Fediverse

Basically the sequence of events as claimed by the author is that:

1. XMPP, niche, small circles
2. Google launches Talk that was XMPP compatible
3. Millions joined Talk that could coop XMPP in theory
4. The coop worked only sparingly and was unidirectional, i.e. Talk to XMPP ✅ but XMPP to Talk ❌
5. Talk sucked up existing XMPP users as it was obviously a better option (bandwagon effect + unidirectional "compatibility" with XMPP)
6. Talk defederated

This demonstrated exactly the importance of reciprocity. If they play dirty, kick them out asap.

One key difference between link aggregators (kbin/lemmy/reddit/digg) and microblogs (twitter/mastodon) on the one hand, vs social networks (facebook/myspace/diaspora/friendica) and instant messengers (aim/icq/xmpp/signal) on the other, is that the latter is highly dependent on your real-life social network, while the former is not. People using instant messengers and people on facebook want to use them to interact with their friends and family, so they have to use the platforms that those friends and family are on. On the other hand, people are happy to use link aggregators and microblogs as long as there are interesting people and communities to follow, even if they consist entirely of strangers.

Back in the early days of XMPP, when it was still known as "Jabber", I tried switching to it from AOL Instant Messenger. I told all of my contacts about it, and tried to get them to set up Jabber accounts. I was super excited that instant messaging was finally being standardized the way email was, and we wouldn't have to deal with AIM vs MSN messenger vs Yahoo messenger vs etc. I think I was also still bitter about being forced to switch from ICQ to AIM because all my friends had switched. I don't think I got a single person to start using Jabber, though. At one point I even declared that I was going to stop using AIM entirely, and that people would have to switch over so that we could keep talking to each other. Didn't work, of course. I just ended up not being able to talk to anyone until I finally went back to AIM.

A bunch of my friends use reddit, but we don't use the site to interact with each other in any meaningful way. This made switching to kbin really easy. Sure, I've told a few of them about it, but it doesn't really matter to me if they switch or not. As far as I'm aware, XMPP never really became it's own "thing" and experienced the kind of growth that the threadiverse has. Since we've passed the point of being self-sustaining, we can keep growing one user at a time, as individuals decide that they're tired of reddit and make the jump.

Because of this difference in dynamic, we're in a much better position against Meta than XMPP was against Google. The fact that we can even consider outright blocking Meta is a really good sign for us, regardless of whether we do so or not. Even if we do end up in a situation where 90% or even 99% of users are on Meta's platform, we can still refuse to allow them to compromise the ActivityPub protocol. Attempts to "embrace, extend, extinguish" will likely just result in non-blockading instances joining the anti-Meta blockade. With the connection to Meta severed, we'll just go back to enjoying the company of the 1 to 10% that remain, and that portion will likely be much larger than what we have now.

An excellent read. My synopsis is that if any big corporations joined the Fediverse they would fracture it, and that no matter what Meta, Reddit, Google, etc. would never want to see a decentralized platform succeed.

Pretty much the Fediverse needs to never let a big company tie into it. Our group needs to work at growing but at a sustainable rate.

Excellent article and it's of course a very serious concern regarding Meta's Project 92.

I want to use this thread to share one other concern that I've seen coming up constantly on Mastodon: overzealous instance admins that take things personally.

"You said X about me, I'll block your whole instance".

"I don't like a particular nuanced view that instance staff holds, #Fediblock now".

"Users of X instance reported me. I'll block the whole instance".

A few of these things happened in the last couple of days. We can't have instance admins defederating because of trivial petty stuff. The only thing this does is drive users to larger instances, among which there might be corporate interests.

I'm gonna throw this out there:

If Meta is going to join the fediverse (or implement something with activitypub) there is absolutely nothing we can do to stop them.

It's an open protocol. They can use it.

The only thing we can do is force them to follow the AGPL and/or fork the code if they get crazy with change requests.

In short: Embrace, start pushing the service, driving users to it. Expand: add non standard extentions, locking users onto your quasi-compatable version. Extingish: break compatibility entirely, preventing users from swiching to the fully open version.

Okay, this is a good article. I was on the fence about Meta, wondering how they'd cause any damage, and this article cleared that up for me.

this is why the powers that be must never be allowed to join the fediverse: they'll destroy it

great article, if you're here scrolling through the comments I urge you to stop and actually read the article, it's worth your time I promise

I hope people, especially instance owners and devs, listen to this warning.

Great read, warnings like this should be added to the conversation as long as federation with Meta is brought up. Especially for non-technical users or new users who haven't seen embrace, extend, extinguish before we will need some way to let them know what is on the other end of federating with large companies.

Sadly that's exactly who Meta wants, is people who don't care about the underlying system and they I'm sure will spend much more convincing those users that federation with Meta is a good thing.

Aye great read and very illuminating. We gotta protect the fediverse from corporate insidious destruction. This quote stood out to me:

And because there were far more Google talk users than "true XMPP" users, there was little room for "not caring about Google talk users". Newcomers discovering XMPP and not being Google talk users themselves had very frustrating experience because most of their contact were Google Talk users. They thought they could communicate easily with them but it was basically a degraded version of what they had while using Google talk itself. A typical XMPP roster was mainly composed of Google Talk users with a few geeks.

In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they were not 100% in control. So they pulled the plug and announced they would not be federated anymore. And started a long quest to create a messenger, starting with Hangout (which was followed by Allo, Duo. I lost count after that).

Is there some way to work a limitation into a licence? Something around only being able to present federated content with included algorithms. That would instantly make it unattractive to all the big players who profit off their specific ad driven algorithmic feeds.

One thing we can do is encourage the Instagram users in our lives to open a fediverse account and use Instagram from the other side.

Excellent read. Have just re-posted this on 'key, thanks for sharing this.
I agree that Meta is doing something very dangerous to the fediverse... hope they could be stopped in their tracks.

I red tha article and I think there is a problem in who it was managed at the time, 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, if something usable comes out of them joining we could use that but we are not their slaves, they are going to play in our home so we establish the rules.

Plus I think that if we don't become meta's costumer support and I don't think we will, we are not that dumb, meta joining the fediverse would only benefit us because we could see all the posts from Meta while being on a private add free server, people wouldn't have to choose between Instagram where all their friends are mad pixelfed ecc.

What do you guys think? Open to talk.

The main thing I understood is that once Meta joins the Fediverse we need to stand up for protecting our protocol standards, is that correct?