cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/181146
I am assuming many of you have heard about the potential of Meta creating an ActivityPub enabled client (TheVerge, PCMag etc. have made articles). I was just wondering what people’s thoughts are on this, and if it came down to it should instances in the fediverse defederate from it considering it could be a case of Embrace, extend, extinguish.
There’s a DefederateMeta magazine at [email protected] if you’re interested, which includes an anti-meta pact on cryptpad with the responses viewable on a seperate website if you care to see which instance admins have agreed.
I’m just curious what my fellow sh.it.heads think of this development in the fediverse, any input is appreciated!
Reposting at the request of can, within the context of c/agora should this instance defederate from any future Meta activity pub enabled clients? From my understanding it is more so a Twitter-clone and I’d argue a more severe problem for Kbin / Mastodon, but it is still worth discussing here.
Brushing this off as a data harvesting question seems a bit simplistic in my opinion as it ignores the concern for an EEE strategy.
What happens if they somehow manage to scale up and become the largest instance on the fediverse? Wouldn’t they become that de-facto central authority? That would give them the ability to defederate instances which aren’t following the “right” code of conduct, effectively silencing them for most of the fediverse users. They could push their own anti-features to the activitypub communication within their apps, forcing the rest of the instances to either follow suit and implement it, or break compatibility with that largest instance (not sure I explain that properly, but an example would be how microsoft and google forced their implementation of the W3C EME specification on Firefox).
Are we supposed to believe that after decades of building walled gardens and prioritising money over ethic, they had a change of heart and decided to embrace open platforms for the greater good of humanity?
They already are the defacto authority on federation. If you’re not on Facebook then you’re cut off from THE social media network.
I understand the EEE fear. It’s certainly a thing to watch out for going into the future. The way to win here is to outcompete them in feature support. If they have a closed proprietary feature that is popular then the FOSS community needs to strive for feature parity. That’s always been the way you win in software. Linux is a prime example of this. Microsoft can’t outcompete Linux in the commercial server space because the overall Linux development team dwarfs anything Microsoft has.
We’re not going to strangle Meta out of the Fediverse even if everyone de-federated them. They can still support ActivityPub pub and the lack of any ability to communicate with the greater Fediverse removed any chance of users leaving Facebook. It allows them to market themselves as supporting open protocols and avoiding accusations of monopolistic behavior without ever being put in a position to have to compete.
Make them compete. Provide their users with better features, better privacy protection, more useful communities, etc. That’s the only way to win the long battle imo.