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this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Fediverse
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Letting them dictate the pace for technological development is actually the shortest path to be extinguished.
They have already 30 millions of users, which is approximately 2.5x the whole fediverse. Shortly they will easily reach 100/200 millions, probably, which means the whole fediverse will be <5%.
Now, in this condition, with Meta turning >100 billions of profit in a year, Mastodon (and Lemmy, and Pixelfed) etc., should compete by aiming for feature parity with an organization that can throw hundreds of full-time developers at the code? Sorry, no.
The whole idea in my opinion is framed poorly. For me the fediverse is a technical implementation of an idea. The technology comes after the idea, and the idea is simple: decentralization, non-monetization, no ads, and no-profit. It is a corner of the cyberspace which is and should remain out of reach for the big companies. We cannot, and should not, compete in their game.
This means that our tech should be poor out of principle? No, obviously. But we need to be realistic that fedi software will fail to keep the pace in terms of features with Threads. Aiming to do that seems already saying that Threads will take decisions, the rest will need to catch up, and it's just a matter of time before one of their feature is a change in ActivityPub, or requires an extension of it, or breaks compliance with it.
I think that the way forward is simply acknowledging that while there are technical similarities, Threads and the fedi software are wildly different things, and they should be considered as such. Some will federate, some will not, but we should keep that distinction.
Yes, I agree that we can't let them dictate the pace. Let me try to express my thoughts more clearly. Couldn't we have something like The Linux Foundation for Fediverse? It has many corporate members including Google, Microsoft.
Some corporations can be partners to a ActivityPub foundation and contribute to the codebase of the protocol. The foundation itself needs to be independent to steer the features and technical direction according to the Fediverse principles.
As you said just because this is mostly run by volunteers, it need not be an inferior product. But some thought on what I said above might make it something that is adopted by the general populace as well.
I think there is a fundamental difference between a tool like the kernel and a protocol which is then implemented by others. Google is part of those who standardizes the web, and it killed any browser competition exactly because it pushed so much stuff, that if you start a browser from 0 today, you will need millions and years to work with most websites.
The Linux kernel instead is one, centralized and that gets distributed, and Linus and other maintainers are gatekeepers as well.
I honestly think there is simply no way to avoid a complete takeover when there is this much asymmetry. Or well, the way is to keep things separated, maybe.