daniel
What’s the mastodon fediverse drama about? I keep seeing a couple toots but nothing that like, summarizes it for my tiny man brain
Jun 20, 2023 at 11:45pmIvory for iOS
Show threadkaylie (moony)Jun 20, 2023

@C418 tl;dr Facebook is trying to join the fray and NDA'd mastodon.social's owner among other people.

[everyone disliked that]

Show thread🍂Evan Balster🍂Jun 20, 2023
@C418 Some years ago Gmail installed itself as a popular mail client and instituted a whitelisting method for spam control that gradually made it more difficult to run small private mail servers, contributing to a sort of email multi-monopoly that worked against the federated nature of email. That was compared to earlier monopoly building anecdotes like Microsoft word vs Lotus 1-2-3. Peeps are reasonably worried that big corps entering the fediverse will use the same playbook.
Show thread🍂Evan Balster🍂Jun 20, 2023
@C418 So the future they're worried about is one where you can't be sure if people will be able to interact with you reliably unless you're on a flagship instance run by a big company.
Show threadFarbsJun 21, 2023

@evan @C418 Yep.

Here's the playbook:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

Browsers are another good example. There are so many standards a modern browser is expected to implement that building a new one is almost impossible.

Embrace, extend, and extinguish - Wikipedia

Show threaddanielJun 21, 2023
@Farbs @evan yikes
Show threadFarbsJun 21, 2023
@C418 @evan Yeah. So, I think the drama is about what to do now, given Facebook are making noises about joining the fediverse. Should instances block them? What about other commercial instances? Etc etc.
Show threadnobodyJun 21, 2023
@C418 there also seem to be a lot of folk who moved into the fediverse because of abusive folk on other platforms