Fediverse

Facebook messenger did the same . You used to be able to talk to fb users via google chat all from pidgin or another xmpp client. They are a hostile actor on the web who have already proven themselves untrustworthy. Let's not forget the Snowden docs or Cambridge Analytica

Seems like just another reason why defederation should be completely removed from the protocol. It's way too easy to abuse and force centralisation.

There are other far less destructive and abusable ways of dealing with spam and content moderation.

I maintain that it's better to give the users the control, and allow them to decide which instances, communities, and users they want to be exposed to. Bottom up moderation, instead of top down.

For example, instances can provide suggested 'block' lists (much like how an ad blocker works) and users can decide whether or not to apply those lists at their own discretion.

By forcing federation, the network stays decentralized. Maintaining community blacklists that can be turned on or off by the individual user protects against heavy handed moderation and censorship, whilst also protecting users from being exposed to undesirable content.

I'm not sure the distinction would make enough of a difference, and focusing only on XMPP might be doing yourself a disservice. There was nothing social about Office, but the OP points out how the same strategy worked there as well. Users, overall, tend to go where the other users are. Some people left Digg for Reddit because they were unhappy with Digg, but the vast majority simply followed because it was where the users (therefore activity) went. Reddit wasn't even the best of the many options at that time; what was important was the inflow of users. Once that kicks off, others tend to flock like moths to flame.

As you point out, Reddit was not where you interacted socially, yet it became where you congregated because that was where everyone else was and therefore where the easiest access to content and engagement was. If a Meta product becomes the most popular way to consume ActivityPub content, and therefore becomes the primary Source for that content, independent servers will become barren with just a Meta Thanos-snap of disconnecting their API. They only need to implement Meta-only features that ActivityPub can't interact or compete with, and the largest portion of users will be drawn away from public servers to the "better" experience with more direct activity. (And that's without mentioning their ability to craft better messaging, build an easier on-boarding experience, and put their significant coffers to work on marketing.)

Sure, there will still be ActivityPub platforms in the aftermath. Openoffice/Libreoffice still exists, XMPP clients and servers still exist, there are still plenty of forums and even BBS systems. But, there is a reason why none of those things are the overwhelmingly "popular" option, and the strategy they will employ to make sure that happens is the focus of the article, not so much XMPP.

As someone who is on just about every social media and aggregator site there is, I find myself gravitating toward sites that allow for as much interaction (or little) as I would like. My friends and I communicate through Facebook messenger, which obviously requires FB, but I use a browser/app called Ferdium, which lets me open messenger directly without the annoyance of opening the Facebook app itself. But each site has its own specialization that it does rather well. I mean, look at Discord's little communities, which are really designed to support the gaming community, and say, Instagram, which does photos very well. I get that companies would like the One Site to Rule Them All, but I look at it like I would at McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts. McDonald's caters to one of my tastes, and Dunks does the other. Like your example with AIM I've largely given up with trying to get my friends to sign up for services. I'm older, and remember AOL when it was just starting out and even remember Compuserve when it was little more than a list server.

We can't effectively block corporate injections, unfortunately. The admins of large hub instances are just of the opinion that bigger is better, and that more is more. They've been excited by the prospect of, I don't know, legitimacy or something, for a while now.

The result is going to be the network... not fracturing, per-se, but significantly restructuring itself. Big instances will get sucked into Big Social's halo, and be like the suburbs to Meta's or Tumblr's metropolitan centres. Smaller instances will end up as the exurbs. Content will flow quickly between metro and suburban spaces, and trickle across suburban spaces between the metro and exurban spaces. And which Fedivesre site you choose to use will end up mattering even more than it does now.

Right now, there's speculative reason to believe that Meta's offering up incentives to big instance admins. Those incentives will ultimately result in Meta owning them by proxy. They'll be client kingdoms, to mix metaphors, working on Meta's behalf, but getting relatively little in return for it.

I think Reddit moderators probably have a good idea about how they'll ultimately end up feeling.

I don't think Google cares if the Fediverse succeeds or not. All they care about is that it can be indexed and people will be able to show Google ads on their instances.

Google doesn't have a Reddit equivalent or even any other social network competitor (anymore; they killed them all). They explicitly chose to exit that entire concept of products.

The only reason XMPP mattered to Google at the time was they were trying to compete with Apple for messaging on mobile devices. XMPP meant that Android devices using Google Hangouts/Chat/Gmail could chat with users on other platforms/services while Apple's chat app could only do SMS.

I guess what I'm saying is that Google is mostly irrelevant from the perspective of the Fediverse other than the fact that it can index and maybe give priority to discussions of certain products/topics like it does with Reddit currently.

@MyMulligan @jherazob I disagree.

I think the key thing is to just make sure that you don't use non #FOSS clients. #GoogleTalk started as a client for #XMPP, people migrated to it, and then #Google dropped support for #XMPP. If so many people didn't use #GoogleTalk, the #XMPP network would have remained unimpeded.

Same. I was familiar with "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" but somehow still didn't get it until Ploum explained it to me slowly.

Yeah, I had never understood why people were so upset about Meta joining the fediverse but after reading that I do agree that there is a lot of damage it could cause.

Your comment made me read it. You're right. I remeber the XMPP gchat days but I was too young to understand or care what XMPP was. I just remember the slick we ui being mind blowing.

The whole article is good. I was about to quote this part.

What Google did to XMPP was not new. In fact, in 1998, Microsoft engineer Vinod Vallopllil explicitly wrote a text titled "Blunting OSS attacks" where he suggested to "de-commoditize protocols & applications […]. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS project’s entry into the market."

Microsoft put that theory in practice with the release of Windows 2000 which offered support for the Kerberos security protocol. But that protocol was extended. The specifications of those extensions could be freely downloaded but required to accept a license which forbid you to implement those extensions. As soon as you clicked "OK", you could not work on any open source version of Kerberos. The goal was explicitly to kill any competing networking project such as Samba.

We will need to be very vigilent with how things proceed here.

But XMPP users were presumably still around and outlasted Google and their apps. We'll be the same even if Facebook churns the protocol, because the whole point of being on Mastodon or KBin is to not be on Facebook.

if Google or Meta wants to join they should to us not us to them so if they break federation we should not care and continue implement our stuff

As I understood the article, the danger is that large actors like these are too important too ignore. Too many users, too much content to neglect. So while in theory you are obviously right, in reality there will be a temptation to cater to their needs, because it seems so worthwhile.