this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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There isn't a company to blackmail. You can't treat the Fediverse as a competing company because it isn't one. You have to treat it more like a movement, like Occupy Wall Street
How do you derail a movement? You make sure the participants are slandered to the point that your accusations are the main things people on the outside remember of it. Mainstream Media did this with Occupy successfully.
However this doesn't work if your opponent is too big, too established or too well funded. Microsoft tried to do this with the Open Source Movement, but the latter was too well established and funded for it to work.
That's the thing, they're not being blunt at all. Literally anybody can pay for this kind of attack to happen and not even the service provider needs to know who the buyer is.
The only thing that is needed now are media hitpieces about how federated services spread CSAM and you've got damage that could make the YouTube adpocalypse look small.
Didn't say blackmail the fediverse. I'm saying blackmail the company trying to spread CSAM.
And again, you don't derail a movement. You try to own it if you really care.
But even then, it's not worth it. XMPP has been "competing" for far longer and likely had more success up front than Lemmy or Kbin.
You're severely overestimating the potential here. And you're severely overestimating how much a company would want to destroy it instead of exploiting any other success. There's money to be lost in paying to derail it. There's money to be made in exploiting it.
Ohhhh okay. Gotcha. There is one tiny problem with this.
On the Dark Web, you treat your identity like your password, you never give it out under any circumstances. And the norms in black markets reflect this, including the norms of transactions.
That means the seller doesn't know who the buyer is, and the buyer doesn't know who the seller is, and the exchanging of such information is a serious fuck up. Sellers don't want to know, as such knowledge can be a vehicle for the feds to charge them with a crime.
Now sure, a bad seller could turn around and blackmail the company, but only if that information gets leaked. This can be surprisingly easy to do, as there are avenues of info leakage that will catch out newbies, but anyone actually experienced with dark net transfers knows the score: no screen sharing, vet all screenshots carefully, don't use your real address for deliveries, don't use your home (or work) connection for the transaction, etc.
Don't know what you mean by own here. Control? Maybe but that depends on your own position and what benefits you.
XMPP is an IM standard, is it not? What that does and what Lemmy/Kbin do are very different.
Are you suggesting messaging doesn't have dominant players or that Google didn't integrate with XMPP and then eventually break compatibility and some folks argue set back XMPP in mindshare and marketshare.
XMPP is essentially an open standard where you can host your own relays. The concept was to fight against iMessage and Google Chat and Blackberry, etc. It was just as popular as lemmy/Kbin is now. Hell, Mastodon dwarfs Lemmy as a whole and isn't under attack.
There's just no real evidence this is a concerted effort to ruin the fediverse for corporate gain. It's much cheaper and more profitable to exploit it. It just isn't worth it right now. Meta sees an opportunity but mainly because it wanted to try and exploit Xwitter's current state. That's why it's not even on the fediverse yet. It's not that concerned.
Occam's Razor.
Edit: added clarification (emphasis added to highlight the change).