cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/719121
This blog post by Ploum, who was part of the original XMPP efforts long ago, describes how Google killed one great federated service, which shows why the Fediverse must not give Meta the chance
cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/719121
This blog post by Ploum, who was part of the original XMPP efforts long ago, describes how Google killed one great federated service, which shows why the Fediverse must not give Meta the chance
Refuse to federate with Meta. I’m generally against defederation, but this is one area I’m willing to take a stand on.
I’m worried this will not be enough in the long run.
Imagine Meta provides more original content, a higher user base, more engagement, more activity. That alone would make it interesting for many other users, further increasing their relative attractivity.
Additionally, they could invest in the codebase, and implement some of the community’s dream features, some nice mod tools, search engine discoverability and whatnot. On a fork which lives on their instances, of course. Services which work if you federate with them.
They have the resources to rase the stakes higher and higher. The incentives are objective, real, advantages for users, communitites, mods and admins. Isn’t it only a question of time / stake height until significant parts of the fediverse choose to cooperate for various reasons?
Probably. But the nature of it is that it’s pretty easy to jump to another instance. I’m not interested in having access to everyone’s content, I’m just interested in a competent link aggregator and discussion.
I’m guessing XMPP users are still happy using XMPP. I used IRC up until Matrix became a competitive thing. I had Google Talk/Hangouts for a time, and I use a handful of other proprietary apps for messaging as well. I don’t really mind having multiple apps for different groups. For me, Matrix is for development (hoping to get my wife on it), lemmy is for news, Mastodon is something I ignore (not interested in “influencers” or whatever), and so on.
If Facebook integrates their things with ActivityPub, I’ll continue ignoring it, and I’ll recommend others do the same. I hate all the nonsense on Facebook, so I left, and I’d prefer to avoid bringing that to lemmy. Let it remain somewhat niche for people who dislike Reddit, and let Reddit keep the rest for those who don’t mind losing privacy and whatnot.
If users are so easily swayed by userbase counts, then I’m not particularly sad if they leave. I just do not want to help host a proprietary service that scrapes user data for profit.