Agree with everything except the tracking; that's got to be built into it since day one, unless they didn't manage to hit their harvesting goals by the stated release date, which they want to hit in order to compete with twitter asap
pentobarbital
joined 1 year ago
Why does a text message amount to contract acceptance? Even if there wasn't a misunderstanding, I wouldn't believe this to be true if you had asked me yesterday.
If I text someone "sell me your tv for $1" and he replies "ok" can I sue him if he doesn't?
Make the switch to Linux! Even if you need proprietary software for your work, you can dualboot and use a linux distro for your personal use.
Can you explain how Google helped XMPP even in the slightest way? Because that's what I'm arguing against.
The only thing I can come up with is the increased popularity, which is shaky because tech-naive users wouldn't know or care about Google Talk's underlying protocol. Also, considering the rest of what Google did with XMPP, like making it hard for their servers to be interoperable with others, or their slow adoption of new features, it's clear to me that Google getting involved was a net negative for XMPP. I don't think I'm assuming anything to arrive on that conclusion.
Talking about any alternative scenario is always speculation, but I believe the "How to kill decentralized networks" post that's been going around lately puts it nicely:
One thing is sure: if Google had not joined, XMPP would not be worse than it is today.
Probably an artsy V? I have no idea, but I'm more interested in what the V in vlemmy means or stands for.
It's true that instances don't need to grow exponentially (or at all), but most mods/admins want to maintain their community and not see it dwindle down to nothing. People used to interacting with instances run by Facebook or other corporations (which most of their friends or family will use) might get upset if the federation link with them gets severed. If they do, they'll either pressure the instance admin to comply with the corporations and federate with them again, or switch to the corporations' instances. Both of these scenarios are bad for the future of the fediverse.
The classic enshittification story.
How is it different than Twitter or Mastodon?
How convoluted the protocol is doesn't really matter as long as someone creates an easy tool to spin up your own server.
I think the XMPP comparison stills stands: Google was able to steer how the protocol developed, or which version of the protocol people used because they had the majority of the users and other servers wanted to still be able to interact with them.
Suppose that Facebook joins the fediverse and most large instances federate with them. All is great, then Facebook starts to make demands to other instances in order to keep federating with them, e.g. no posts about protests. Because a large share of ActivityPub activity will be on Threads, naive users would prefer instances that federate with it, so instance mods will be incentivized to comply with Facebook's demands to attract new users and maintain their current one and... you see where this is going. The only way to deal with this is to deny Facebook this kind of leverage in the first place, either by blocking them instantly or at their first mishap or demand.
That's the problem though. If XMPP had grew organically then it would fare much better. With how it happened, XMPP's growth was mostly because of Google, and that put a lot of pressure to other servers and the protocol's development to cater to them, because they had the majority of the users in their platform.
What you describe is a big problem for generic communities such as YouShouldKnow, NoStupidQuestions etc and even hobbies where most of the people practicing them aren't good with tech.
For more niche stuff Lemmy works better because if you want to talk about, say, communism you can go to lemmygrad.ml and instantly get a front page with communities about communism. If Lemmy continues to grow I expect we'll see more themed instances pop up (e.g. about gaming, technology, fitness) and Lemmy's advantages over Reddit will be seen more clearly.