Found this post super informative as it relates to Mastodon, and thought Lemmy might also benefit from this perspective. I’m not sure I share his optimism, but his points seem sound to dampen some of the alarm bells over Meta joining the Fediverse.
I think E/E/E is still a risk. If some “high follower” type people start joining Threads, and people on Mastodon start following them and making that content a big part of their feed, those people are not going to be happy if Threads accounts suddenly disappear because Meta make arbitrary, incompatible changes.
Hopefully it won’t actually extinguish Mastodon/the Fediverse, but it can still do damage.
IMHO this is 100% the plan. If they play their cards right they stand to take out two birds with one stone (heh). They’ve already paid celebrities to be on there.
Still, this can only happen if Threads gets massive enough relative to the rest of the fediverse that the incompatibility doesn’t hurt them equally.
…that is to say, it’s all pretty likely, unless other strong competitors show up with ActivityPub support.
I don’t think Meta really gives a shit about the Fediverse. They are hoping to take out Twitter though, and the Fediverse could be collateral damage.
It’s not gonna extinguish the fediverse in the same way nobody leaving reddit joined Mastodon as a replacement. They’re technically compatible, but these are entirely different styles of sites we’re talking about. Lemmy and Kbin are gonna keep on trucking regardless of what happens to the Twitter-likes.
But they’re definitely going to try and kill Mastodon/similar through social engineering. Everybody’s favorite content creators, organizations, and brands will be on Threads, not Mastodon, and when they lock it down we’ll lose access to them and end up needing a Threads account. I don’t understand why anyone trusts this company won’t try to secure market dominance and then monopolize it. The guy says “we’ll just be right back where we are now,” but this could easily decrease the Mastodon population by pulling away anyone who doesn’t care about federation or open source and just wanted a decent Twitter alternative.
I think the people that value being on a decentralized service will stay on a decentralized server. The people that would abandon one platform to follow their favorite “high follower” poster are normies that never cared about what service they were using to begin with. Meta may absolutely take a large share of users to their platform in the future if they shut off federation and our favorite celebrities and shitposters are no longer visible. But I don’t really see how that is any different than Twitter currently having all the celebrities and high volume shitposters. We already can’t see them. The EEE argument just strikes me as sour grapes that “their” users are going somewhere else. And I’m on the fediverse (both Mastodon and kbin) so I see the value here. But I’m not going to get angry that normies don’t want to put the effort into learning this ecosystem when they have their own lives and struggles and a limited number of social causes to care about.
Now what does bother me is Meta having an outsized influence on the development of the protocol of ActivityPub. We’ve seen something similar to this with Google using Chrome to push some additions to how browsers handle HTML standards/elements, like supporting DRM.
All I can say is that, I started using Jabber before GTalk federation, but ultimately Google made me leave Jabber.
What actually happened is that some friends who originally were on Jabber switched to GTalk, because later Google added it to Gmail, making it more convenient.
So essentially when they defederated, my network was pretty empty.
The people that would abandon one platform to follow their favorite “high follower” poster are normies that never cared about what service they were using to begin with
Thats now how things work. Let’s say that now you are following people from fediverse. Those people are motivated to post things, because someone needs to, because they want to grow the community, etc. Meta joins, then meta people post a trillion things(because they are a trillion people, some of which might even be paid by meta). Those initial fediverse people no longer post things because “they have already been posted”.
Then you defederate meta. Congratulations, now you have 0 content and 0 content submitters. You will start to start from the beginning, from an even worse point than we are atm. You are now dead.
Very few people are as ideologically driven as they think they are. Ultimately it is about quality of life. And maybe you can tolerate some junk because of your ideology but everyone has their limit. Content is king, not only for the “normies” but for everyone. What is the point of a fediverse that has nothing to interact with and noone to interact with you?
Then the fediverse was only a temporary stopgap until Meta (or any other corporation) made a better product than Twitter. It was doomed from the start.
The thing is that this can happen even without active malice.
If the product owners or engineers decide “hey, we want to add this cool feature, but it’s not supported by activity pub” the path of least resistance – bypassing the long process of changing the activity pub spec and getting everyone else on board – can be super tempting, and come from a place of wanting to make your product better.
Those ostensibly good intentions can lead to E/E/E without actively meaning to.
You could argue that this is what happened to Jabber.
Although Facebook Messenger never made a good faith attempt to interoperate with Jabber in the first place.
It was Google’s GTalk not Facebook’s Messenger.
Facebook never needed Jabber for their messenger.
Yeah, I don’t find his answer on E/E/E comforting. However if nothing changes hopefully the niche that’s already on Mastodon and kbin/Lemmy could survive regardless of Threads as I’m fairly happy with the state it is right now.
Google effectively killed XMPP this way. During the time the federation was working the protocol essentially stood still, because they were afraid of breaking GTalk. Once GTalk gained enough momentum Google just pulled the plug.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
