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Comment by bix6 | Hacker News Reader

Are you familiar with embrace, extend, extinguish?

Sure.

I'm also familiar with positive reinforcement.

If/when they start touching the reverse-chronological feed with algorithms I'll call it out. Until that time, I'm happy that it's a non-algorithmic feed and will say so.

(It's also not clear to me what "extinguish" would look like here. If Threads starts messing with the feed, just go view it anywhere else you view you fediverse feeds)

Extinguish comes after extend -- eg, the goal is to make their client the preferred client for fediverse feeds for a large number of people by adding some kind of feature that they can prevent fediverse projects from also adding. Then extinguish.

(Edit) Examples:

- Google and RSS

- Slack and IRC

- Google (chrome) and web standards

- Apple (iMessage) and SMS

What type of feature, and how would they prevent other projects?

I'm happy that there's a non-algorithmic feed in a Meta app. I think that's good for society.

I'm not focused on how this means Meta will be the fediverse overlord in the future, once they release some fediverse-killing feature. When that time comes, I'll be sure to rally against it.

I'm quite sure they'll think of something. I don't think most people could have predicted that apple using an "ugly" color to represent non-iOS messages would have such a strong effect. But apple knew, and they were right.

Edit:

To be fair - "extinguish" is not entirely accurate..RSS, IRC, etc still exist - they're just ghost towns.

RSS is far from a ghost town. Almost everything supports it still, its just not used by many people.

It just occurred to me - post your fediverse content via thread and get preferred placement in the "neutral" feed. Boom.

Okay, if they do that, I'll be sure to say "that sucks".

Until then, I'll be happy that millions of people can get non-algoirthmic feeds.

How is this positive reinforcement? It’s fostering threads lock in.

I don’t really understand why you’re so excited about getting something you already get but now packaged by a monopoly platform?

Extinguish here means they start siphoning users off the fediverse. We’ve seen this many times before.

>How is this positive reinforcement

They are doing what I think is a good thing so I said "good".

>you’re so excited

I'm not "so excited". I'm offering a not negative opinion. Weird, on an HN topic about Meta, I understand.

Having a non-algorithmic feed in a Meta app is good. When Meta overtakes the fediverse or whatever because of it, somehow, let's chat again.

!remindme 3 years

> I'll call it out

What’s the point if the algorithm buries it

can people stop bringing up this thought terminating cliche every five minutes, it's like the HN version of that quip about Rudy Guliani, "everything he says is a verb a noun and 9/11."

Any open protocol will always be subject to competition, that's the point of it being open. If someone adopts that protocol and supercedes it because they add stuff that people want, that's how it goes. If people don't want that to happen, they need to stay on their toes and extend protocols quickly driven by user demand. That's really why a lot of protocol based ecosystems get absorbed, they stagnate.

It’s not a cliche if it’s the truth homie. We all know Meta’s intentions.

This ^. Gravity isn't a cliche, it's just how the world works.

but you don't blame gravity when someone pushes you off your bike. The point isn't that it's not real, it is that you decided the rules of the game when you built a protocol. It's like publishing something under a permissive license and then complaining if someone clones your code and does something with it you don't like. if you didn't want it, you should have built a proprietary platform.

If you create something under conditions that by definition must be robust enough to repel adversial use and it doesn't, what's the point in blaming the bad actor

That's fair, and I'm not "blaming" meta for anything here. They're well within their rights to EEE ActivityPub, but I think it's naive to complain about people calling it out. This new is only really relevant to people who care about Fediverse content, and I see two potential responses from that group:

1) Yay! That's great that meta is helping popularize Fediverse!

2) It's a trap.

I'm in camp (2) - just trying to show people the trap before they step in it. It doesn't matter anyway, these kind of warnings have never, ever worked. Just let the old man shake his fist at the clouds FFS :) Where else am I supposed to do it? Threads?

They're welcome to try. RSS is still going strong, and I use it daily. Spotify and ClearChannel are trying to kill it for podcasts, and that seems to be failing.

ActivityPub in the form of Mastodon will probably never be as big as Twitter was, or as Threads could become if Facebook pushes it hard enough, but I'm fine with that. That's not really a place I would like to hang out, and I like my Masto instance.

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