What's stopping "embrace, extend, extinguish" from happening to the fediverse?

IRL cockroach@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 53 points –

This is what "embrace, extend, extinguish" means btw: link

16

Because anyone trying to pull that off would likely be defederated pretty quickly.

EDIT: That downvote I got was from Zuck himself.

I think “normal society” will not be too embedded into the fediverse. The nature of its framework and the hoops you jump through to get into the verse keeps them out. (It’s absolutely easy btw otherwise I wouldn’t be making this comment)

I kinda like it that way. Plus I don’t have to deal with Nazi’s, racism, and overt data surveillance with my current federation set up so I’ll never go back.

it would take thousands of independent systems to 'embrace' whatever changes [from BigCorp], and those changes would have to be proprietary... somehow... and then those instances would have to be dependent on those features.

so a shit-tonne of 'what-ifs' and 'maybes'.. unless the consortium regulating/defining the ActivityPub protocol is compromised by 'big business' theres no real way for this to happen.

the fediverse is in no more danger of being overtaken by some big entity anymore than SMTP [email] is.. because at its heart, the fediverse is a protocol-based network. not an application framework.

because at its heart, the fediverse is a protocol-based network. not an application framework.

At the end of the day, users do not care about protocols, those are implementation details, they only care about how good of an application you can build them.

Nothing for the first two but niche fediverse instances can always safely defederate without losing historical data or needing a painful migration. Expand and extend can happen - extinguish is impossible by design.

What's stopping "embrace, extend, extinguish" from happening to the fediverse?

What makes you think anything is stopping it?

Nothing.

It will probably end up with a few major companies in different Fediverse segments deciding overall moderation standards. From that, minor instances will need to comply or get defederated.

Facebook and google killed XMPP that way, which is why people are very concerned regarding federation with threads.

However, I am not sure that this strategy worked that weight. Microsoft never killed competition from Linux and Mozilla

No they didn't. Google Talk had millions of users, all other XMPP clients combined had like 5. XMPP died when Google Talk stopped supporting it, but that wasn't a case of Google Talk killing XMPP, it was a case of Google Talk being the only thing keeping XMPP alive.

Because there are cheaper and easier ways for a massive corporation to avoid competition.

Hardly seems like we're big enough to bother, unless it's low effort spam, astroturfing and general pissing in the well. Other than that, nothing.