Fediverse
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
I think the issue people have is that threads is way bigger than all Mastodon instances and that they could having control over Mastodon because of the amount of content coming from threads vs the actual Mastodon instances
The only control they could exert over mastodon is the control mastodon etc give them.
I don't think for one moment that IBM Google or Apple are ever good even though they contribute code and funds to at least a few different projects. What I think those projects do well is their priorities and sticking to them. Ask Torvalds about bending the knee and stopping everything else to give Google or IBM a "nice to have" or breaking change that they want for themselves. They can make and submit their own patch. To be accepted or not. Torvalds will stick to the road map.
As long as activity pub, mastodon, and Lemmy stick to theirs. There's little to nothing to fear from meta or anyone else. Users can block their instance and their users as needed. They're welcome to screech hatefully into the void. We are not beholding to them.
I want nothing to do with companies and their bullshit. I don't want to see their brainwashed users pushing more garbage my way. Anything that separates logic from impulse is a ok in my books.
The internet was good until companies started to see benefit in it...now it's mostly all garbage
I don't have the post at my fingertips, but big tech had taken over fedi-like stuff in the past.
There was some messaging app that was gaining steam and so Google connected with it. Now Google had the majority of users.
Some time passed and google was developing the software more because they can afford a team of a dozen programmers. Google introducts something that the original developers don't like... maybe mandatory telemetry and ads.
Google thus breaks the open source community into two and the smaller one dies because they can't connect with the big audience anymore. Your great aunt didn't give two ducks about fediverse, but she might see a threads ad on her Facebook. Big tech stops support once the open source is dead.
Some details wrong im sure.
The tldr is that having a big stake in the social platform means you can steer it, even against the wishes of the owner.
The google example: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
More about EEE: https://lemmy.ml/post/9577838
Pisses me off that we can't have nice things for everyone because these fuckers won't let us live in peace.
Thank you, what I was thinking of, mvp
The polum.net link is misleading. The author renegs on his own sensationalist premise within the first paragraph or two. No Google did not take over or destroy XMPP. The XMPP group allowed Google outsized influence. Bending over backwards trying to procure the audience they had rather than focusing on their core product. Which didn't kill XMPP. But it certainly didn't help it in the long run.
Activity pub, Mastodon, and Lemmy only need to look to Linus torvald's shepherding of the Linux kernel. Heavy hitters donate to the project yearly. Even submitting their own code. Nothing makes it in to the repository officially unless Torvalds and the others think it makes sense and doesn't break anything else. They set the agenda, not the heavy hitters. And as long as other projects don't fall on over big corporate groups and just follow their road maps to make the best products they can and want to make. There's nothing meta or any of the others can do to destroy it. Just screaming uselessly into the void of no one listening to them.
K
- Threads federates
- Threads hosts 99% of all content and all users.
- Threads releases and update that allows a new feature. Example: they add buyable threads gold, that you can reward to a post or comment.
- The rest of the fediverse can't implement this feature, and is inherently left behind in terms of features.
- Threads releases an update that breaks federation. 99% of the users do not notice.
- It takes Threads 3 months to fix the issue.
- Go back to step 5.
Every non-Threads participant will have less features, and is constantly struggling to keep up with the changes and bugs of Threads. Result: the fediverse cannot grow. Only the most stubborn anti-Meta users will accept the objectively worse experience, just to avoid using Threads. But the average user will just use Threads, instead of joining Mastodon, Kbin, Lemmy, or any of the many other fediverse instances that Threads can federate with.
Yeah, now that I've read about EEE more, it seems probable that they'd do some shit like this.
We need to make the Fediverse's entry easier for the common man. Maybe by having a default instance for major apps like Mastodon (their instance is mastodon.social or something I believe) offered on the signup page... We can have an additional list at the bottom by clicking a button, suggesting the options and why they exist.
But if we don't make it easier for the common man, we won't be able to compete.