I understand a lot of people are mad at me for posting this. I just wanted to share my thoughts. That is all.

I honestly agree, I feel so annoyed that on a platform designed from the ground up to enable communication whatever platform we’re on, people are taking the first opportunity to cripple its growth because they hate a company.

You can get whatever data is available from federation with a server just by joining a server - the data they want is from installing their app on your phone.

if you stay federated with them you can get all their content for free without installing their spyware.

complete win.

I think you’d let a polar bear into your house to see how it goes, given the chance.

I think that activityPub is different from what happened with XMPP. XMPP was a niche product at that time so after Google stepped out, only a disrupted niche reamined.

Here we are a lot of users on our own. If meta starts to do their own implementations of features too difficult to replicate (EEE) or they decide to stop using activityPub, we'll be fine on our own again.

Anyway, https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

Personally I do not see them access to their network ad-free. Maybe there is some data extraction value in outside people interacting with their users but I just don’t see it.

The fediverse is overreacting in a hysterical manner with the Meta federation. Unlike the ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-ne… article suggests, XMPP is a bad comparison, because the protocol itself was destined to fail, to quote tapoxi:

I was a weird XMPP nerd in high school and tried to switch friends from AIM. So here’s my experience.

• Onboarding was difficult. There was no obvious choice of server or client to use.

• Adding friends was difficult. You needed to send a subscription request to a contact, and they needed to send one to you. If anything happened during this process, you couldn’t chat.

• Popular XMPP clients, like Pidgin, also supported the other chat services (AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, etc) so people just continued using those.

• Network effect. You need to convince a mass of people its better, otherwise nobody’s using it because no-one uses it.

• No obvious benefit to the user. It’s decentralized sure, but there weren’t many improvements over AIM that people actually used.

• A lack of good iPhone XMPP clients`

It also struggled with proper handling of multi-device setups with synchronization. There is a reason why XMPP is gone and we have WebRTC, Matrix and others instead, even on the open source side of things.

And the Microsoft Office analogy does not hold up, its data format pretends it is open, it is no open software anyways.

Mastodon made it clear they will not accept venture capital, the corporations cannot highjack the development of Mastodon. If anything we will see forks like the Star Office, Open Office and Libre Office situation in the far future.

I also would like to keep communication channels open to most other instances and networks and will leave those anti corporation blockers. You are not going to tell me with whom I may interact. Keep the invasiveness to a minimum to not flood the network with hateful crap. People looking for designated safe spaces with limited scale communities have otherwise brilliant opportunity to do so.

It is totally wild how people think an instance could be possibly toxic and apply that to Meta, and Meta alone. The entire fediverse must be distrustful, because anyone can hookup. With the recent growth I see more and more drama of immature instance admins throwing tantrums who their users are allowed to interact with, because of some astrological misalignment as with the mastodon.art drama. As an instance admin, you have the role of an ISP, you are not a community mod. Know your place.

lemmy.world itself is the “Meta” of the Threadiverse thanks to its gigantic size alone, speaking of EEE. There is already a “rogue” fediverse in the form of the right wing gab.ai etc.

We will end up with about a dozen huge instances and the rest will have barely any relevance as with E-Mail providers. But it will be still diverse and big enough that EEE is not going to happen.

There is a whole lot of, “the leopards won’t eat MY face” in here.

I think it’s ingorantly optimistic to think meta hasn’t spent more money than you make in a lifetime on strategy alone to marginalize the rest of the fedi-verse in an attempt to increase profit and destroy competitors.

My thinking is, if the normies weren’t motivated enough to move to Mastodon after Musk’s shenanigans, this isn’t going to move the needle very much, either.

To them, they see it as “hey, they’re making something that’s kind of like Twitter, but I don’t have to create a new login, GREAT,” and not look into it any further. I can see a very marginal percentage that could be curious, but not enough to be that noticeable.

If more normies actually cared at all about protecting their data, it’d be a different story.

Whoa, the amount of downvotes is staggering. I agree with you that it doesn’t feel right to see many instance admins defederates with thread from the start. EEE is a threat, but fediverse is already has known by normies as mastodon and has strong culture behind it. I think fediverse will live as usual even when meta decided to stop federating.