I do not want my posts from anywhere on the Fediverse on FaceBook.
I have have seen people express worry over FaceBook posts showing up on the Fediverse. But, what about our posts showing up on FaceBook.
If Meta federates with the Fediverse, do my Mastodon posts (e.g.) show up on FaceBook?
As someone who is cautiously optimistic about Meta’s ActivityPub adventure, my main disagreement with the author is over
I’d like to see ActivityPub and the Fediverse at large succeed, that is actually gain significant adoption among the average user, people that don’t care about freedom, decentralization etc. I disagree with a very common take on the Fediverse which seems to be “we don’t want to succeed, we want to make our happy little garden, it doesn’t matter if the overwhelming majority of people stay on centralized social media” because I think widespread adoption of federation (for social media, but also for code forges etc.) and open, interoperable protocols (matrix!) is important for society: less reliance on American tech giants, more resilience (services just shutting down as they run out of VC money impacts less content/users) and so on.
I only see widespread adoption happening through commercial entities setting up instances, the model of donation-supported admins simply doesn’t scale. The risk of EEE is very real though, but Meta making an ActivityPub move will hopefully be a signal for others to follow, and the best way of ensuring Meta doesn’t subvert ActivityPub development is by having other stakeholders that are just as important to counterbalance its influence, not by having 5k-10k-users instances de-federate from Threads because their admin (rightfully!) doesn’t like Meta.
I am one of those people who does not want massive widespread adoption. Then we just turn into something else to be monetized with no privacy or security. If someone wants that, there are plenty of godawful social networks they can go to.
I see this in the Linux ecosystem as well. Everyone who wants it to overtake Microsoft or Apple is more than willing to sacrifice what makes Linux better in the first place just for what? Numbers? I would rather have the greatest thing in the world that has a steep learning curve so only twenty people use it but who appreciate it than sacrifice everything about it that is great so 20,000 people can use it.
Same with Signal. People complained about the devs getting rid of SMS support because now Memaw won’t use the app anymore, despite the devs stating that to keep SMS support would make the app inherently less secure, which is the entire point of the app.
I’d say it like this: In general, I have nothing against growth as long as it happens of its own accord through clear advantages over centralised and closed systems and not for the sake of growth. Growth must never happen at the expense of principles.
Yeah I can agree with that
I remember when Google Chat added XMPP support. I already ran my own server but some of my friends we’re happy enough to use Google. And that was good for a while, but at some point Google had enough people running its own chat that it could simply shut off external XMPP traffic. That was a sad time, because we could have had a federated decentralized chat protocol that dominated the internet, much like email does for its particular purpose, and instead we got fragmented chaos.
The same thing could happen with the fediverse in various ways. So hey, if some commercial entity wants to run their own server, that’s cool, but we need to keep reminding our friends of the dangers of relying on that commercial entity.
Why do you think donation based doesn’t scale? If x percent of users donate and the server cost per user scales linearly it does. Also as large User numbers are reached you will find some power users which free to play games call whales. I don’t see how it doesn’t scale financially.
It will take longer if no big company very involved but I don’t think we are in a hurry here. I’m not on the building a little garden side of things. It’d be great if eventually all social would be open source and decentralized. It’s a must to keep our societies and democracies intact even. You can’t enormously powerful tools of mass communication and mass manipulation in the hands of companies and closed source algorithms nobody knows what they do.
I do like your counterbalance argument. If multiple tech companies come in competition might reduce the risk of EEE. And I do hope decentralization reduces the risk of them putting their own sorting algorithm on things and then killing other apps by not adhering to certain standards or something.
I think my belief that donation-supported instances won’t scale comes from the assumption that the users donating today are those that do so for ideological reasons, they want to see the Fediverse succeed, they are anti-capitalists etc. Most of these type of users are already on the Fediverse, as you move towards “the average user” that propensity to donating gets rarer and rarer, because they just want a social media platform that works and are perfectly fine with ad-supported models of alternatives, so I assume that percentage of users willing to donate does not stay steady with growth.
But a good example of a project that has managed to get even the average person to donate is Wikipedia, so maybe with enough nag-bars and the appropriate messaging Fedi instances will manage to do so as well. I certainly hope so! I also hope to see other non-commercial entities like not-for-profit institutions and government bodies on the Fediverse but again I believe these tend to move slowly and only adopt things that have sufficient momentum, momentum that might come from the Meta move.
In my opinion there is some hurry, we’ve already seen Mastodon user count slumping before the latest Twitter fiasco and alternatives like Bluesky and Threads are coming online, whether they federate or not. Social media relies on network effects, and the current collapse of Twitter is a golden opportunity for the Fediverse to get that critical mass necessary for widespread adoption. Slow steady growth might not be possible, as people don’t tend to stick around if most of their (para-)social circle is consolidating on another platform.
Wikipedia was the example I had in mind as well for donation based large scale funding that works. Especially if you consider how over funded the project is as they divert money into tons of side projects while still having enough money in the bank to keep up the site for decades. It makes me hopeful this can work.
I see a danger in too explosive growth. It could lead to an unhealthy rapid change of the user base. This is why I would prefer a somewhat steady growth. But you are absolutely right in that there are big opportunity costs to not making use of the collapse of other platforms. Which with the continued enshittification of social media will likely continue.
Lastly I just want to say how happy I am that healthy discussion like this one are possible around here.
Im on the other end of this. As a recent reddit refugee and general anti capitalist i am strongly opposed to association or integration of tech giants with this fledgling infant of a democratic social network. Time and again corporations have shown that they will inevitably ruin a good thing for their profits. It happens all the time, your food gets more expensive while quality and quantity only decline. Everyday goods are now subscriptions, everything becomes a commodity. Buying a home is a fever dream for the average citizen because commercial entities buy anything and everything even over market rate just to corner the market. And to use some more recent tech examples, look at streaming services. Piracy was a thing, then Netflix came and made it obsolete through convenience and a fair price. Now greed has not only ruined Netflix but also spawned a dozen subpar clones because everyone makes their content exclusive out of greed, devaluing each other. And just these last weeks we can watch what short sighted bullshit happens to social media when billionaires (or spez) feel their fortune is in danger.
Fuck right off with yet another corporation quasi monopolizing internet communities. Any instance that associates with corporations is an immediate quit and block for me.
I agree. I want nothing to do with corporations.
I have been working hard to delete all my corporate social media accounts. Reddit and Twitter is gone. This next week is FaceBook. I just can’t take they way corporations ruin things just to make billionaires more money. I don’t want to add to that.
1000000% agree, you said it perfectly.
I especially get so pissed about houses. Houses are for living in, they are not speculative investments. In my culture, a family builds a house and then their descendants live in it for hundreds of years. The house is part of the family and is considered a living entity with its own god. When I visit Western so-called “developed” countries, all I see are shoddy houses thrown together by the lowest bidder and meant to last 50 years tops, within which time they’ll have been bought and sold a dozen times by people who don’t even know one another. Capitalism ruined Westerners’ connection to the land and one another.
What a beautiful belief! Do you mind sharing what culture that is? I’d love to read more about it.
I am also not sure how EEE is supposed to work with decentralized platforms. In the end, everyone can say “that it’s all too much for me and I’ll build my own network with like-minded people, just like at the beginning of the fediverse.”
The article linked above describes how Google killed a federated service by EEE. If you are interested how it can work I’d recommend it.
After EEE is done the fediverse would be irrelevant and lack users. But course it doesn’t stop people from making their own servers and federating into small communities. But the vast majority of users would use the meta version which was eventually made incompatible with the fediverse. That made 99% of users go there. And I if you ask someone to join your fediverse groups they’ll wonder why you are not on the meta thing instead.
As I stated in another comment it is not impossible that they may leech the fediverse to death but I think its highly unlikely. The fediverse is much more than just a decentralised platform. It is an amalgamation of many platforms with different userbases and different goals. In order for the fediverse to collapse, everything would have to be replaced together as well as the flexibility to continuously integrate new services, as is the case here now.
In the case of XMPP, the community became a passive spectator of google’s advance and was eventually replaced by it. But as long as the community does not become dependent on the big corpos in any way and regards their contributions more as a nice bonus, something like this will not happen. It is this self-sufficiency that allows the freedom to go one’s own way and to keep the power decentralised in the community. I have to admit, however, that this can be a big challenge, but one that is nevertheless manageable.
I see some merit in Ploum’s argument that the same way the Google monolith slowed down XMPP development, Meta could slow down ActivityPub development or steer it in a certain direction by forcing others to implement their extensions if they want to keep interoperability, before finally dumping it. But yes the “extinguish” situation would then be a return to the current status-quo, Fediverse as a tiny niche of like-minded people doing their own thing.
Sure, you can always go back to having a federation of a 1000 users in the same way that you can still host teamspeak servers or IRC and maybe get someone to join them. Some of us want a more widespread adoption though so we actually have people to follow and talk to - in that case meta coming here, taking over the users and then gimping or maybe even ditching the rest of the fediverse is not a good outcome.
So waht you are saying is
I’m not saying it’s impossible, but in my opinion it’s very unlikely. The fediverse, unlike XMPP, does not consist of a single service but of a multitude of platforms. To shut down the fediverse, you would have to destroy all of these platforms and create your own platform that can do all of this and also flexibly integrate new services, as is currently happening with git hosting sites. I don’t think even the biggest companies will be able to break this power of the community.
It’s really not what I’m saying. They won’t “destroy every single instance in the fediverse”, I’m saying they won’t care about the 1% of old fashioned techies that remain here after they establish a monopoly on users and content elsewhere.
Besides, XMPP didn’t consist of a single service either, it was just a protocol. It still exists and can be used today. Good luck establishing a community with it though.
It was a protocol used mainly for text communication. The fediverse is far more than that already. It’s not the instances that matter but the services that the fediverse offers. It is a unique tool on the internet to connect different platforms. I don’t know of any alternative that can do it that way.
Also I wouldn’t say that XMPP is dead it’s just that less people want to use it anymore. but that depends on us users and no one else. I, for example, still offer to switch to XMPP for my communities and recommend it to others.