Dumb. Federation is how we escape from every cloud-based service being a dictatorship of the person who owns the platform. That includes federating with privately own orgs to provide them an exit.
By all means make good tools to allow individual users to block Threads (or other private instances ruled by amoral coporations), but doing it at instance level is just dumb.
edit: also, number of instances doesn’t matter. Number of daily active users matters. Most users are on mastodon.social, mastodon.cloud, lemmy.world, hachyderm.io, lemmy.world, etc. And all of those are federating. The only large instance that is not federating with threads is mas.to
What I hate to see, even in this thread, is people turning on each other in this “us vs. them”, “you’re either a part of the pact or you’re against us” nonsense
Let’s all remember why WE ALL CHOSE to get on the fediverse and build it. The strength of the fediverse comes from the freedom for each instance to choose how to run things. My understanding is that no one in an instance is harmed if some other instance chooses to federate or defederate from Threads.
I hate Meta. I also know that Meta doesn’t need to do anything to take down the fediverse if we do it ourselves.
Part of it is just today’s polarized political climate, especially since the popularity of the Fediverse is partially a backlash to reactionaries taking over Twitter and the corporate enshittification of Facebook and Reddit.
Everything is a war now, and solidarity and boycotts are basically the only weapons that small, independent actors have. So people apply “don’t cross the picket line” thinking to everything, even where it doesn’t make sense.
Want to act properly? Contribute money and labour towards your instances. Help them build better moderation tools so they can handle the flood of crap from Threads, and onboarding tools and better UX so they can steal away the Threads users.
“The flood of crap” isn’t what people should be worried about. They should be worried about Meta embracing, extending, and extinguishing the Fediverse. There’s a good article about this here. People are worried about the wrong things and don’t realize what’s at stake.
Well that and the story while not “wrong”, is definitely hyperbolic. The author even stated after stating that Google killed XMPP that they didn’t. So which is it? I’m not a dev, but an avid open source fan. i first tried Linux in 1995. Started using jabber itself in 1999 through Gaim. Later pidgin and psi clients in 2001-2. There were a ton of problems beyond Google. As far as clients were concerned there was no reference version. And there really were no large professionally run servers like mastodon.social or lemmy.world. People, myself included put too much hope in the Google basket. It was a massive unearned win in user count. That was just as easily lost. And kept people from focusing on the core service. Yes Google was never a good steward. Corporations never are. But the lack of official clients and servers, plus their decision to persue IETF standardization had as big or bigger impact on the services development and adoption.
The moral of the story isn’t that Google or anyone else can kill an open source project. Microsoft Google and many more have tried and failed. The moral is that we shouldn’t cater to them or give them special treatment. They aren’t the key to success.
I asked how the circumstances are similar, not vague descriptions that suit your existing views. But sure.
XMPP was dogshit back in 2004. A good idea, but nowhere NEAR what it needed to be to actually get mainstream acceptance. ActivityPub is light years ahead.
There were very very few XMPP users in 2004. There are millions of ActivityPub users. If meta was to pull the plug on federation it wouldn’t kill ActivityPub, there would still be millions of us here. We joined Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon because we don’t want to live in a centrally controlled/owned social platform. That won’t change just because we can suddenly interact with Threads users. In fact, if anything, once Threads users hear that we get the same shit they do without the ads, they might decide to join us instead.
Google killing off XMPP integration didn’t kill XMPP. It did that all on its own.
If meta was to pull the plug on federation it wouldn’t kill ActivityPub, there would still be millions of us here.
It’s not about pulling the plug. It’s about introducing proprietary features that break communication, forcing people off of an independent server and onto Threads.
If most of your IRL friends are on Threads and your experience with them has gotten janky due to Meta fucking with the protocol, it’s going to be very difficult to not switch over to Threads.
Oh, and good luck trying to get your friends to switch over to some indie server they’ve never heard of. If you can do that, then you should run for president.
So basically, the worst thing Meta could do is what the defederators are actively campaigning for: To make it impossible for Threads and the Fediverse to communicate.
I don’t know if the fear is well rooted, but I can definitely understand how Facebook is perceived as not having established a history of trust.
They are a private company, which have placed profits above the best interests of its users.
Edit: I think you can draw a parallel with another scenario: an open and free market requires regulation. There should be rules and boundaries, such that a true free and open market exists. Similarly, there’s an argument to be made than we should restrict the fediverse for it to keep existing in the way we want it to.
Jabber was much smaller than the Fediverse when Google launched Talk.
Users are more aware of the risk now. “Oh you should go use Google Talk, it’s an open standard” is stupid in retrospect. Likewise, “you should use Threads, it’s an open standard” would be absurd. The value here is “you should use Mastodon/Lemmy/whatever, it’s a good open platform and still lets you interact with Threads users”.
It’s important to remember that the most famous example of embrace-extend-extinguish ultimately failed: Microsoft’s tweaks to Java and Javascript are long dead, Microsoft having embraced Google’s javascript interpreter and abandoned Java in favour of their home-grown .NET platform.
Dumb. Federation is how we escape from every cloud-based service being a dictatorship of the person who owns the platform. That includes federating with privately own orgs to provide them an exit.
By all means make good tools to allow individual users to block Threads (or other private instances ruled by amoral coporations), but doing it at instance level is just dumb.
edit: also, number of instances doesn’t matter. Number of daily active users matters. Most users are on mastodon.social, mastodon.cloud, lemmy.world, hachyderm.io, lemmy.world, etc. And all of those are federating. The only large instance that is not federating with threads is mas.to
What I hate to see, even in this thread, is people turning on each other in this “us vs. them”, “you’re either a part of the pact or you’re against us” nonsense
Let’s all remember why WE ALL CHOSE to get on the fediverse and build it. The strength of the fediverse comes from the freedom for each instance to choose how to run things. My understanding is that no one in an instance is harmed if some other instance chooses to federate or defederate from Threads.
I hate Meta. I also know that Meta doesn’t need to do anything to take down the fediverse if we do it ourselves.
Part of it is just today’s polarized political climate, especially since the popularity of the Fediverse is partially a backlash to reactionaries taking over Twitter and the corporate enshittification of Facebook and Reddit.
Everything is a war now, and solidarity and boycotts are basically the only weapons that small, independent actors have. So people apply “don’t cross the picket line” thinking to everything, even where it doesn’t make sense.
Want to act properly? Contribute money and labour towards your instances. Help them build better moderation tools so they can handle the flood of crap from Threads, and onboarding tools and better UX so they can steal away the Threads users.
“The flood of crap” isn’t what people should be worried about. They should be worried about Meta embracing, extending, and extinguishing the Fediverse. There’s a good article about this here. People are worried about the wrong things and don’t realize what’s at stake.
The Ploum article again. Please explain how the circumstances with XMPP and ActivityPub are remotely similar.
Well that and the story while not “wrong”, is definitely hyperbolic. The author even stated after stating that Google killed XMPP that they didn’t. So which is it? I’m not a dev, but an avid open source fan. i first tried Linux in 1995. Started using jabber itself in 1999 through Gaim. Later pidgin and psi clients in 2001-2. There were a ton of problems beyond Google. As far as clients were concerned there was no reference version. And there really were no large professionally run servers like mastodon.social or lemmy.world. People, myself included put too much hope in the Google basket. It was a massive unearned win in user count. That was just as easily lost. And kept people from focusing on the core service. Yes Google was never a good steward. Corporations never are. But the lack of official clients and servers, plus their decision to persue IETF standardization had as big or bigger impact on the services development and adoption.
The moral of the story isn’t that Google or anyone else can kill an open source project. Microsoft Google and many more have tried and failed. The moral is that we shouldn’t cater to them or give them special treatment. They aren’t the key to success.
Both are open protocols for communication over the Internet. Both have been adopted by a large corporate interest.
Now, how are they different?
I asked how the circumstances are similar, not vague descriptions that suit your existing views. But sure.
XMPP was dogshit back in 2004. A good idea, but nowhere NEAR what it needed to be to actually get mainstream acceptance. ActivityPub is light years ahead.
There were very very few XMPP users in 2004. There are millions of ActivityPub users. If meta was to pull the plug on federation it wouldn’t kill ActivityPub, there would still be millions of us here. We joined Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon because we don’t want to live in a centrally controlled/owned social platform. That won’t change just because we can suddenly interact with Threads users. In fact, if anything, once Threads users hear that we get the same shit they do without the ads, they might decide to join us instead.
Google killing off XMPP integration didn’t kill XMPP. It did that all on its own.
It’s not about pulling the plug. It’s about introducing proprietary features that break communication, forcing people off of an independent server and onto Threads.
If most of your IRL friends are on Threads and your experience with them has gotten janky due to Meta fucking with the protocol, it’s going to be very difficult to not switch over to Threads.
Oh, and good luck trying to get your friends to switch over to some indie server they’ve never heard of. If you can do that, then you should run for president.
So basically, the worst thing Meta could do is what the defederators are actively campaigning for: To make it impossible for Threads and the Fediverse to communicate.
I think the fear is that this turns into an “embrace, extend, extinguish”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
I don’t know if the fear is well rooted, but I can definitely understand how Facebook is perceived as not having established a history of trust.
They are a private company, which have placed profits above the best interests of its users.
Edit: I think you can draw a parallel with another scenario: an open and free market requires regulation. There should be rules and boundaries, such that a true free and open market exists. Similarly, there’s an argument to be made than we should restrict the fediverse for it to keep existing in the way we want it to.
Jabber was much smaller than the Fediverse when Google launched Talk.
Users are more aware of the risk now. “Oh you should go use Google Talk, it’s an open standard” is stupid in retrospect. Likewise, “you should use Threads, it’s an open standard” would be absurd. The value here is “you should use Mastodon/Lemmy/whatever, it’s a good open platform and still lets you interact with Threads users”.
It’s important to remember that the most famous example of embrace-extend-extinguish ultimately failed: Microsoft’s tweaks to Java and Javascript are long dead, Microsoft having embraced Google’s javascript interpreter and abandoned Java in favour of their home-grown .NET platform.
What do you mean by providing corporations an exit when federating with them?