Mastodawn

I have a question for fediverse heads. Threads is federating with a bunch of the fediverse, but a lot more are "oh noes, EEE!!!!!!!?!" and actively blocking it. Which seems counterproductive, and quite a bit scaremongery.

Does anyone have an actual instance where Embrace Extend Extinguish actually worked? I mean, sun sued MS for it over Java and as far as I can tell Java is still doing fine. They wanted to EEE Linux too, back on the day. Again, seems to be doing fine....

cpw Dec 19, 2023

The biggest thing people point to is some rando's account of the death of XMPP. Which didn't actually happen? Sure, google defederated gtalk from XMPP, but quite honestly, I dunno if the author has a severe case of rose tinted glasses but XMPP was SHIT. No image support, no media support, no voice support, no room support. It was fucking awful and the protocol frozen for years. I remember searching for old gtalk friends on XMPP and finding out this had happened myself. I switched to matrix.

cpw Dec 19, 2023

It's like everyone is convinced that somehow zuck is going to kill masto and the entire fediverse. Which is just whack. First, this is an EU "we're good guys" play by meta. Killing it is just dumb. Second, how will it exactly play out? I'm never going to sign up for threads or a meta account again, so I won't be using their stuff. It's neat but not a necessary condition of my social media that people there can read it if they wish. So, again, how is this anything but, heh ok cool I guess?

cpw Dec 19, 2023

A quick tldr: has EEE ever actually worked? Can you point to a thing that was successfully squashed in the open source arena? I can think of a few proprietary products that have been squashed by other proprietary products, but nothing that's an open spec or standard. Most shit just does because it doesn't keep up with modern trends.

SirEdvin Dec 19, 2023

@cpw google chrome with firefox case?

gigaherz Dec 19, 2023

@cpw I have never heard of a case actually getting to the "extinguish" phase. And honestly, EEE has always felt wrong to me. IMO, the more likely plan is usually "Embrace, Extend, Profit from people who think your extensions are worth paying extra for", extinguishing feels counterproductive almost every time. but EEP maybe doesn't roll that well off the tongue.

Faer-Anne Dec 19, 2023

@cpw Can't say that I'm aware of any instance of it working (though if it ever had, it's probably because whatever it replaced was too small to make it through the process, so I doubt people would remember it.) I will say, though, that part of why EEE has never visibly succeeded is because people involved with the targeted projects refuse to give in. Users refuse to change, and devs refuse to concede to the "extensions". Open Source has a very important connection with choice. Choice of software, choice of interaction, choice of change. I don't think I personally would care one way or another if I ever saw a thread message, but I also know I can go to another instance if I really wanted to. Heck, I can move my entire account if needed. But the main thing is that EEE is fought by people who care, so I'm ok with instance owners making a choice on it.

I'm not, however, ok with people bullying others for making a choice. That I'll 100% agree on.

@cpw not completely, but it has made the projects go into being irrelevant, outside of hobbyists. xmpp for example, it still exists, it's still used by some, but the average person is probably never going to touch it ever again

@cpw google talk is a pretty decent example imo (and the facebook one did a similar thing), they had xmpp support and just phased it out while it had high use and reportedly in some cases dropped incoming xmpp messages, not delivering them to the recipients

cpw Dec 19, 2023

@ashka did you ever use xmpp? Because I did for years. It was SHIT. I was actively looking for better alternatives when stuff like matrix came along. Also xmpp is very much still alive so how is it extinguished exactly???

@cpw oh yeah I've used it for something like 10 years! and it is garbage, matrix isn't perfect but I'm glad it exists. The EEE part is how a big userbase lost link to gtalk users and the only way to get in touch with these users was to use a google account directly

cpw Dec 19, 2023

@ashka that's not EEE tho. It might have been the tipping point for a few people, like me, to actually ditch and modernize, but it didn't extinguish anything. It extinguished itself by being shit and stuck in a design that was laughably outdated, with poor quality open source server software that never updated and was getting harder and harder to keep secure. That doesn't sound a lot like EEE to me.

@cpw yeah I guess that's fair. maybe rss when google reader closed and they pushed people to google news instead? I'm trying to broaden the range of the EEE thing because otherwise it can be super specific and I can't think of an actual thing that got EEE'd on the spot (and I'm probably biased on the rss thing)

cpw Dec 19, 2023

@ashka that's kinda my point. Open source open spec stuff is effectively immune to EEE. The examples that come closest are the java stuff by MS back in the 90s. That WAS a clear attempt to break Java. J++ was a very real threat and I remember people discussing it in meetings at the Java company I was working at at the time. It didn't work. Most actual EEE is actually just competing closed source products where one just eats the other because of feature copying and shit. And you never hear about.

@cpw plus now that places like Flipboard are joining and tumblr is planning on it I don’t think they’d even be able to eee it

Philip Mallegol-Hansen Dec 19, 2023

@cpw IMO there are some legitimate reasons one might choose not to federate with Meta, but the fear of EEE isn’t anywhere near the top of that list.

cpw Dec 19, 2023

@philip facts. IMO social media is by definition pretty open, so the security stuff, I'm ok with. Others might have a different comfort level so they can make their own choices, but EEE is just stupid noise and a kneekerk response.

@cpw I think EEE is a very vague and ill-defined threat, and people aren't necessarily afraid because they've seen it happen before, but rather because they just don't trust Meta and assume that's the end goal. It's probably not even close.

That said, I'm still happy to be on an instance that preemptively blocked Threads because I've completely lost count of how many times Meta has been sued for privacy violations so I don't want to make it easy by just giving them my data via federation.

davibu Dec 19, 2023

@cpw
I think Visual Studio Code did kill Atom, by adopting their addon-model and then literally buying GitHub and stopping Atoms development.
I would also say that AWS, Azure and Docker killed clean Open Source hosting on a scale and you now rely on them, which are attached to their commercial services or have to heavily compromise in building for scale.
I would also say Firebase replaced just storing data locally. Because they put the decent database abstraction behind using their servers.

davibu Dec 19, 2023

@cpw
I just remembered, Chrome did as well, Google now pretty dictates the whole Web-Standard and Firefox has to play along. Which Mozilla devs complain about quite frequently.
They now dictate what is acceptable tracking, changed their addon-system which makes ad-/tracking blocker addons impossible or their recent efforts to ensure "secure runtimes" and thus limit the free web even further and Firefox having to play along to be compatible

Wolf480pl Dec 19, 2023

@cpw GNU did a successful EEE on Unix (from what I heard, people were installing gnu coteutils and gcc on AIX and HP-UX because some things they needed relied on GNU extensions) but that's a a tricke example: it's non-standard free software EEE-ing open-standard proprietary software.