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John Gruber Doesn't Know What He's Talking About
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this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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I wholeheartedly share the worry of rug pulling but we have to dance with the devils aka evil corps one way or another as we have no mean to eradicate them. As long as the goals aligned to a large enough extent, the alliance should still be accepted despite the unholiness.
Meta's platform(s) supporting ActivityPub can potentially give us a leverage. If they do honour how the system works and be reciprocal, it means they no longer monopolize the content (from which most values to us the users are derived) on its platforms. So if another Reddit madness happens again, valuable contents created would have been (or could be made) distributed across the fediverse already. That would make migration much easier. Just a change of URL and business as usual for most people. Of course you may say I am being overly optimistic here but there is no point in being pessimistic either. The whole Thread thing is still a rumour after all. Maybe it will never see the light of sun.
But that's the thing. For a lot of people here, the goals are fundamentally misaligned. Much of this space was made by, and is populated by, people who explicitly and specifically walked away from corporate social media.
We're here exactly because we don't want them.
Obviously, that's not everybody, but so many of us have actually learned the lessons of the last 15 months.
As the author Sean said in a response to my comment, defederating is always an option in the fediverse. It is a built-in feature. I am not against it. If some communities have enough spite to anything corporate social network, they can defederate as they please. Just bear in mind the spite is for everything corporate social network, the people and the content included. And there is no need to indulge in a grandiose manifesto. Just say "I hate Meta and anything associated with it" is more than enough.
@qazwsxedcrfv000 @Kichae could it even be narrower than 'corporate social media'? Ie maybe you run a tiny business and don't have a problem with companies just because they're companies. But you know monopolies are usually bad, so monopolies over the world's public digital squares & discourse must be really bad.
And so you ended up here, on Activity Pub, not completely convinced that an 8-million-monthly-active-user fediverse will survive federating with a 3-billion-daily-active-user monopoly.
Yes and no. Yes, in that for many people it's "Fuck Facebook in particular" because of just how absolutely invasive Meta has been, and how it has specifically turned brainwashing users into a business model.
No in the sense that corporate social media will all inevitably try to do the same thing, sooner or later, because social media that's actually usable for users' interests just isn't profitable. The enshitification process demands that we be manipulated into being more reactive, more hostile, and more open to the influence and exploitation.