this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Do you want Facebook to do to us what Google did to XMPP???
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
Yup they can mess up the fediverse in the near future
https://fabulous.systems/posts/2023/06/meta-is-a-danger-to-the-fediverse/
https://fediversereport.com/meta-plans-on-joining-the-fediverse-the-responses/
And there's Google's with their new privacy policy states that it can use publicly available data to help train its AI models
https://www.engadget.com/googles-updated-privacy-policy-states-it-can-use-public-data-to-train-its-ai-models-095541684.html
They only cares about money and unlimited growth.
That happens whether they are defederated or not. They have 1.6bn users, the rest of the fediverse is a rounding error.
This is what happened with XMPP:
Even if the entire fediverse defederates from the Meta instance, they have a huge network which already exists. And people who want the things that a huge network brings will want to be part of it. Mass defederation will just push some people onto the Meta instance because it's the only place a huge network is operating (and many already have an Insta account so they're already on it anyway).
That's not to say that federating with them is necessarily better. Some users will prefer a smaller network. Some instances will want better moderation than Meta are likely to provide. Moderation issues might make it nigh on impossible for most instances to federate anyway.
But you can't stop them dominating the fediverse by universally defederating. That is not an option. Gmail got big enough to not need XMPP federation; Meta and other potential mega-corp instances are already huge, they don't need us at all.
The best hope might be for several mega-corp instances to hold each other hostage. Google could kill XMPP because none of its users understood that they were part of a federation and barely noticed when the tiny proportion of non-google users disappeared. But if there's a Meta instance and a Google instance and a Mozilla instance ... it's hard for one of them to unilaterally withdraw without handing their users over to a competitor.
I addressed the point about Facebook dominating the fediverse in another comment in this thread. To keep it short, it'd be like they just popped up another platform like Reddit, Twitter, etc, and it wouldn't really change the trajectory of the fediverse that much, since it'd be no different to another monolithic social media platform.
And for people that want the fediverse to stay small, that would be fine. For those coming from very large sites like Twitter or Reddit, it often will not be because the value of those sites comes from the size of their networks.
It won't kill the fediverse but it might kill the various dying-mega-site migrations. For some that will be welcome. For others, not so much.
There isn't a one-size fits all here. The biggest danger is the fediverse devolving into a paranoid war of words solely because some people think there should be.
I came from Reddit, and personally I would rather see slow growth rather than having the fediverse dominated by Facebook.
I am an associate member of the FSF though so there's a sort of purist bias that isn't there with most Redditors 🙃
I understand where you're coming from, though. People resist change, and so people coming from monolithic platforms are more likely to want another monolithic platform.
I don't think it's that people want a monolithic platform? They just want a network that is big enough to provide enough new, high quality content to keep them amused/informed.
Back in the day this was a constant struggle for bulletin boards (the best of which were focused on a particular hobby or area of interest). Too small and the place was dead, often with a lot of poor quality content with no one around to correct it. Too big and it became impossible to moderate, and difficult to keep track of who was reliable and who was full of shit, and difficult to find what you were interested in if a handful of threads took off and pushed everything else out of sight.
After BBs mostly died, I used Twitter and Reddit as newsfeeds with informed commentary attached, plus bonus cute animal content. Mastodon and Lemmy/Kbin aren't (yet) big enough to fulfill that role. Not enough of the commenters and sites I want to read stuff from are on it, and there are too few users to rely on to fill the gap.
At work, we want to switch. We use Mastodon and Twitter atm. But there are not (yet) enough specialists in our field in the fediverse for it to work. A small fediverse just can't do the job we need it to do. (FWIW we're public sector researchers; this is about disseminating research and finding collaborators, not advertising products.)
There is no one size fits all and neither should there be. The danger is that the small-is-good parts of the fediverse disappear because the content devolves to endless bitching about what other instances should have done and why won't they all agree with us (even though we're not a monolith, honest).
Thats the nice thing about fediverse. People with different opinions can co-exist and they have freedom to choose what they want
Big enough is nice but I’d rather have a small community without anything to do with the big tech.
Do you want Facebook to do to us what everyone else did to open standards???
Build a closed alternative, ignore that we even exist, bind all the users and have us fall back to the low levels of relevance we had before Twitter and Reddit went crazy.
At least with open standards we have a slim chance at giving our input on how we want things to be.
It's nice that you think Facebook will care about or be influenced by any input we have. They won't play nice, if you think they will, I have a bridge to sell you.
We only stand a chance if we cut them off from the fediverse completely. If we don't, they will throw their weight around and kill the rest of it.
Reddit and Twitter are massive, and we're becoming more and more relevant, even though they both still exist. One more service we aren't connected to won't exactly make us irrelevant, we have momentum.
Could you please be a bit less aggressive? The post is titled "Why I probably won't defederate from Threads" and I've given my personal arguments. I've also addressed the points you're making, both in my post and in other comments over here.
It isn't titled "Why you shouldn't defederate from Threads" or "Why we shouldn't defederate from Threads". It's not even titled "I will never defederate from Threads". There are many valid and well-written arguments for defederating. I posted my counter-arguments for a bit of balance yet I have no intention to force or even convince anyone to do as I do.
So let's please be civil around here and not go around brigading people who have different opinions with arguments they have already heard multiple times. If you want to set a good example, then do that for a respectful discussion just as much as you try to do it for the ethical aspects of federation.
I read it. Your points, especially about how they'll have to play by the rules, seem a bit naive. Theoretically, those points should have applied to Google and XMPP, but in reality, Google just threw their weight around and killed it anyways. It's very likely that Facebook will do the same.
Sorry if I seem a bit aggressive, I just don't want to see this thing we have die because of the influence of a megacorporation.
I don't see how Google killed XMPP. They removed it from their own application which is the exact same effect as not speaking an open protocol in the first place. Nobody forced other XMPP-based applications to change. You know what made me stop using XMPP and not keep my Jabber instance when I moved to a new server? Clunky applications and the fact that everyone I had in my contact list was also on another more comfortable platform (at first ICQ and MSN, later Discord) and prefered to contact me there.
If we federate with Threads, they may use their power to push changes to ActivityPub but nobody forces any of us to implement them, making them effectively irrelevant. If they do something that's incompatible with the rest of the fediverse, they effectively defederate from everyone else. So either way the end result is two separate sub-fediverses and the more popular one will win out. Hint: it's gonna be the one with billions of dollars of funding. If we let them in as long as they play by the rules, we have a chance to educate people on what's beyond Threads, it gives Meta something to lose if they defederate (their users' ability to talk to people in their friend lists). At least we don't lose anything that we wouldn't also lose by not talking to them in the first place.
When they removed XMPP, they disconnected the Google users from the rest of XMPP. And since it was the largest instance, XMPP as a whole basically died. People couldn't use XMPP to stay in touch anymore with people using Google's thing, and vice-versa, which XMPP as a whole kind of came to rely on. I don't know much more about XMPP, but anyways, most of my points are general and not XMPP-specific.
Also, cutting them off from the fediverse won't have the effect you're trying to say it will have. It'll just be it's own thing, just like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc are now. And the fediverse thrives in spite of them.
And please, stop assuming Facebook will play by the rules. They won't.
And how is this different from not using XMPP (or being defederated) in the first place? Their platform would still have become huge and pulled over users. People don't use a platform because they like the technology. They use it because it has people they want to talk to. Even google themselves had to accept that with their failed Google Wave which didn't even survive the closed beta because people who got an invite couldn't talk to their friends who didn't get one.
And I'm explicitly not assuming Facebook will play by the rules in the long run. I'm saying while they do, let's talk to them, even if it's just for a month. When they eventually start breaking the rules, we can still defederate and I assure you that we won't lose significantly more users than we would have if we had defederated earlier. Because why would we? We're on the side of the open-closed divide that values privacy and open source software. Our only reason to ever switch to Threads is to talk to people that aren't on Mastodon/Lemmy/Whatever. If that's a requirement for someone they have to do that either way. But for someone who starts out on Threads, we might suddenly create an incentive to create a Mastodon account to keep talking to their friends. They probably won't leave Threads but they will use both, pulling the fediverse into the public conciousnes.
It's different because for a while, there was no incentive for the average person to move to decentralised, libre XMPP when they could interact with the people there from Google Talk. If someone was on XMPP and asked a Talk user to come over, the odds they would be convinced were very small. Why would they when they can access it anyways?
Even if they didn't kill it, they certainly stalled it's growth, from the moment they federated.
Facebook will probably start not playing nice slowly, if they don't right away, so it'll be very hard to draw a line where they should be defederated, so larger instances and users may never end up defederating them thanks to blurred lines and constantly shifting goalposts. "We'll defederate when they don't play nice" is too vague to work when they move slowly and change things gradually.
When the vicious predator bares it's fangs, it's best to deal with it right away by running or fighting back, instead of trying to be friendly with it.
And how many of those Google Talk users would have created an XMPP account if there hadn't been any federation at all? If someone was on XMPP and asked a Talk user to come over, the odds they would be convinced were very small. Why would they when they can ask you to create a Google Talk account instead?
Why would someone create a Signal account when they can ask you to create a WhatsApp account instead?
People do it, because they're convinced of it for one reason or another. But it's a hell of a lot harder to convince someone to move when both are interoperable. Imagine if Signal and WhatsApp were federated together, do you think Signal would have nearly as much success as it does if WhatsApp users could just stay there to communicate with Signal users?
Its interesting how aggressive some people can get if you respectfully state your opinion
Have a look at the upvote to downvote ratio on the top level post. Currently 22 up / 9 down. I can fully respect people not agreeing with me, it is a controversial opinion after all. Fine, ignore it or respectfully post an on-topic reply and move on. But actively marking it as "this is bad" or leaving replies that just repeat arguments that I've explicitly addressed... I don't get it. Especially when my last two paragraphs are literally:
If a person thinks your idea is a bad one, downvoting and walking away is just about the least aggressive they can be, though. Especially if they see other people have already left comments that reflect their opinion so they couldn't add anything.
I guess there are different opinions about what downvotes are for. Personally I think they shouldn't reflect if something matches my opinion but if it's worth reading. For me, a downvote says "this is badly written", "this is rude" or in general "this shouldn't be on people's front page". I will gladly upvote a post/comment that contradicts my personal belief if the author put effort into it.
That's fine. Fwiw I don't even have a button for it on my instance. You shouldn't assume everyone is going to share your usage though, in fact I think most people don't.