Why YSK: If we want to keep the Fediverse in the hands of its users and prevent “enshittification” (search it), it’s good to know how corporations kill grassroots projects like this.
I saw this in another thread on /c/Showerthoughts. I think it’s important for this to be circulated widely so that the broader Fediverse community is aligned. We don’t want admins second-guessing their decisions when users start infighting. We should be united in our thinking and ready to protect our platform.
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Great read!
I remember me using software called trillian that supported logins to all chat networks, so I could use ICQ, Google, MSN and AOL all at the same time
Oh man, I remember Trillian, too. That was great. Must have been a nightmare to build, though
It was “just” a bunch of clients in one though, AFAIK it couldn’t connect people from different protocols.
Pidgin still exists; I used it probably 20 years back on Linux.Ahh, I recall using Pidgin, too. I think i ended up favoring it over Trillian. I already had accounts on all the services, so it worked out. I guess thinking about it, if only basic chat was supported, it may not have been terrible supporting everything
Having never heard of it, I tried Pidgin just now, and it’s kinda exactly what I’ve always wanted. Discord support is really rough, though…
I also remember when XMPP wa still the cool kid on the block. Gtalk and other chat networks supported it and allowed federation. I tan my own XMPP server and could talk to users on other servers and even networks. But then Google cut the federation and eventually all external access.
It could have been the next email, but big corporations were already in the chat space and they all walked in their user base.
I’m fairly certain that if email (SMTP) hadn’t been the dominant protocol, we would have walled gardens there as well.
the internet without the existance of email as a de-facto proof of identity and account recovery protocol would certainly be interesting.
almost every single site these days requires you to have an email to sign up. it would be interesting to know what system we would have used instead if email wasn’t an option.
I was using Miranda for the same thing.
I use to use Pidgin then move to Kopete. It even baffled me at one point how Kopete could connect to Facebook messenger and chat with my friends from Kopete and customize the chat interface to my liking. Good times good times.
The internet truly became a much more closed place :(
Okay, but realistically, how can we prevent this from happening in the future?
We’ve already, according to the article, dodged one bullet; but there’s no reason to expect that it’ll be the only one.
Also, due to the nature of the Fediverse being open source, there’s no way to prevent Facebook or other corporate monstrosities from building their own hooks.
I think we need to be prepared to preemptively defederate from the likes of Google, Reddit, Facebook or whatever. Not just this instance, but the greater Fediverse should have a United policy to reject association with those who would consume us and spit us out.
You really can’t stop it unless you deliberately cultivate an anti-corp mindset in your users. You basically have to treat it like cyberpunk rules.
There’s no stopping it. We’re just going to have to keep being ready to migrate to the next platform when the corporate hooks get in and ruin shit.
I’d like to say “we have nothing to lose but our chains”, but more accurately we are only as strong as our resolve against corporations. We’ll do what we can, Meta or whatever multinational will do what it does.
We can’t fully stop what they are planning but it is possible to cultivate what we have and let it grow in a direction that’s open, just and not solely for economic ends.
Agreed. We need to treat this like OUR platform. It’s not the admins’ platform. It’s not the devs’ platform. It’s OUR platform. We create (or at least link) the content. I think that if we maintain this mindset, people will reject corporate attempts to inject themselves into our platform.
Edit: Not to say we shouldn’t appreciate devs and admins. See the thread continued
Excluding admins and devs from the start is just petulant and short sighted. Treating them like the enemy will only encourage them to silo off from the community.
It’s not that they’re the enemy - it’s just that the platform is controlled by its users. If an admin goes bad, users have the ability to change instances or stand up instances of their own. We are not tied to a single entity’s will.
Yes, this is what I meant. Thank you for making it clearer than I did
It would be nice to have some sort of mutually assured destruction with these mega corps.
If we reach a critical mass before the corporate weasels sneak in, then we’ve stolen their first and best chance to gain leverage.
So the earliest wins are the biggest wins. We need users!
Here is a GPT4 tldr summary, and thoughts on how to avoid this from happening to us:
Summary:
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The Fediverse is a decentralized network of servers communicating through the ActivityPub protocol.
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Large corporations like Google and Microsoft have a history of either trying to control or make decentralized networks irrelevant.
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Google joined the XMPP federation initially but implemented their own closed version, causing compatibility issues and slowing down the development of XMPP.
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Eventually, Google stopped federating with other XMPP servers, leading to a decline in XMPP’s popularity and growth.
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Microsoft used similar tactics to hinder competing projects, such as the Samba network file system and open source office suites like OpenOffice and LibreOffice.
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The strategy involves extending protocols or developing new ones to deny entry to open source projects.
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Proprietary formats and complicated specifications are used to maintain dominance in markets.
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Meta’s potential entry into the Fediverse raises concerns as it could lead to fragmentation and a loss of freedom.
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The Fediverse should focus on its values of freedom, ethics, and non-commercialism to avoid being co-opted by large corporations.
How a new federated decentralized platform can avoid this fate:
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Stay true to the principles: The platform should prioritize and uphold the values of freedom, openness, and decentralization.
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Develop open and robust protocols: Use open standards and ensure the protocol’s specifications are transparent, well-documented, and not controlled by a single entity.
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Foster a strong community: Encourage collaboration, participation, and diversity within the community to avoid reliance on any single company or organization.
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Emphasize user control: Give users control over their data and privacy, allowing them to choose which servers and communities to join and ensuring their content is not subject to corporate surveillance.
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Focus on user experience: Create a user-friendly interface and provide features that attract and retain users, making it easy for them to engage and connect with others.
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Avoid centralization of power: Design the platform in a way that distributes authority and influence across the network, preventing any single entity from gaining too much control.
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Promote interoperability: Support compatibility with other decentralized platforms and protocols to encourage communication and collaboration across different networks.
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Educate and raise awareness: Educate users about the benefits of decentralized platforms, the risks of centralized control, and the importance of supporting independent, community-driven initiatives.
By following these principles, a new federated decentralized platform can strive to maintain its integrity, preserve user freedom, and resist the influence of large corporations seeking to control or make it irrelevant.
Ugh, I came into this thread with the argument that we should be inclusive to other platforms, but you’re right and you’ve changed my view.
These companies do have a habit of open source capture and then killing them. I’m sure they would have made sending an email cost a stamp if they would have been mature enough at the time.
I don’t want capture to happen to this great little platform here, but I also don’t want the developers and admins to get jaded either. We’re going to need to find some way to incentivize the folks that are willing to sacrifice their time and resources to keep this going.
I was more of a lurker than a contributor on Reddit, but I’ll fight for the Fediverse because I believe in it and I don’t want to see it corrupted. I hope others like me will too.
Mostly agree, but the “incentive” focus is a misnomer. Humans don’t just sit around and stare at walls when they’re not “incentivized”. Incentives in sociopolitics is just a rebranding of coercion, getting people to do things they don’t want to do. People are incentivized/coerced to work at McDonald’s because otherwise they’ll live on the streets, the housing scalpers will make sure of it.
FOSS exists and isn’t at risk of dying. Yeah, it’s ideal if the people working on FOSS things don’t have to also work a soul crushing day job, and yeah maybe when their soul is crushed they’ll lose interest in the things they enjoy doing, but we shouldn’t frame that as them getting jaded towards FOSS projects. It’s actually just depression, and it impacts other hobbies too.
All that being said, I’m all for donations to people who do FOSS work so they can escape and do the things they love, it means better FOSS products and happier developers.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Just to clarify, FOSS (Free and Open-Source Software) promotes collaboration, transparency, and community-driven development. For those who may not be familiar with the abbreviation, it’s all about empowering users to use, modify, and distribute software freely. Supporting FOSS developers sustains ongoing development. Let’s appreciate the value of FOSS in fostering an open and accessible software ecosystem.
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Embrace, extend, extinguish. Google also did that to rss/atom.
Annoying. RSS is a superior platform for sitting through the firehose of content.
You can still use it of course, and I do. It’s just annoying that it’s largely unheard of.
So many sites don’t even provide RSS anymore. It used to come enabled out of the box for every content management system, now only in the large old ones like Drupal.
It’s enabled by default in Wordpress but not visible. You’ve just got to use the right URL which is the same for pretty much every Wordpress site.
Well that was disheartening to read. Money and greed ruining everything.
Thank you OP, it surely is enlightning. I think that the only real thing that can be done is keep this place anti-corporate. This will result in a maybe not so polished and popular environment but surely more true to it’s mission.
I don’t see how anyone can be pro corporate at this point on the time line short of being a major shareholder or executive. As worker, consumer, and taxpayer, I am so fucking tired of their corruption and crimes. Nothing left to do but vote with your feet and money, since political process is captured. Maybe third-party vote as no confidence vote in the regime.
I’m really glad people are starting to notice their crimes. Only a year ago it felt like I would only see comments like this in anti-capitalist communities.
I think most people in theory are against big corporations, but when it comes down to it they just go ‘it is what it is’ and just accept the big corps without any attempts to break off that path.
My wife is like that and I think it has more to do with not being very tech savvy/or willingness to try something different.
Corporations are great for one thing, and that’s becoming a funnel for money. They bring people people together to optimize for work on that goal. Innovation just happens to be a consequence of that constant pursuit. I think they do have a place in the societal fabric.
However, we need the other pillars of society to be strong as well in order to maintain balance and democracy - strong government, strong workers’ unions, cultural cohesion , advocacy for nature and resources.
You weaken those, you may get some tidy profits short term, but likely at the expense of our future.
Right. Capitalism isn’t inherently bad. It encourages resources being put into new ideas and technologies, but if left unfettered, it can abuse the people operating within it, as we see now. This is similar to communism being highly vulnerable to low productivity and stagnation. It’s not a direct objective of the system, but it’s a natural consequence without some kind of outside force regulating it.
To be clear, I’m agreeing, but I’m adding focus to the balance aspect of things
Very good introduction to this topic.
Can’t have anything nice, can we?
(Edit: I know the Fediverse isn’t only American, but these American companies are the ones fucking things up, so that’s where my focus is)
I know this was probably meant to be an innocuous comment, but I think this is dangerous thinking.
We’re in the current situation due to inaction and forces acting against us. The US populace stopped worrying about trust-busting. We assume that the current system is inevitable. We let our government not serve our needs. We don’t selectively place our purchasing and attention to promote good behavior of companies.
If we recognize that we can do something and we decide to work together, we can make things better. We can reject Meta. We can agree to not federate with them and pressure others to make a morale choice rather than a convenient choice. We can do this in other aspects of life, too.
We just need to make sure that we don’t let them divide us. We see this among the American population, dividing us based on issues that affect a tiny population and ignoring the things that could help us all, including those tiny populations. We let fighting over the optimal solution for problems get in the way of doing anything, even if imperfect, to at least improve things.
Let’s do better. Let’s unite. Let’s make it clear what results we want. Let’s make incremental progress (and giant leaps, if possible) towards making things better. We can’t just accept not having nice things. Let’s demand nice things, together.
“American companies” smh, let me introduce you to “The City of London”, not to be confused with London the city in England.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London
The UK has a metropolitan region called “The City” (of London) where banks get to basically play without rules. It is for that reason the financial capital of the entire world.
The UK has a square mile dedicated to white collar crime and fraud and it exists because the international wealthy were more powerful than the monarchy ever could be, let’s not pretend Americans are the ones who gave up. This is a very long, very old battle - older than America the nation itself.
Sadly true, as much dirty money runs through that place as the rest of the world combined, the US included.
Having the EU defend the community free space against corporations, like they do with GDPR and the standard laws hitting Apple, should be a powerful ally and strongman for our liberties
As much as I hate all the work I’ve had to do to comply with GDPR, I love it. The EU did a good job with it
Well said.
Sure you can, as long as big tech designed it, can sell it to you and sell your data to others. ;) Win-win (for them)
Nobody can get together and build something for everyone without some fucker trying to get a yacht out of it.
Removed by mod
I agree with you. Boosting this every time I see it.
Super interesting read. Points out that the main strategy for gobbling up open source protocols is to adopt the standard, then expand on it, creating a “better” version for those using their ecosystem (and driving out those who aren’t)
I just wonder, hope, that this ecosystem stays innovative and big enough to always be better than corporate alternatives. We’ve sorta hit the point in my mind where the major players in social media have made all their products… Awful. Just terrible to be on. The tracking, the ridiculous amounts and types of ads, the constant censorship and rule > changes, all in pursuit of monetization. I just hope they continue to shoot themselves in the foot too much to draw people back in even if they’re federated. Reddit sucks now, Twitter is failing, everything of Meta has sucked for a long time. Hopefully people agree moving forward that open source replacements are good enough and being enough benefits to push these turds out. I’m sick of the internet being controlled by massive corporations.
Agreed on all counts. I recommend reading up on “enshittification,” popularized by Cory Doctorow. It talks about how online platforms become how you describe.
I’m hoping that we can avoid similar results via the mechanics of federation. We’ll see
This was a great article… thanks OP.
YSK?
Short for You Should Know, like the name of the community
and now i know
TIL about YSK
same
Could you please add a “Why YSK:”? It’s rule #2. :)
Ah, thank you! Will edit now
One of the best weapons against this is probably having a well-formulated idea about this, which can effectively be communicated to people who are not in the loop. For example Right to Repair presents a kind of “our high quality device with schematics vs their short lived crapware”. Good naming helps too. I suggest “Fediverse vs Corponet”
Fediverse vs Corponet sounds great! But I wonder if we can go more along the lines of Right to Repair? Something like Right to Publish or Content Independence or something?
Corponet very clearly sounds bad, which is good, but Fediverse requires an explanation to a layman without generating interest, first. Laymen are interested in rights and independence, so I think words like that can act as a hook. I’m open to debate, too
