Not that kind of “open”: The anti-Meta fedi pact | Hacker News Reader

Not that kind of “open”: The anti-Meta fedi pact

daringfireball.net

25 pointsCharlesW13 comments

The issue is the well known strategy of embrace, extend, extinguish.

Facebook+Google and XMPP/Jabber had this happen already. A big company comes around to embrace a new technology. They then call it Google Hangouts with a few changes. then they extinguish support of the original, leaving the original community crippled and everyone locked into Google.

Discord too, with IRC support early on was embraced. Then extended to include new features users wanted, and then IRC support was extinguished, and the old IRC networks were worse off because of it.

I dunno the solution to embrace-extend-extinguish, but I'm kinda fine with free-software developers and administrators on recognizing the pattern and trying to do something about it. I'm not sure... what... exactly should be done. But we all know that Meta/Facebook is just using the platform to seed their competitor and will extinguish support (either through success: when they supplanted the original. Or through failure: when they don't grow as fast as expected they'll cut out).

Either way, its not in the long-term interest of any platform to actually support Facebook or other such large companies.

Glad you pointed this out and covered it well. I used to use both companies' XMPP federation until they were ripped out.

Users should understand that neither company is a good faith actor in the fediverse, and that this kind of compatibility from social media companies is a tactic that most only see as relevant in the early part of their lifecycles as companies. Once they're dominant or it's time to monetize, that shit goes right out the window.

We just saw this play out with Twitter, and we're seeing it again with Reddit right this very moment. As an individual user, enjoy the 'openness' while you can if you want, but free online communities should be strategic about what relationships they form with tech and social media companies.

I think this will likely happen either way. My prediction is some Mastodon server will become much bigger than competitors(even now mastodon.social is far bigger than others) and they won't be able to pay cloud cost by just donation. Then they would introduce ads, and then it will be clear that other servers could serve users better without ads and they have the monopoly to cut ties with those who scrape content from them and could significantly increase revenue by owning the content.

We need proper assurances.

1. Maybe the US government wakes up and finally starts to use antitrust law properly? A company is nominally for the betterment of our country, and not just the profits of a few. Previous administrations would split up companies that got too big, like "Ma Bell" as they used to call it.

2. Government could split up networks to prevent them from reaching effective monopoly power. It's clearly not in the users best interest to centralize as much as we have today.

3. Alternatively, EU could move in this direction since I don't think USA is super interested.

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I don't wanna reach for the regulation button unless necessary. But it's a tough problem, and I don't see a solution outside of government on this particular case.

How will splitting companies solve the issue? The problem is that for lot of big companies ads is the only driver of revenue and that leads to bad decision. Even if you split the ad divison, the revenue will come from the same thing.. making product worse for increasing ad clicks.

Splitting makes sense if there are unrelated companies giving benefit to each other because they are part of same organization like Bell labs. And even in Bell labs splitting failed and they merged again.

But a lot of smaller companies, the forum / discussion site is just there for support.

Factorio, for instance, needs a discussion site where players could swap strategies and discuss the game. Its complex enough that the players have a need to work together to discover how... say... the best layout for trains was or other such systems.

Factorio was funded by two sources: Reddit (/r/Factorio was very big), and the developers, who ran a private phpBB forum for this purpose. Additional hosting existed across the internet to help distribute mods, "Blueprints" and other community-sourced strategies/features.

There's no need to make a giant mega-advertising webpage. The "usefulness" of these systems is far smaller.

Past outcomes created by a known actor's engagement with similar projects may be predictive of their objectives with regards to this instance of engagement.

The early hardcore adopters & admins definitely tend towards a militant dogmatic ardency. There's an ever expanding list of absolutely unacceptable things which folks will ban instances for, like having search. Or being Meta, I guess.

Think of all the advertising dollars and big-ticket enterprise users they're missing out on!

If I were to create a public real-life community, would I be happy to invite people who are known for being toxic, associate with political extremism, or simply would not fit with the present state of the community? Would I invite a giant corporation with billions of dollars that could potentially have devastating effects on my community? I don't think I would.

The question is whether the fediverse is a community, or infrastructure. You wouldn’t argue that toxic people should be prevented from using the roads or the power grid.

Agree. I also don't like Facebook, but if they contribute something good, great. If they don't, and they're somehow harming the system... well this time there's a solution <-- that's the cool part.

In practice, email is not really open.

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