cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/9799372
What’s Meta up to?
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Embrace ActivityPub, , Mastodon, and the fediverse
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Extend ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the fediverse with a very-usable app that provides additional functionality (initially the ability to follow everybody you’re following on Instagram, and to communicate with all Threads users) that isn’t available to the rest of the fediverse – as well over time providing additional services and introducing incompatibilities and non-standard improvements to the protocol
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Exploit ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the fediverse by utilizing them for profit – and also using them selfishly for Meta’s own ends
Since the fediverse is so much smaller than Threads, the most obvious ways of exploiting it – such as stealing market share by getting people currently in the fediverse to move to Threads – aren’t going to work. But exploitation is one of Meta’s core competences, and once you start to look at it with that lens, it’s easy to see some of the ways even their initial announcement and tiny first steps are exploiting the fediverse: making Threads feel like a more compelling platform, and reshaping regulation. Longer term, it’s a great opportunity for Meta to explore – and maybe invest in – shifting their business model to decentralized surveillance capitalism.
This is one of the many reasons to just defederate from Threads.
Meta can fuck right off
That is painfully accurate of what’s happening if instance admins do not hard block Threads.
Yet another word that starts with an E! Thanks for the link, I added a link to the post near the end of the “Extinguish isn’t the only word that starts with an E”:
Either way, as Ramin Honary suggests, it’s a great opportunity for Enshittification – yet another word that starts with an E!
As i suggested from the start. Defederate any instance that federate with threads. Yea I’m being Trotsky here, split can be a good thing.
Well, it makes me sad that we would have to, but that doesn’t make me agree less that it would be necessary to keep a real alternative in existence.
Every instance that allows Meta should not be considered part of the Fediverse anymore, but is now Metaverse. Mastodon/Pleroma/Lemmy/… will then just become the running software, but not by default ‘Fediverse’ anymore, that choice will become the admin’s: Fedi or Meta.
In a perfect world we can still keep the big parties out for those that choose to, though at first it will be hard, not only to keep up with instances leaking both ways, but also hard to let go of the unrelated users that had no choice in the matter and are now presented with: change server or follow the server’s choice, and the second choice will be the least trouble for most. In other words: many followers will be lost and many currently followed won’t be reachable anymore.
Yep, I’ve said for a while that if a schism with transitive defederation happens, it’ll be a good thing. There are many fediverses!
If the plan for the fedivers is to associate with Meta, I will leave it in a heart beat.
…but meta is where the hookers actually are…
The best paragraph is at the very bottom
speaking of Bannon and his pals, since far right social networks Gab and Truth Social are built on ActivityPub, if Threads opens up two-way federation as planned later this year they’d have a golden opportunity to try to build on the Trump campaign’s successful work with Facebook on digital voter suppression in 2016, the “Stop the Steal” and coup planning in 2020, and QAnon conspiracy theory as well as Libs of Tik Tok and Moms for Liberty’s work. What could possibly go wrong?
Glad you liked it, I like to put in a treat for people who read all the way to the end!
What I really hope is that the fediverse doesn’t end up in a fragmented mess trying to catch up with Meta’s eventual extension of ActivityPub… What this project needs is a slow and steady (technological) development driven by the communities instead of trying to fit in with the big players. That’s what really did harm XMPP too IMHO.
My understanding of how xmpp has progressed is exactly what you think ActivityPub needs. Xmpp is still alive and still continuing to drive for further technological standards and classification.
Google essentially dropped xmpp b/c it was such a slow progressing standard that was focused entirely on the technological progress and that march towards standardization and specification.
Well, threads dot net is already fully blocked on my pleroma instance, like it doesn’t exist.
Any other urls I should maybe add to keep the big culprits out?
That’s the only one that’s currently active as far as I know. https://mastodon.moule.world/@MOULE/110586556696261405 has a bunch of resources including blocklist for other Meta domains as well.
I stopped reading when I saw a copy-pasted definition of the word “exploit”.
This article thinks we’re dumb as shit.
I didn’t have that in the original draft, and half the people who reviewed it said “I don’t understand what you mean by exploit”. And no, I don’t think people reading the article are dumb as shit, I assume that most people who already know what exploit means are intelligent enough to skip over the four lines of cut-and-paste text and read the rest of the article.
Maybe it’s trying to exploit us.
That’s a great article. I linked to it in the OP:
The same is true with Google’s adoption and then abandonment of the XMPP protocol, which is also often described as EEE. I don’t think that’s the right way to look at it; for one thing, XMPP is still around, and thanks to adoption by Zoom and others it has hundreds of millions of users – or billions, if you count WhatsApp’a non-standard derivative version. But in any case, whether or not it was EEE, Google didn’t go into it with a goal of killing XMPP. They just wanted to exploit XMPP to address a business problem of making Google Talk successful – and did so, until it wasn’t useful to them any more.
Chill mate. This is the fedi - you get to actively allow or deny what you see.
No-one can take that away from you.
Can mastadon hosts just refuse to federate with activepub? (I’m probably misunderstanding everything here but hopefully you get my drift).
Yes, Mastodon instances can indeed refuse to federate with Threads – you’re not misunderstanding anything. You can track what instances are and aren’t federating at https://fedipact.veganism.social/ (the “FediPact” it mentions is an agreement that hundreds of instances have signed to block Meta). Currenntly, about 40% of instances aren’t federating – but most of the largest instances are.
Assuming you mean “Can Mastodon instances defederate with Threads?”: Yes. Mastodon (and similar services) run on the ActivityPub protocol, which allows them to decide who they do and do not federate with. Many instances have chosen to preemptively block Threads, many have chosen not to. Pick what works for you.
the fediverse is so much smaller than Threads
Is that a typo?
It’s not a typo but I see what you mean, I meant that it has a lot fewer people in it but it’s not great wording and I’ll fix it. Thanks!
How many people are on Threads? I don’t get it, theres wayy more people on the fediverse than Threads, no?
No, Meta claims that Threads has 100 million monthly active users, the fediverse as a whole has 1.4 - 1.7 million depending on whose statistics you use. Even if they’re exaggerating, it’s still much got a lot more users.
Wut? Email is federated and has at least a billion users.
When people say “Fediverse”, it’s almost always in reference to federated social media. In other words: email doesn’t count.
Exactly. XMPP has hundreds of millions of users too (billions of you count WhatsApp’s non-standard version) and Matrix has close to 100 million but we don’t consider them part of the fediverse either.
Meta can’t even keep Facebook or Instagram functional. They get worse with literally every single update. New things are broken every time I visit. They need to take care of what they have, not go looking for other things to fucking ruin. Stupid-ass anti-trust pig dogs.
So, the Microsoft method - except that never really killed Linux.
It’s really basically number 2 to get you to move to Threads, the exploit part is going to happen on the Threads side, and is basically going to be with ads (which you can block or avoid seeing) or with selling data about the fediverse in one platform (which defederation isn’t going to be able to prevent against). But if embrace and extend is your problem, might as well defederate from kbin and mbin …
So, the Microsoft method - except that never really killed Linux.
explain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Nowadays, it’s more of a tactic for getting sued out of a couple of million.
Oh, hi dessalines, saw your downvotes, anything you disagree with specifically? Or is upvoting comments that say explain and downvoting comments providing said explanation just your vision of what you wanted lemmy to evolve to? Nice profile pic.
how can you see who downvotes
Thanks for sharing! Really interesting history in this article. It’s scary to think what a world would look like if Sun didn’t sue Microsoft into oblivion and put an end to this strategy.
We could be living in a world where Windows is the dominant desktop OS instead of our beloved Solaris.
To be serious, though, being sued/forced to settle isn’t an indicator that the strategy hasn’t worked. In fact, as is evident by the continued doubling down on the strategy by Microsoft and the unfettered execution of this strategy with Chrome, it’s clear that the value far outweighs the cost of the occasional settlement. The only real deterrent is antitrust regulation and that has been just about entirely defanged. These concerns are especially pertinent for something like Lemmy where there’s no central entity to soak the legal fees to go to court.
Sun’s problem was competing with Linux, which it couldn’t. Nobody wants to pay premium for discount proprietary Linux. Sun’s Java, however, still exists. Microsoft’s browser is far from the norm. There’s more alternatives to popular software than ever, whether it be office suites, video editing, 3d modeling, 2d painting, you call it. No, they don’t compete with the industry leaders that have both stability and far more features, but they won’t die off.
Embrace, extend, and exploit is just something that’s being thrown around to see whether it will stick as an argument, and quite frankly, I already see the 3E’s from already existing lemmy instances whose entire approach to the lemmyverse is essentially that - not that it makes it more ok, just that it’s clear that people have other priorities when they throw the concept aroud.
