this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Fediverse

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How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) (ploum.net)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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This blog post by Ploum, who was part of the original XMPP efforts long ago, describes how Google killed one great federated service, which shows why the Fediverse must not give Meta the chance

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[โ€“] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't think Google cares if the Fediverse succeeds or not. All they care about is that it can be indexed and people will be able to show Google ads on their instances.

Google doesn't have a Reddit equivalent or even any other social network competitor (anymore; they killed them all). They explicitly chose to exit that entire concept of products.

The only reason XMPP mattered to Google at the time was they were trying to compete with Apple for messaging on mobile devices. XMPP meant that Android devices using Google Hangouts/Chat/Gmail could chat with users on other platforms/services while Apple's chat app could only do SMS.

I guess what I'm saying is that Google is mostly irrelevant from the perspective of the Fediverse other than the fact that it can index and maybe give priority to discussions of certain products/topics like it does with Reddit currently.

[โ€“] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The threat right now is from Meta, that is eyeing the fediverse, not Google.

For anyone paying attention, I'm going to sound like a broken record here, but it bears repeating: business models that treat the user as the product--to be sold, not catered to--is a cancer on the internet.

This ought to be a wakeup call in 2023. If you aren't the paying customer/supporter, you are less than dirt on the underside of the boot of the big tech firms. You are cattle, in a factory farm, to be treated like shit, only to be slaughtered for profit at the next opportunity.

Attitude's like "I don't care about ads" and "my data is worthless to me, so why not trade it in" all mask the more fundamental problem that is that you are being held in a cage full of shit, when in reality you could be roaming free in a pasture.