805
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] lazyvar@programming.dev 92 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This reads as incredibly condescending, naive and duplicitous, filled with hubris.

For starters, the whole “yeah sure XMPP got EEE’d but who cares, only nerds cared about that, lol” is not only false (e.g. Jabber), but also does nothing to quell concerns.

Here’s an account by someone who was in the XMPP trenches when Google started adopting it.

Notice something? The “omg so cool!”, this is exactly the same as Rochko.

It’s the hubris when you’re a FOSS maintainer who toiled away for years without recognition and now a $700B+ corporation is flattering him by wanting to use/interact with his work.

The blog is a far cry from the anti-corporate tone in the informational video from 2018.

Then there’s the fact that Rochko is extremely tight lipped about the off the record meeting with Meta and consistently refuses to deny having received funds from Meta and refuses to pledge not to accept any funds from Meta.

There’s also the unsatisfactory answer he gave to people who started questioning some dubious sponsors and the fact that he rushed to lock the thread, killing any further discussion.

I genuinely think the dude is just so hyped for the perceived recognition, that he lost the thread.

So much so that he thinks Mastodon is untouchable.

And it’s extremely naive to think that Meta has benevolent motives here or that Mastodon will survive any schemes Meta might have.
What’s more realistic is that Mastodon will die because people will flock to Threads if their social graph has moved over.

Similarly these lofty and naive ideas that people on Threads will make the switch to Mastodon once they get a taste of what it has to offer.

So now all of a sudden the “difficulty” to get started in Mastodon, that is keeping people who want a polished corporate experience away isn’t going to be an issue?

Especially when in the “extinguish” phase Meta will have siloed off from Mastodon and its portability function, having to leave their social graph behind?

It’s all so increasingly naive, one can’t help but wonder if it’s intentional sabotage at this point.

Mark my words, this’ll be the end of Mastodon especially when Meta can outspend Mastodon all day every day to add proprietary functionality.

Sure perhaps years from now a few hundred to a few thousand people might still use it, but it will be as irrelevant as XMPP is to most people, and Rochko with it.

@remindme@mstdn.social in 2 years.

[-] cybersandwich@lemmy.world 37 points 1 year ago

I read your comment before I read the blog post and I have to say, I am finding it hard to align it with what's in the blog.

Aside from the hand-waving comment about XMPP, he does a great job of explaining how everything works, and based on my understanding of the fediverse and its architecture, its all true.

I dont understand what people think should happen here. If a large corporation wants to join, then there is nothing anyone can do to stop them. Its an open protocol. If you want to use Threads, join. If you dont, don't. If you want your server to defederate, tell your admin or join a defederated instance. If you want to federate, tell your admin or join an instance that's federated. If you want to control your own destiny completely, self-host.

There is tons of choice here and the way it's architected, several layers of protection. I dont get this moral panic everyone has. This is quite literally the point of a decentralized social network.

At the end of the day, if a large corporation joining the network, kills it, then it was destined to be destroyed from the beginning.

[-] YellowBendyBoy@lemmy.world 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The problems I personally have with Meta are:

  1. Data scraping Meta is an ad company and tries to collect as much data from anyone. They are known to make shadow graphs of people not even in their network to try and know as much about as many people possible. This is their business model so they will do it to the fedi.
  2. Moneyed interests They are going to compensate instances that federate with them, which turns people that run instances from volunteers into business owners. From there they can try and dilute admins further into showing ads etc.
  3. Sucking users from the fediverse They will make it easy to get in (import with history when mastodon does not support it), hard to get out (if you go, you can't take your posts) and will hold your connections hostage against you (we will stop fedarating with the other instances now, so if you want to connect to your friends you have to have a threads account, sorry not sorry).

That and basically all the shit big corps do like make people angry and hacking people's brains to stay on the site for as long as fucking possible. Which they are 100% going to try to do here regardless of our intentions.

[-] darkkite@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

couldn't they data scrape without creating a new social network platform

[-] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 1 year ago

Far too many people in this thread seem to not understand that everything they post here is on the open, public internet, and it's infuriating.

The data is already public. The cat pictures are already public. Those pictures of food you posted on Instagram are public. All of those posts you put on Facebook with your real name and political beliefs and pictures of your family and social security number are public.

It's only not public if you choose to lock it down with permissions, but all that does is make it public to the corporation you don't trust. The Fediverse doesn't have that feature because they already know it's fucking pointless. Everything is a third-party server and nobody should trust any of the servers they post on.

If you don't want it to be public, don't post the message!

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (8 replies)
load more comments (16 replies)
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
805 points (97.9% liked)

Technology

58981 readers
4194 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS