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.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Why didn't your friends return to Jabber once GTalk locked them out?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Because thats not how human nature works. Convenience tramps everything and almost noone is as ideologically driven as they think they are.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Then the only real solution is to disallow big companies from making convenient products. At some point the onus has to be put on the average user. Throwing your hands up and saying "the normies are too stupid to consider their own self interest" may be true but it is also an unsolvable problem if they choose to never put any thought into their own lives and problems.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

My point is that we shouldnt enable those big companies even more than they currently are. We shouldnt let them into our own garden. This is a lemmy.world thread, i didnt even know that, i am using kbin. Tomorrow, this might have been a threads thread and i might have not even noticed it. But if for x, y, w reasons, kbin defederates from threads one day, i will notice that most of my feed will have 0 content all of a sudden.

Taking stuff away is a very powerful motivator. We will end fighting human nature. While if we never federate with threads and naturally grow the rest of the fediverse, this wont happen. It's easier to grow a garden amongst other gardens than to grow it next to a skyscraper.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

If this is how it will play out, then we're already doomed. Meta will throw money at the platform until everyone you want to follow is there, which will leech fediverse users until there are only the hardcore users left.

[–] lagomorphlecture 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The solution to that, which I would fully support, would be for kbin, lemmyworld, etc to deferate from threads from the beginning. You can't lose something you never had and personally, I don't want to interact with a meta owned product so the prospect of what you just described bothers me. If lemmyworld doesn't defederate from them I would 100% move to another instance that does.

Edit: So there is actually a pact for instances to sign pledging to block meta and I don't see lemmy.world on it. That said, it's a long list and it's manually updated so I may have just missed it. https://fedipact.online/

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Because GTalk integrated with Gmail and with ability to still having access to other friends was much more convenient and they didn't care about who owns their favorite instant messaging network. And majority of their friends were also on Google.

The truth is that only purists will stay, and most people (even tech people) don't give damn about being locked out.

Google also broke things in a subtle way. You could see the person is online, if they messaged you you would get their message, if you messaged them, your message would show as delivered, but never get to them.

So first thing you thought that maybe they are just busy. When you started suspecting something is not right then it made you think that maybe there's an issue with Jabber etc

I don't think the defederation was ever announced, it was more like a bug that was never fixed.