this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Can someone ELI5 what this means for Lemmy, Mastadon, and other platforms that are federated?
I thought the point of federations was to allow server instances the ability to prevent other instances from interacting with one another?
Couldnt servers just block or prevent Threads from interacting with them?
Just reading this? I don't understand how this truly changes anything at all. Why is everyone concerned? The API isn't owned by Zuck but open for usage.
The fear is a practice called "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" (or EEE). It's been used by tech companies before: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
It, in theory, could work like this:
Meta embraces ActivityPub in its tech in an attempt to garner good will and make it easy for users to transition to Threads.
Meta extends on ActivityPub by saying "oh we're just adding a few things that make this better for our users (on our service) but we're still supporting ActivityPub!
Meta then extinguishes ActivityPub support, and severally hobbles AP, after they secure enough users to be happy and think AP offers no real competition anymore.
Then the enshittification process begins, by moving the focus from users to other interests (usually advertisers) at the expense of users. And eventually to the platform owners, at the expense of advertisers. Though I guess they'll skip the middle step, being a public company?
https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
So after they build good will in the community and get a large userbase on their platform you think they will then pull the rug right out from under their own feet? Why would they cripple AP if their app is running on it?
It's not that they would necessarily cripple it, but they would "enhance" their instance of AP (the "extend" in EEE), "accidentally" making it incompatible with the rest of the Fediverse and thus creating an excuse to suddenly drop support for the Fediverse. At this point users in, say, Mastodon will have created some degree of dependency on users in Threads, and at that point people in there would be forced to move to Threads if they want to maintain a similar experience as before.
Sounds like people should be more concerned about just not using Threads.