Can Big Social just swoop in and take over the Fediverse on a whim?
Realistically, that can't happen.
1. Pivoting a big business is like captaining an aircraft carrier: it is slow and takes deliberation
2. Most businesses don't like to kill their cash cow, and the network effect that they own is their cash cow
3. Big Social itself is in disarray and doesn't have the wherewithal to make good strategic decisions
And there's other reasons too! đ§”
Big Social are no longer the innovators they were.
In actuality, for the past 10 years, most innovations in social media have been created by small, nimble playersâwhich Big Social then attempts to either acquire or copy.
In essence, they've replaced R&D with M&A.
Thus, they probably have nothing new to add to the Fediverse.
The Fediverse is one thing that Big Social cannot acquire or copy.
No one owns the Fediverse, so that's not an option.
And to copy or integrate the Fediverse is to kill their own cash cows.
In essence, the Fediverse targets the chunk in their armour.
Big Social is obsessed with metrics, and proving value through metrics.
What metrics prove the Fediverse's value?
No one knows. Every metric regarding the Fediverse is at best conjecture. Nobody even knows its true size.
Hard to convince a CEO to buy into an idea when nothing is probable through metrics.
Nobody has validated the Fediverse as a place to make money.
Sure, tiny web-hosts might charge for services, but the average Big Social executive isn't looking to make tiny increases in a new venture. They want to 100x or 1,000x their ROI.
Somebody might eventually try this, but Big Social isn't going to be first.
Yes, Big Social has more than enough money and tech to upset the Fediverse.
What they don't have is the capacity to onboard knowledge about the Fediverse quickly and easily.
This is because the actual inner workings of the Fediverse are held by only a small handful of people.
Believe it or not, most people who work at Big Social are *not* social media nerds, and have zero interest in how the technology works.
When they look at Mastodon, their response is pretty much the same as everyone else's: they throw up their hands and say, "This is too complicated!"
And then they close their browser tab.
The only way Big Social challenges the Fediverse is through small competing skunkworks projects.
Which has actually happened with Jack Dorsey's Blue Sky project.
And to be honest, I'm skeptical about Blue Sky for many reasonsâwhich I may talk about in a separate thread.
But more to the point, Blue Sky has been around for 4 yearsâand why aren't we using Blue Sky?
Before the Fediverse took off this month, Big Social was already intent on pivoting their big aircraft carriers into other "Next Big Thing" initiatives. Too much money and manpower has been staked into making stuff like the Metaverse happen.
They're not going to suddenly stop their current pivot to pivot again into the Fediverse.
Money can do a lot of things but it cannot guarantee you a future. And we're seeing this shake out currently with what's going on with Twitter.
If $44 billion isn't enough to guarantee Twitter's future success, why would that same amount guarantee success pivoting to the Fediverse?
There's the matter of culture. When Big Social sees the Fediverse, all they see is a bunch of deviant upstarts.
Joining the Fediverse, and thereafter hijacking it, means getting comfortable with a bunch of misfits that often aren't even currently welcome on Big Social.
And if there's a culture clash, it's not happening.
Finally, a previous parallel for what's happening right now with Big Social and the Fediverse:
At one time, Microsoft owned 98% of the OS market.
Then a tiny community of raggedy upstarts built their own free and open source OS called Linux.
Microsoft did everything possible to keep Linux from growing. They weren't successful at all.
Now Linux is the most dominant OS in the world, and it continues to be free and open source.
If Microsoft can't win, why would Big Social?
/END TREAD
@atomicpoet my suspicion is that this is Mastodon/the Fediverse's fight to lose, rather than big socials to win.
My take is there's one important risk; a big influx of users happens (e.g. Twitter fails entirely), Mastodon or the Fediverse hit some unknown scaling limit, the new users have a terrible experience, the press slam the Fediverse, and everyone returns to big social. Those of us left mourn the lost opportunity to fundamentally change how people experience the internet.
@dfeldman
> Itâs very hard to compete with free.
Free as in beer or free as in speech? I'm guessing you meant the former, but I think the latter had more to do with GNU/Linux dominance. MS made strong arguments about TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), which could have stemmed the flow of enterprise users away from Windows if the main issue was financial cost.
@atomicpoet @davidallengreen interesting.
However, much like the tale of Linux, there still seems a risk the open nature might be embraced and extended with popular proprietary features to make popular spaces which are essentially privately controlled (even if the core underlying aspects are technically open).
i.e. the Embrace/Extend/Extinguish tactic demoed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33545541
@atomicpoet @kasilas @davidallengreen The AGPL isn't especially helpful or relevant against this risk, because the _protocol_ is open. The risk is that (as has happened before with XMPP) big players release a new service with great fanfare that initially federates with other systems, and then quietly turn off federation once they have a sufficient critical mass of users.
There are probably defences, but this one won't be solved by licensing.
@cjwatson @atomicpoet
they probably would not even have to turn off federating. Indeed, meekly supporting competition in fields you will, in time, dominate has some legal advantages.
They could just let their well-funded instance slowly capture users through an ever-so-slightly better service. Few will leave it when they are there, unless the mods go wild a lĂ Elon.
I am sure there are defences but they are not obvious to me at the moment.
Unfortunately, #Mickeysoft is far from defeated.
They've long since jumped on the linux train (but thankfully failed to extend-extinguish so far),
They own #LinkedIn which is another of those "big social" things based on socially coercive marketing;
They "own" many companies and even public services infrastructure-wise and force their crap on millions of employees via this lever
They've succeeded in making restricted boot a thing in the laptop market
They're in the cloud market
@basexperience
> Linux on the desktop still doesnât move the meter
You could say that about the the 'verse relative to the used numbers still on the Datafarms. Let's look at direction, not current state. MS failed to leverage their desktop monopoly to dominate the mobile OS space; mobile Windows was about as successful as Ubuntu Touch. Windows as default OEM OS on consumer laptops has been a big barrier. Now there are more companies selling GNU/Linux laptops than ever before.
@atomicpoet all my personal computers run Linux. Have been since at least 2004, maybe even earlier than that.
I don't trust Microsoft with my personal data.
For work? Hey. It's their machine. They can put whatever they want in it.
@atomicpoet @jeffjarvis #Microsoft is much more profitable now than when it owned 98% of the desktop OS market.
Microsoft is arguably the biggest Linux distributor on the desktop via WSL2.
Microsoft owns GitHub and therefore the namespaces of most of the world's open-source projects.
Booting Linux on your new laptop depends on Microsoft's goodwill in giving you the signing keys for Secure Boot, and on some new laptops booting Linux isn't permitted.
The vast majority of Linux users run Android, where they don't have root and aren't permitted to recompile their kernel.
This isn't what free and open-source Linux winning would look like. It's better than a Windows monoculture would have been, but it's a much, much less free world than 25 years ago.
You're kidding, right? Linux represents a mere 1% of computer OS instances worldwide. Windows is #2 at 30%, just behind Android at 42%. These numbers are readily accessible from any number of reputable data sources. Not a good 'parallel' to push a wishful success of Mastodon.
@DanaBlankenhorn Twitter isn't gone *yet*.
But Big Social tends to be Twitter, Facebook, Snap, Reddit, Pinterest, and TikTok.
There's others nipping at the edges, but these are the players.
@atomicpoet WeChat. If you're Chinese it's WeChat, TikTok, and that's about it. Indians and Africans and East Asians add Facebook.
We make a mistake when we look at markets exclusively from a western lens.
And before we condemn all this, it must be added that more people were brought into something like a middle class lifestyle in this century than ever before, thanks to free Internet services and cellphones.
@atomicpoet
I don't care too much for money, coz money can't buy me love.
And if Twitter wanted to buy love they would find that the 44 billion that is on their books is more debt than credit.
They couldn't even pay the people they had.
Twitter are on the edge of broke.
If they federate it'll be in a last ditch attempt to save themselves from their own debt.
And even that won't work.
@atomicpoet @DanaBlankenhorn
You say LinkedIn aren't joining the fediverse with certainty, but it does strike me as something "new Microsoft" might recognise as a valid good move.
@Microsoft are here already, just via 3rd party, so toes are dipped.
They have had LinkedIn.social for 8 years, so maybe they can finally use it... đ€
(mostly joking, slightly hoping)
@davidcampey
> @Microsoft are here already, just via 3rd party, so toes are dipped.
Did you look at the posts? This is clearly a parody account, like every account I've seen on brands.town so far. There have been MS staff (current and former) here for a long time, but I don't think they're here as a company (yet).
@strypey @atomicpoet @DanaBlankenhorn
Thanks, yes #BrandsTown is definitely satire / trolling, know that now.
I read the top toots and it seemed okay, and I was trying a different client, so thought the "blue ticks" were verified URLs đ
It also looks like brands.town has been defederated from mastodon.online, because I can't even search for that account from my mobile clients now, can only see it in browser https://brands.town/@Microsoft
59 Posts, 13 Following, 157 Followers · We're on a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
@davidcampey
Aww, that's a shame. Yes Men style anti-corporate parody is awesome. I guess it violates some server rules around clearly marketing parody at parody?
@darnell @atomicpoet
They were stalled arguing about blockchain for almost all that time.
Dorsey took over, and they have since basically all but abandoned any blockchaininess, released a couple of papers, and got some test code running.
Their plans are ambitions and unproven, and seem to amount to still having algorithms written by advertisers deciding what you see. Just you get to pay to pick which advertisers wrote the algorithm.
I think they wasted 3 years and are now doing work but I don't think their incentives and aims are for the communal good.
We shall see. They have some interesting ideas, but that is what all vaporware projects have.
@atomicpoet @pre I am surprised that Blue Sky is this far behind after several years in development. I know ActivityPub was not built in a day, but at least there was progress being made over itâs development.
I know there are other protocols around aspiring to do what ActivityPub has done, but most lack widespread adoption (basically having a million active users).
One of these days I'll set aside the time to write my piece about how capitalism, the free market and entrepreneurship have nothing to do with each other, and this will be one of the key example.
Chris, I have often been baffled by this: several good people I happen to know in the twitterverse, when they first experience something like #Mastodon, keep saying , 'it's too complicated'. I must be missing something that they have experienced, what it could be? If you want to post, follow, like, share, how much difference exists between twitter and this? Is it the tweetdeck like appearance of Mastodon client? Perhaps a phone client will make for easy onboarding (tusky/mtext)?
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