be here much earlier than that? Add to it that you're still quite active on reddit, so you're lying to yourself and (at least from the outside) it looks like likely you would be one of those people.
First of all, gross. Cut it out with the stalker bulshit.
Second of all, you are not making the point you think you are. You just found out that my oh-so-unprincipled self posts in other places. Well, if I was "those people" you speak of, I wouldn't be here. Isn't that your whole point? That people will quit it as soon as anything vaguely more popular comes by? Now I ask, sherlock, what am I doing here?
Maybe you didn't pay much attention while you were combing over some random stranger's whole internet presence, but I literally spelled it out, I wish this place to grow so that communities that I like take root here instead of being non-existent or ghost towns. But since they didn't yet, I hang around in places where they do exist also.
You are right about one thing, people don't have allegiance to any platform. Which also means I can be in multiple places at once. You might have gotten that if you weren't so engrossed feeling lemmier-than-thou.
It’s silly, you’re just thinking that somehow this time will be different.
Would YOU really jump into Threads?
I don’t, but I’m not the most people.
And so are most people who are here, that's the difference. The people who want to be on Facebook, stay on Facebook. How hard can you slam your face on the point and still miss it?
But hey, if you want to wallow in paranoia I'm gonna stop sweating it, because trying to push back against it only got some random creep sniffing through my stuff.
They don't need to kill "every" lemmy/masto instance to kill the ecosystem. You just need to absorb enough of it that the only people left outside of your perversion of the ecosystem are certified weirdos.
E-Mail was (and still is) an open standard anyone could use. But after decades of getting EEE'd, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone using an E-Mail Not provided by the corporate giants, even like, other enterprises have rolled their e-mails into the Google/Microsoft ecosystems, and ALSO if you have an e-mail address that is outside those domains, normies who are inside the corporate ecosystem will have trouble communicating with you as your address will get autoflagged as spam more often than not.
...we already are all certified weirdoes. The average internet user doesn't have a single clue what Lemmy or Mastodon is. There isn't an Established Fediverse Institution that is household name for regular people on social media.
Meta could buy up lemmy.world and mastodon.social and they'd end up... exactly in the same place because most people who got into those got there to avoid big social media companies to begin with, and they'd jump ship immediately. This is the alternative social media movement. The people who are on established protocols are the ones who are already on Facebook and Twitter, and many don't even like those. They only stick around on those because everything else sounds too complicated for them.
Facebook and Twitter are today's social media GMail and Outlook equivalents. Lemmy and Mastodon are not.
People throw EEE around full of fear but it just sounds like it just became a sort of boogeyman mantra. It doesn't apply. There isn't some magic that can make Meta dominate a whole decentralized ecosystem like this. The only possible way for it to happen is if everyone decided to jump back there (which is what happened to GMail and Outlook) but paradoxically because Fediverse users are so paranoid of even vaguely coexisting in an interconnected vicinity, the odds of that happening are zero.
I will concede on the "we are all weirdos" bit. Fair point.
because Fediverse users are so paranoid of even vaguely coexisting in an interconnected vicinity
(this is a good thing, megacorps corrupt all that they touch, actually by your own metric, if fear of Meta is what keeps the fediverse safe, than I say the best defence is for us to never stfu about it)
To a certain point I get it, but I also want more people to come over here. It's not because I think Meta is great and totally trustworthy to hang around with, it is not. It's because I'd like my family and friends and creators I follow to make the jump over too.
Ouch, so I'm a certified weirdo just because I don't have accounts on GAMAM sites?
And my mail accounts not by big corpos work well regardless...
Definitely on that first one. Normies are all inside the GoogleMetaAmazonMicrosoft panopticon. If they are old they might still have a Yahoo Mail, but that's as spicy as it gets.
As for the second bit -- All evidence I have is purely anecdotal. My ProtonMail account works fine and no one ever complained about not getting mail from me, but I have heard stories of people who use mail accounts not from GMail/Outlook getting flagged as spammers and having trouble chatting with the normies (tm). Or having trouble creating accounts on sites because their e-mail is considered "not valid" by whatever system they put up on the shitty-ass site.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
How would they even extinguish a whole ecosystem of independent instances? What does that even look like?
They could very well make some feature or requirement and demand that every single ActivityPub instance uses their version to remain compatible...
...and instance hosts can just say no, fork it and keep going unbothered.
Even buying up some big Lemmies and Mastodons is not going to get them the whole Fediverse.
from https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html :
Basically keep people from using all the other platforms. Then stop supporting them. Similar like .docx never quite works in the open document editors. At least i refuse to believe that OSS devs are less skilled and motivated.
I've seen people bringing this up, but while they talk of EEE and XMPP, it seems like the analogy here is not being quite finished and formulated.
If we apply that to this, it seems like people are saying "if Meta changed the ActivityPub protocol to favor them and become incompatible with the rest of the Fediverse, Fediverse users would choose to return to Meta-owned platforms."
And that's what I'm questioning. Would you? Would you think others here would? I wouldn't. I'd rather go to whatever fork Fediverse devs favor instead. If anything, all the fear being expressed every time Threads integration is brought up only emphasizes that this is not how it would play out
I hear you. During the reddit exodus i left without having an alternative and stumbled upon lemmy much later. So i am fine going back to not having social media. However, a social network only survives if there is enough content. And if we are honest, lemmy barely has enough content.
Ill give you an example: I like climbing and there is !climbing@lemmy.ml with roughly 2 posts a month and !climbing@sh.itjust.works with less. I am happy to see something about my hobby twice a month. But all my friends still are on reddit, because two posts a month are not enough to them.
If you click on my profile, you will find 4 posts. I am a natural lurker, like most people on the internet, i read, vote and maybe comment. These posts, i made them because i wanted to add some content to this platform. While facebook is federated, there will be much more content. We can see theirs, they can see ours. Sounds like a win-win, right? But it may also make lemmings dependent on facebook content. If there is always more than enough content to endlessly scroll, I don't need to upload my stuff to the network. However, if facebook pulls the plug after a long time, that leaves barely any content here and lemmy is basically dead.
I would probably still be around: Angrily clicking on some link about random big corpo, once a month smiling because someone shared a picture doing the same hobby as i. But for sure there are still people on old XMPP instances, while motivated dev's reinvented XMPP: Matrix
I hear that, but I see it the other way around.
Like you, I have some niche interests, and to be honest the Lemmyverse is still lacking on that sense. I'm here more in hopes of what it might become someday, than because it appeals to me as it is. Most communities I'd like to participate of simply don't exist here. Yeah I know "why don't you make them", but I don't have the time to cultivate and manage a community. I find myself hopping back to Reddit because as much as that place is on a decline, it has those communities.
Like you say, integration or no integration, if the communities and content isn't there, people will not come, or they will lose interest. This is already happening. Even with the occasional exodus only a few communities manage to be self-sustaining. Facebook can't kill the Fediverse. Obscurity can kill the Fediverse. Your disaster scenario of what maybe could happen with Facebook is something that is on the verge of happening without Facebook anyway, all that might take is that one of the handful of people keeping the little movement there is in some of the niche communities gets tired and gives up.
As much as Facebook may control their platform and integration, they don't control the people, and I'm sure some amount of people will be like "this place sucks" and hop over because they will see there are alternatives. If Facebook sets it up and then cuts it off, there will be people who will miss it and decide to move to the Fediverse for good. A small fraction of Facebook defectors would be enough to make this place much more lively. And again, would people just give up without Facebook content? It still seems like this is underestimating the people who want to make this place thrive or wish not to be beholden by Facebook.
It really seems like we are looking at two sides of the same coin.
The coin has already ben tossed. Let's see on which side it will land - I certainly hope it is the one you described.
The network effect can be strong. Say you're now able to contact all your friends via your favourite Activitypub instance, you had to previously use Facebook.com or Threads or whatever but now they're all here. You delete your Facebook and keep your Activitypub account to speak to all your friends who are on Threads.
Now Meta pulls the federation plug, or adds some feature that makes your Activitypub server not able to fully cooperate (Maybe you can talk, but you can't video call anymore, or you can't post GIF/images, whatever). Now what? All your friends are over there and getting annoyed with you. So... you eventually succumb and fire up a Threads account.
That's no worse than you started. The fact remains nobody is going to get 100% coverage of their contact list on the fediverse without Meta, so trading a Facebook account for a threads account is no different, and it ignores the benefits of that time when you maybe able to live without either.
Right? I don't know how to express any more clearly for the people who already are here that being here right now is the proof that there are people will choose a better platform over the most popular one. Unless they are admitting they are personally one temptation away from returning to Facebook.
I agree with you, I'm totally fine federating with them. If they choose to become incompatible with me, THEIR users will lose access to the content on the rest of the fediverse. They have an obligation to get ad revenue. If they can have someone else host the content, then use their interface to put ads and collect data on their users, it sounds like a win, as those users can still interact with me. If they really wanted to EEE and create incompatibilities, the rest of the ActivityPub instances just carry on as normal without supporting those extensions. The ecosystem already exists without the integration, so it'll just go back to being separate again, exactly as it is now.
You mention EEE and forgetting how it works in next paragraph.
This exact thing happened with Jabber/XMPP and it was also realization that vast majority of people are not loyal to some ideals and will switch to whatever works for them. Companies absolutely hate to have product they can't fully control.
I'm so tired of this argument. I keep hearing you guys repeating this again and again and again and again and again and it never makes sense. You take way too many conclusions for granted of how it would play out. EEE is not a cursed mantra of inevitable destruction, it's a tactic which relies on public trends, and we are not trend chasers, we are niche users.
WHY?
Would YOU really jump into Threads?
Who is this person that you imagine that dropped Facebook and Twitter, but will jump right back as soon as they so much as see it again.
Such a person wouldn't even be here to begin with, They would already be there.
What makes you guys so sure if a shutdown comes everyone will choose to go to Threads?
Because they got more content? Because there are more users?
Guess what, that's HOW IT IS RIGHT NOW. With this logic, how do you even explain that we are here right now? Just because we apparently don't get a single whiff of THE BIGGEST SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM IN THE WORLD?
It does not make sense.
Do you have so little confidence on what we have here? That nothing we offer could compare?
That's where I disagree the most. I believe many people would like the experience they could have in the Fediverse, yet, unlike Facebook, it isn't something widely known or advertised.
Jabber is not a community, it's a communication tool. A communication tool is only fit to purpose if it allows people to communicate with those they want to. Social Media is about community. There is appeal in connecting with like minded people even if not literally everyone you know is there.
And yeah, most people aren't loyal to social media either. WE ARE NOT MOST PEOPLE. We are the people who ALREADY CHOSE ideals over convenience. Or, more cynically, functionality. Because Meta's inscrutable algorithms suck for anyone wishing to tailor their own experience, which is why I doubt they can even meaningfully Expand to begin with.
I would bet that if such integration came and went away, the Fediverse will come out of it bolstered. I don't doubt Facebook would try EEE, but what they stand to gain is insignificant and very debatable, and what we stand to gain is enormous.
Don't take their complete takeover as granted. If things played out as they intended so easily we would all be on the Metaverse paying for digital replicas of street art or some other other unexplicable bulshit.
It's silly, you're just thinking that somehow this time will be different.
Maybe you are, but most people aren't. With XMPP, I was similar, running my own server. I didn't jump to GTalk, but it still ended up with me shutting it down after I ended up to be the only person on my rooster.
I don't, but I'm not the most people. I didn't jump with XMPP, but it still killed it for me.
I think you believe that everyone on fediverse is for the same reason as you are. Though I even doubt that, it's ironic, since you're here for 9 months, so you arrived here because of the API change. Don't you think if it was about principle you would be here much earlier than that? Add to it that you're still quite active on reddit, so you're lying to yourself and (at least from the outside) it looks like likely you would be one of those people.
First of all, gross. Cut it out with the stalker bulshit.
Second of all, you are not making the point you think you are. You just found out that my oh-so-unprincipled self posts in other places. Well, if I was "those people" you speak of, I wouldn't be here. Isn't that your whole point? That people will quit it as soon as anything vaguely more popular comes by? Now I ask, sherlock, what am I doing here?
Maybe you didn't pay much attention while you were combing over some random stranger's whole internet presence, but I literally spelled it out, I wish this place to grow so that communities that I like take root here instead of being non-existent or ghost towns. But since they didn't yet, I hang around in places where they do exist also.
You are right about one thing, people don't have allegiance to any platform. Which also means I can be in multiple places at once. You might have gotten that if you weren't so engrossed feeling lemmier-than-thou.
And so are most people who are here, that's the difference. The people who want to be on Facebook, stay on Facebook. How hard can you slam your face on the point and still miss it?
But hey, if you want to wallow in paranoia I'm gonna stop sweating it, because trying to push back against it only got some random creep sniffing through my stuff.
They don't need to kill "every" lemmy/masto instance to kill the ecosystem. You just need to absorb enough of it that the only people left outside of your perversion of the ecosystem are certified weirdos.
E-Mail was (and still is) an open standard anyone could use. But after decades of getting EEE'd, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone using an E-Mail Not provided by the corporate giants, even like, other enterprises have rolled their e-mails into the Google/Microsoft ecosystems, and ALSO if you have an e-mail address that is outside those domains, normies who are inside the corporate ecosystem will have trouble communicating with you as your address will get autoflagged as spam more often than not.
...we already are all certified weirdoes. The average internet user doesn't have a single clue what Lemmy or Mastodon is. There isn't an Established Fediverse Institution that is household name for regular people on social media.
Meta could buy up lemmy.world and mastodon.social and they'd end up... exactly in the same place because most people who got into those got there to avoid big social media companies to begin with, and they'd jump ship immediately. This is the alternative social media movement. The people who are on established protocols are the ones who are already on Facebook and Twitter, and many don't even like those. They only stick around on those because everything else sounds too complicated for them.
Facebook and Twitter are today's social media GMail and Outlook equivalents. Lemmy and Mastodon are not.
People throw EEE around full of fear but it just sounds like it just became a sort of boogeyman mantra. It doesn't apply. There isn't some magic that can make Meta dominate a whole decentralized ecosystem like this. The only possible way for it to happen is if everyone decided to jump back there (which is what happened to GMail and Outlook) but paradoxically because Fediverse users are so paranoid of even vaguely coexisting in an interconnected vicinity, the odds of that happening are zero.
I will concede on the "we are all weirdos" bit. Fair point.
(this is a good thing, megacorps corrupt all that they touch, actually by your own metric, if fear of Meta is what keeps the fediverse safe, than I say the best defence is for us to never stfu about it)
To a certain point I get it, but I also want more people to come over here. It's not because I think Meta is great and totally trustworthy to hang around with, it is not. It's because I'd like my family and friends and creators I follow to make the jump over too.
Ouch, so I'm a certified weirdo just because I don't have accounts on GAMAM sites?
And my mail accounts not by big corpos work well regardless...
Definitely on that first one. Normies are all inside the GoogleMetaAmazonMicrosoft panopticon. If they are old they might still have a Yahoo Mail, but that's as spicy as it gets.
As for the second bit -- All evidence I have is purely anecdotal. My ProtonMail account works fine and no one ever complained about not getting mail from me, but I have heard stories of people who use mail accounts not from GMail/Outlook getting flagged as spammers and having trouble chatting with the normies (tm). Or having trouble creating accounts on sites because their e-mail is considered "not valid" by whatever system they put up on the shitty-ass site.