this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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I don't like Meta, I don't like Facebook and I don't like anything Zuckerberg does, including him. But I think that we're overreacting and creating assumptions that perhaps won't be true.
Everyone is free to de-federate or not to de-federate from that project. But let's think for a minute. ActivityPub projects are open source, that means that everyone can read the code of a specific project, being Mastodon or Lemmy. That won't change, it's not so easy, luckily for us.
Can they add on features that aren't part of the spec? Sure, they can, but everyone is free to add those features to their projects, it's not mandatory. Their project won't be another Mastodon instance, or another Misskey instance, but an independent project inside ActivityPub. It's like saying that Pleroma is Mastodon, that's not true.
Can they cut ActivityPub support? Well, it's their problem, ActivityPub is alive right now without their support, and we're doing pretty well.
Will they mine everyone's data along the way? That's the most serious concern for me too. But unless we look at their code, we don't know yet.
We old-timers are not warning because "it might happen", we're doing it because it has already happened multiple times before
The core of the strategy was delineated by Microsoft when they tried to kill Linux and failed because the strategy was discovered, it's known as Embrace, Extend, Extinguish . And it only failed because of active pushback for years by Linux users.
Have you tried to run your own email server these days? Many have tried for a long time, and end up throwing the towel, because email is now dominated by a few corporations who can decide to reject your small server at a whim, as a sysadmin i've seen this a lot. And email too is an open federated standard, supposedly resistant to failures.
Or XMPP, which was to be the future of chat clients. It was enthusiastically embraced by everyone including Google and Facebook, then once everybody was dependent on their clients they quietly killed support from it.
Let's envision a future where Meta has the biggest share of the Fediverse, the most convenient clients, the most features, like they used to be. That's when enshittification step 2 starts, and they start slowly cutting off anything not under their direct control. Just like they did with XMPP, just like it was done with email. And like WhatsApp and various other things, you don't want to stop using it because you now rely on it for your communication, and when you try to tell people to follow you to the free part they look at you like you're an alien. They won.
This is not flights of fancy, this all has happened before. Yeah, Charlie Brown, Lucy is not going to take away the ball this time. And we continue to warn it because it's bonkers to us that you cannot see it.
Thanks for explaining it in detail, I was along the right lines but this added much more depth to my knowledge.
Does the ability for other servers to be able to de-federate themselves from Meta provide any mitigation or challenges for Meta in their ability to do achieve EEE? In my mind, it would be a useful tool to utilise at any point but especially early on (like has been proposed) in order to curtail corporate control.