Christina WarrenSo the new Instagram text thing is reported to have ActivityPub support and instead of being happy at all the new labor that could potentially be coming to the standard, Mastodon people are now actively encouraging instances to not federate with any of that stuff. K.
Look, instance admins can block whatever they want for any reason they want. It hurts your users but do you. And I'm not trying to argue that Facebook isn't a fucked up company. But actively working to discourage extremely skilled participants (and love them for hate them, FB engineers are VERY good) from contributing or associating with your open source protocol or community is just peak stupidity for people who claim in the same breath to want to remake and reset the social web.
flere-imsaho 🇺🇦@film_girl we've seen them embracing, extending and extinguishing other federated protocols, and frankly, why should we expect they won't do that again?
@film_girl (in an extremely skilled way)
@mawhrin of course we have and in many instances, EEE has led to better products so I think all of this is overly dramatic and stupid just for the sake of it. The entire discourse is about something that hasn't launched and that might not even be successful or have a lot of investment from the parent company. But yeah, let's just battle down the hatches and attack it from the get go to ensure no company ever does invest in the protocol.
pmoe@film_girl @mawhrin Your stance is great, in principle. But like others have said, the mess they’ve caused in order to just make more and more profits, do you *honestly* think they wouldn’t try to do it again?
@pmoeser @mawhrin No, I'm sure they will use any and all things at their disposal to make money. I still don't see why that means it is a good idea to discourage them from using an interoperable open standard. I'm not saying let them lead the project or even be major contributors, but like, calling for all instances to insta-ban seems like a pretty good way of ensuring that users get pissed off with the whole idea behind decentralization pretty quickly.
@pmoeser @mawhrin Or, to be more pointed, because I do believe that the future of social networks is decentralization. I also believe it will be largely dominated by systems that appear to be centralized. There are competing protocols right now and if the incumbent right now (AP) refuses to even acknowledge attempts by big players to even use them, I think that's a pretty clear indicator to everyone else that they should probably use one of the other open standards.
in many instances, EEE has led to better products
well, i don't care about better products, i'm not here to sell anyone's data or advertise anything.
i do care about high-quality communication tools that put the security and privacy of the user first; none of the companies now feigning interest in activitypub have good record here.