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Mastodon's Founder & CEO Gives His Thoughts on Meta's Threads
(blog.joinmastodon.org)
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this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Fediverse
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I think the people that value being on a decentralized service will stay on a decentralized server. The people that would abandon one platform to follow their favorite "high follower" poster are normies that never cared about what service they were using to begin with. Meta may absolutely take a large share of users to their platform in the future if they shut off federation and our favorite celebrities and shitposters are no longer visible. But I don't really see how that is any different than Twitter currently having all the celebrities and high volume shitposters. We already can't see them. The EEE argument just strikes me as sour grapes that "their" users are going somewhere else. And I'm on the fediverse (both Mastodon and kbin) so I see the value here. But I'm not going to get angry that normies don't want to put the effort into learning this ecosystem when they have their own lives and struggles and a limited number of social causes to care about.
Now what does bother me is Meta having an outsized influence on the development of the protocol of ActivityPub. We've seen something similar to this with Google using Chrome to push some additions to how browsers handle HTML standards/elements, like supporting DRM.
All I can say is that, I started using Jabber before GTalk federation, but ultimately Google made me leave Jabber.
What actually happened is that some friends who originally were on Jabber switched to GTalk, because later Google added it to Gmail, making it more convenient.
So essentially when they defederated, my network was pretty empty.
Why didn't your friends return to Jabber once GTalk locked them out?
Because thats not how human nature works. Convenience tramps everything and almost noone is as ideologically driven as they think they are.
Then the only real solution is to disallow big companies from making convenient products. At some point the onus has to be put on the average user. Throwing your hands up and saying "the normies are too stupid to consider their own self interest" may be true but it is also an unsolvable problem if they choose to never put any thought into their own lives and problems.
My point is that we shouldnt enable those big companies even more than they currently are. We shouldnt let them into our own garden. This is a lemmy.world thread, i didnt even know that, i am using kbin. Tomorrow, this might have been a threads thread and i might have not even noticed it. But if for x, y, w reasons, kbin defederates from threads one day, i will notice that most of my feed will have 0 content all of a sudden.
Taking stuff away is a very powerful motivator. We will end fighting human nature. While if we never federate with threads and naturally grow the rest of the fediverse, this wont happen. It's easier to grow a garden amongst other gardens than to grow it next to a skyscraper.
The solution to that, which I would fully support, would be for kbin, lemmyworld, etc to deferate from threads from the beginning. You can't lose something you never had and personally, I don't want to interact with a meta owned product so the prospect of what you just described bothers me. If lemmyworld doesn't defederate from them I would 100% move to another instance that does.
Edit: So there is actually a pact for instances to sign pledging to block meta and I don't see lemmy.world on it. That said, it's a long list and it's manually updated so I may have just missed it. https://fedipact.online/
If this is how it will play out, then we're already doomed. Meta will throw money at the platform until everyone you want to follow is there, which will leech fediverse users until there are only the hardcore users left.
I do wish the ActivityPub licensing had more requirements for data protection. They failed in that regard.
Because GTalk integrated with Gmail and with ability to still having access to other friends was much more convenient and they didn't care about who owns their favorite instant messaging network. And majority of their friends were also on Google.
The truth is that only purists will stay, and most people (even tech people) don't give damn about being locked out.
Google also broke things in a subtle way. You could see the person is online, if they messaged you you would get their message, if you messaged them, your message would show as delivered, but never get to them.
So first thing you thought that maybe they are just busy. When you started suspecting something is not right then it made you think that maybe there's an issue with Jabber etc
I don't think the defederation was ever announced, it was more like a bug that was never fixed.
Thats now how things work. Let's say that now you are following people from fediverse. Those people are motivated to post things, because someone needs to, because they want to grow the community, etc. Meta joins, then meta people post a trillion things(because they are a trillion people, some of which might even be paid by meta). Those initial fediverse people no longer post things because "they have already been posted".
Then you defederate meta. Congratulations, now you have 0 content and 0 content submitters. You will start to start from the beginning, from an even worse point than we are atm. You are now dead.
Very few people are as ideologically driven as they think they are. Ultimately it is about quality of life. And maybe you can tolerate some junk because of your ideology but everyone has their limit. Content is king, not only for the "normies" but for everyone. What is the point of a fediverse that has nothing to interact with and noone to interact with you?
Then the fediverse was only a temporary stopgap until Meta (or any other corporation) made a better product than Twitter. It was doomed from the start.
Big companies can do whatever they want. But we are enabling them to do it easier if we federate with them. When i joined reddit 15? years ago, it wasnt that dissimilar to the fediverse. Of course it is even harder now to replicate the thunder in a bottle that reddit was and to scale but still.
The culture may have been similar to fediverse culture, but the underlying structure was nowhere near similar. It was just as much a private site run by (benevolent) dictators.