ŚéáńInteresting comment on Hackernews regarding a possible scenario/long term risk should Mastodon threaten the corporate sphere of social media.
Ernie Smith@fiercemilder Holy crap, this is exactly what Substack is doing to the newsletter community right now
Max@ernie @fiercemilder so, let’s say this plays out as described (which isn’t entirely far-fetched, I think).
What’s to stop the existing fediverse software makers and standards people from… just not going along with Google Toot™? Fine, shove it down every Gmail user’s throat, there’ll be an influx of a smattering of folks (not billions, if the general Gmail populace had that kind of desire, G+ would’ve still been alive and a lot bigger today), and Google might at some point diverge from the standards.
So? They’ll have their own, somewhat (and maybe increasingly) incompatible island, which… doesn’t bother us? And then a year later, they’ll add SMS to it and kill it a couple of months later, because Google.
I can’t really think of a platform or standard that Google really managed to fuck up for everyone.
Looking at different parts of the FAANG crew, I’m not sure if they’re going to go for it, either. Microsoft? They aren’t in the social game, haven’t been since the MSN days. Apple? Adopting a standard they haven’t invented or, alternatively, set on for half a decade? Nah. Facebook? Too busy with inventing legs. Amazon? Not sure, really, how could they extract money from a social network? It’s not shopping or cloud services. (Well, actually, Amazon might profit from all of it because everybody is going to need compute to run those servers on).
Also, I like to think that people are, slowly, catching on. The big privacy-invading days are coming to an end, the EU is putting their foot down, the US is probably going to follow it at least partly.
Of course, I could be wildly off the mark. That still has me kind of wondering how the EEE would work for a platform (or a group of platforms) that are open and decentralized by design. Worst case, they might siphon off a group of people, but that’s not really a danger to the fediverse as such.
Simon@max @ernie @fiercemilder I don't think they don't really need to extend or extinguish Mastodon in the same way don't need to with email either. Gmail simply offered a killer feature (1 GB mailboxes!) that drew everyone to their platform and they've been harvesting metadata ever since. Same with Mastodon if Google were to run an instance: they can get data from the network, even from people who are not on their instance.
Unlike email though, Google's instances can be banned off the network without much cost to the rest of the world
@ook_simon @ernie @fiercemilder
Unlike email though, Google’s instances can be banned off the network without much cost to the rest of the world
Exactly!
level 5 troon hazardLooking at different parts of the FAANG crew, I’m not sure if they’re going to go for it, either
there are some obvious motives to me
- amazon: data harvesting, vendor lock with instances on some kind of managed hosting provider
- facebook: again, data harvesting. it’s already clear their metaverse is a shitfest, they might look to hedge their bets with other initiatives.
- google: data harvesting here too. also, they killed widespread RSS adoption (thereby killing large swathes of the blogging ecosystem), there’s no reason to believe the won’t do the same to fedi.
there’s big money in surveillance, and FAANG knows it
@dangerdyke @fiercemilder @ernie Well yes, but they don’t really need to go through the trouble of hosting the service and deal with everything that entails - just have an account on a few instances and leech public.
I can’t really think of a compelling advantage a FAANG-powered fediverse instance could offer to offset the spying (of which people are increasingly aware, and weary). Sure, they have the money to scale instances out or up, but that’s not really needed, we just need people to understand that we need “lotsa small ones” instead of “a couple of big ones”, and then it’ll be fine.
So then what? Meta isn’t going to offer an instance under the FB brand, so whatever they do it’ll be a new thing that they, too, will have to generate interest for. Same with the others.
And the point remains — as soon as they start behaving shittily, they’ll get defederated, and part of their datapoints will get wise and move to a non-shitty instance.
@max @fiercemilder @ernie i mean, ideally that’s what would happen. it just seems like a rather optimistic view
@dangerdyke @fiercemilder @ernie It is somewhat optimistic, perhaps, but let’s hope I’m right for once. ;)