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@[email protected] on the Fediverse & Meta's Threads (calckey.social)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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For those who don't want to click through, this is the content of the post:

There is another reason I find the discussion about blocking #Meta's #ActivityPub project #Threads interesting:

I've been saying for a while now that the #Fediverse is a new and different beast, and whoever tries to understand it simply as a direct social media replacement misses the whole picture. We're also federated communities, just as much.

Today we see a lot of concern about "what will the #Fediverse do" with #Meta. Wanna know what we will do? Everything and nothing. Because the Fediverse is not one entity. This is the essence of its decentralized nature - and that's cool. If your server intends to block Meta servers completely - cool. If not, cool again.

But if you expect a unified response on something like that, you're in for a disappointment.

This is not a "schism", a "problem", something to "solve". This is just decentralization in practice. We don't need to have the same blocklists, and that's ok. Open protocols are not something you can control, so chill. When the time comes for this subject, choose a server with a policy that you agree with. But if you're worried that we won't all have one unified stance... are you sure you actually like #decentralization?

Edit: It looks like the post got copied by Lemmy anyway, but I'll leave it for now just in case it doesn't show up on Mlem or Jerboa (or if it gets deleted)

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I think the biggest risk is "Embrace Extend Extinguish".

Kind of like how FB Messenger is based off XMPP.

Facebook puts out their new Twitter clone and embraces the fediverse to get access to our community and content.

Facebook extends the fediverse and adds reaction emojis and videos that only show up on MetaTwitter, not on Mastodon. This draws all the users to MetaTwitter and makes them the defacto instance for federated microblogging.

After a few years as MetaTwitter becomes an institution, they extinguish their open-source competition by blocking federation, and now all the Mastodon users have to make MetaTwitter accounts if they want to keep microblogging with their friends.

This happened with Internet Explorer, XMPP, and it's ongoing right now with Google's Amp email and project Fuschia.

Any attempt to extend GPL code in a non GPL way is an attack on our rights as users.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

That, and Meta has the infrastructure/paid developers to develop features/respond to issues much faster, which might cause more casual users to migrate over because they see things they desire.

Another worry I've seen around is that if the Meta instance is not blocked/defederated, it could aggregate all that data and sell it, which is something lots of people explicitly do not want.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

My question is. Isn’t all of this true regardless of whether people block them or not? Meta still has a huge audience and they could still do everything you outlined here.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Yeah I think the main risk is Meta using Open-Source's accomplishments, or good will, to help their proprietary software compete with open-source software.

They don't have to make their Twitter clone federated at all, but because they're making it federated, it harms existing fediverse users because they can use the communities to promote proprietary software, and they can use federation to "opensource-wash" their proprietary software. This competition takes away potential users of open-source software and allows Meta to have control over the fediverse.