this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
405 points (98.8% liked)
Fediverse
28513 readers
498 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
In theory, however there's a saying: embrace, extend, extinguish.
Just because the standard is open doesn't mean you can't use it to strong-arm everyone else out of the market, and Meta is definitely big enough to do that.
ActivityPub is open, but Meta's client is not open IIRC. It can implement proprietary features that only work with other Meta clients and so they become the de facto standard, or subtly and intentionally introduce errors into the implementation of the standard to force practical usage to depend on the proprietary implementation of an open standard (say if they released an SDK), or you miss out on most of the users and content.
Microsoft has been accused of using this strategy, but I'm not an expert at describing it. Bottom line: the GPL protects how code is used for a specific project--it doesn't protect an open standard from having proprietary implementations.
Microsoft did this with browsers.
HTML was a thing, that was implemented by other browsers at the time. Netscape Navigator (the precursor to Firefox) was a thing that already did HTML well. It could access the world wide web, and was the defacto standard.
Microsoft introduced internet explorer, bundled with Windows. At first, internet explorer was not as good/complete/compatible as Netscape Navigator. Over time, it got better almost to parity. But it also added new features, features not in the HTML specification. They were not added to the specification, and how IE would use those features was not made public. So Netscape could not implement them.
Users started to expect those features.
Over time, more webpages would break on Netscape than on IE. Web designers wanted the fancy new features of ie. So users moved away from Netscape.
If only a number of technical users care about something, that the "mainstream" (for want of a better word) doesn't care about. Then things work less and less for the techies.
Meta could do the same with the Fediverse. As they already have market domination in other markets, they can introduce a lot of users to our "safe space". But be real if posts stop working and you as a techie knows it's because Meta have done something funky, Grandbob Jim isn't likely to care. Grandbob Jim will continue to use what "works". And some of the less techie of us will be forced to move to the MetaFediVerse to talk to our Grandbobs.
Thank you for explaining a real instance of this happening much better than I could.