this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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I figured I'll write up a tldr on Embrace, Extend, Extinguish in case you aren't really feeling reading the articles.
Embrace: Meta builds a federated Twitter/Reddit alternative, potentially called Threads but is right now P92, that follows the ActivityPub standard almost perfectly. Various Lemmy and KBin instances federate with them and share information. Users from Facebook and Instagram flood into P92, making it one of the largest instances.
Extend: P92 starts adding nice, but proprietary features to their system. The allure of these features begins drawing users off of other instances to P92. Those instances are upset, but Meta insists it's doing nothing wrong, continues to follow the ActivityPub standard in some form, and tells the other instances to just implement the features themselves.
Extinguish: Meta announces that due to incompatibility, they are withdrawing from the standard and defederating from everyone. Most users of this software are now on P92, and thus don't mind. Meta gets a fully populated Twitter/Reddit alternative, and the remaining ActivityPub instances wither. Without user support, the standard fails, and a new open source alternative is created to replace it.
That strategy has been used to kill other open source protocols, and many people are worried it will happen again. My personal opinion is that servers should only federate with Meta if they follow the standard perfectly, and if they deviate even a little bit they should be universally defederated via software changes, but I'm sympathetic to the people that would rather be proactive than reactive.
I understand the concept of embrace extend extinguish
i just don't see a significant chunk of fediverse user giving up on open source instances and flocking to Meta's instance. I can't imagine what kind of features they could add that could accomplish this. Sure, they could make a site that's more polished but if Meta enters the game, we're going to be seeing a huge influx of both users and development. open source alternatives will likely be very close in parity
i think when considering this whole situation we need to calculate the potential positives and calculate if it's worth the risks - and those positives include huge amounts of money and people. this could be enough to push the fediverse to the next level of adoption.. the dream of having a decentralized social media system could become the standard in such a future.