Aurelia Brandenburg
ŚéáńInteresting comment on Hackernews regarding a possible scenario/long term risk should Mastodon threaten the corporate sphere of social media.
James_Pond@fiercemilder Thats the beauty of Open source though. Its everyone's train set. You set it up and invite anyone you wish to play with it. The downside is as you explained. But Then the instances can Move again, and so forth. I note today that Rasberry Pi joined the party and have set up server farms.
One thing you could try and lock in is to say that each Instance must have 0 power consumption. Completely green.
https://betanews.com/2022/11/09/raspberry-pi-mastodon-server/
Raspberry Pi creates its own Mastodon server -- running on a Raspberry Pi 4
Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, and he's been doing a terrible job of running things. He made the verification status confusing and nonsensical, but worst of all, he quickly fired thousands of workers. And so, many Twitter users have been abandoning the platform and switching to alternatives. You can find yours truly on Mastodon, for instance.
Paddez@fiercemilder I feel like the AGPL License protects Mastodon itself from a lot of this.
level 5 troon hazard@paddez @fiercemilder mastodon is AGPL licensed, but AP is an open spec. there’s nothing stopping a company from reimplementing. hell, loads of other free software has already reimplemented it (the fediverse is not just mastodon!). it would be trivial for FAANG to do so too
Lightning Bjornsson* 
@dangerdyke @fiercemilder @paddez I have considered writing an AP server in Tcl, and writing it so that to the client it is an email server.
@dangerdyke @fiercemilder @paddez you would thunderbird into your courrielpub, yes
I still haven’t figured out how I will support writing to followers, or approving followers, or writing public posts, or literally anything else
@dangerdyke @fiercemilder @paddez ideally I wish to reuse as much of an actual email suite, written in C, as possible
@lightning @fiercemilder @paddez i wonder if you could set it up to use different addresses on the instance’s “email” handle as endpoints of a sort: something like say, sending to [email protected] to post, [email protected] to follow, and so on
@dangerdyke @fiercemilder @paddez no, I fully intend on as many of the endpoints as possible being exactly equivalent to apub endpoints of the same name - could only use invalid apub endpoint names for control addresses.
@dangerdyke @fiercemilder @paddez a public posting would probably be posted to public%yourusername (or yourusername!public) at your.instance
@lightning @fiercemilder @paddez i wonder if you could use a subdomain for the user control endpoints then. or vice versa
@lightning @fiercemilder @paddez yeah, like [email protected] or something to follow someone, while [email protected] remains free for the AP endpoint
@dangerdyke @fiercemilder @paddez no, that would just overload an action.instance.example.com endpoint (let's use example.com for example endpoints ok?)
Lutin Discret@dangerdyke @lightning FYI mastodon and email are already bridged. @adbenitez did that via @delta
@lutindiscret @dangerdyke @fiercemilder @paddez that was Not the idea. The idea was, afaik, an Apub server whose UI was OFMIP and IMAP.
@lutindiscret @dangerdyke @adbenitez @delta @fiercemilder @paddez I think you misapprehend Delta Chat
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!
Looking 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. ;)
Rin (Rins2pworth Twitter)@fiercemilder so true where's there's alot of people there's always someone trying to make a buck from it or trying to prevent it
👻 coogie@fiercemilder classic Google, and we see this approach in the Web in general with Chrome - get involved, contribute to the community, then when you dominate usage shovel out a million non-standard features and APIs at a blistering rate so that others can't keep up and look lacking in comparison.
I can only think that a lot of instances will immediately defederate on day 0, but what about communties that are less technical, or don't care as much?
@fiercemilder I'd like to think that it would resist, but realistically I imagine it would be more of a schism with the people who are all-in on things like Fediverse breaking out into a new/adjacent 'verse that isolates the corp-sponsored ones.
Alex R@fiercemilder I’d give fairly good odds on most current Mastodon instances quickly defederating with a hypothetical ActivityPub’d gmail.com. The only way to prevent embrace/extend/extinguish is to reject the ‘embrace’ part.
grob (teeth era) 🇺🇦🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️@fiercemilder
Thanks for the good examples, I read this before but didn't really understand.
Thanks for the good examples, I read this before but didn't really understand.
Woke in PDX Fella@fiercemilder User recently arrived from twitter/$8chan here. The biggest benefit to me of mastodon is that it is not owned by one entity.
I agree that it is essential it is not controlled or dominated by a central entity and that interoperability between servers is maintained and defended.
And that there will be a need to defend with continued growth.
Perhaps there is a helpful legal path along the lines of GNU licenses.
Mike@fiercemilder interesting piece - but unless people get their heads round the idea this is not a Twitter substitute but an alternative social media platform, then things are going to start getting chaotic
Skylar Caulfield 
@fiercemilder my honest take on it is maybe 5 or 6 years ago this could of happpened but I think now we are pretty safe. The biggest reason I say this is while they could add centeralized features like verifications, a discover algorithm and more. I overall think most Mastodon client have a solid user experience, and on top of that I feel like there isn’t a ton of features they could add
@fiercemilder like when you look at social media now a days. It’s all just a TikTok clone with a slightly different UI. We kinda struck gold years ago. I think any company could clone Mastodon but it’s federation that matters in mastodons case. Which eliminating that at some point would kill off that platform really quickly.
@fiercemilder I think when messaging apps were still maturing, it was much easier to do this, since at that point no one fully knew what they wanted. Also adding a reccmenations algorithm/trending would likely turn googles instance into twitter.
@fiercemilder it’s also another thing to note YouTube isn’t really the best platform anymore, everything Google rush other than classroom is absolutely terrible. YouTube legit ensures when you search trans, trans women or anything lgbt you get Matt Walsh or some daily wire shithead
@fiercemilder Definitely a concern, we need to prepare to fight for our independence from tech empires.
Cjayfla@fiercemilder this is excellent. We have to remember that the kinds of people who back Trump, Qatar 2022, the American Health Insurance lobby are the kinds of people who will stop at nothing to “portect their investments”. If they can break this, they will.
*My* take, though, is that they will try to legislate this kind of collective out of existence.
@fiercemilder rare good point from hackernews
Kevin Swiber 🐀@fiercemilder @mcollina Essentially, Google already did this with XMPP. Really, XMPP should have been what launched fediverse. Client-server protocol. Server-to-server protocol. Active standards management. Healthy open source ecosystem. The difference now is the size of the community who cares about this. We were few. ActivityPub has many.
Sven Slootweg@fiercemilder By and large, this is only a risk from the "everybody should use Mastodon" perspective, though. From the "fostering a safe community" perspective, the problem is very quickly solved with a defed.
@fiercemilder (A lot of the commenters in that thread also seem to be under the mistaken assumption that the success condition for the fediverse is "universal adoption")
Shine@joepie91 @fiercemilder Exactly my thought. If they want to play with ActivityPub, no one can prevent it. But the first thing every reasonable instance should (and all I know also would) do is to defederate, instead of attempting to catch up with their features. E/e/e worked well with XMPP, because we left the decision to defederate on them, and they did it only after securing dominance. That won't happen if we make our move first.
ProtectiveHen@fiercemilder As a newcomer who appreciates FOSS unsurveilled spaces, it's great to see you knowledgeable folks generating possible scenarios & protection strategies.
Terra Field@fiercemilder *cries in 2000s*
Robot Taylor
Chris_Swan@fiercemilder I understand where this is coming from but the takeover scenario is mighty difficult with a truly federated network. I think it is important that each server is a separate community of users linked to other communities. I'm not sure big business will see this as their native home and they will stay on Meta ( they are certainly fleeing the other site). I'm hopeful and optimistic. I hope I'm right.
Khaled Blah@fiercemilder Has this already occurred and I've just forgotten about it? I mean it does seem plausible but I can't remember a particular case. 🤔
Kyrre Sjøbæk@fiercemilder this is pretty much what happened to xmmp/jabber? I remember both Facebook messenger and Google talk being just rebadged jabber, and i think you could even talk to people across platforms! Then Google did, well, exactly what the image says.
Pasha Finkelshteyn@fiercemilder I'm sorry for the offtop, but how do you add this "Show more/less" button?
@asm0dey the content wrap/warning option allows this, it looks like "CW" on the browser, but on my app it's a speech bubble with an exclamation mark
Cassandra Granade@fiercemilder Not a hypothetical, that literally happened with XMPP. I think the difference is that there's a lot more momentum to ActivityPub at this point such that it's harder to capture the fediverse that way (not impossible by any stretch, just harder).
Aki Rodic@cgranade @fiercemilder also, this time there is a lot more awareness of the adversarial and exploitative nature of tech industry. Hopefully, we also got better at social consensus.
Chani 
@fiercemilder oh dang... Remember Jabber?
Kenneth@fiercemilder An astute analysis.
PulkoMandy@fiercemilder replace Mastodon with Jabber/XMPP and notice that this already happened a decade ago.
Stryder Notavi@fiercemilder One saving grace here is that while it might slow new sign ups on existing services, I can't see the people who've already bothered to get themselves an account migrating into the Google version.
Add that to the major virtue of federation being the ability to find a community where you best fit (the local timeline on the Gmail instance would be completely useless) and an attempt at Embrace, Extend, Extinguish could potentially backfire (Embrace, Exodus, Oopsie).
@fiercemilder Just adding a thought on this that's been bouncing around in my head the past couple of days.
Historically, a lot of people have been uncomfortable with the amount of data collected on them by Facebook / Google / Twitter but tolerated it because they don't know what to do about it.
When protecting the privacy of your data just requires moving to another instance - same UI, same experience, just less spying - that actually becomes a much easier sell than abandoning your entire social graph.