How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) écrit par Ploum, Lionel Dricot, ingénieur, écrivain de science-fiction, développeur de logiciels libres.

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

  • sugar_in_your_teaEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.