Omg that thread was illuminating.

Key points are:

• xmpp was systematically killed by Google by "embrace, enhance, extinguish" where they federated, added bells and whistles, then de-federated after having essentially all users.
• meta systematically removes competition. It is naive to assume anything otherwise, and both meta and the fediverse is international, so governments have less ability to enforce (and enforcement via govs are mostly via the elite and interest groups)
• control over the fediverse can be lost to big tech via updates to protocol that can't be bug fixed fast enough, a fork being run on big instances via a compromised sysadmin selling out for cash or other benefits
• link sharing is about interesting content (not social inertia like messenger apps and social apps like Facebook) so it is not a perfect analogy.
• there is no negativity on the fediverse yet
• once users become the product (even partially), the fediverse will be driven to enshittification via the same pressures of big tech

Reading this article I was constantly reminded of how Apple has designed iMessage in order to create an "us versus them" mentality. The amount of vitriol that some Apple users will direct at SMS texting is saddening.

This, tbh

“Benefit of the doubt” shenanigans is corporate bullshit 101

@jherazob @hedge
If corporate and government powers want to control more of the fediverse (of course they do), they will approach the biggest instances first. If your instance is large, and you are not sure your instance operator cannot be corrupted, move to a smaller instance or run your own.

Companies like Meta don't do anything without an NDA. They probably reached out to Eugen and said "hey, we want to talk but first you need to sign this NDA." They could be asking for his grandmother's sugar cookie recipe.

Sure, there are plenty of reasons to loft an eyebrow at Eugen. Signing an NDA isn't one of them.

That he signed the NDA at all means he's been bought, or is planning to be.

Everyone in open source knows those are tools to shut down prominent voices from being able to call out abuse and rally support. They just make sure to hit every needed talking point in the meeting, and now he legally can't condemn anything meta does because it is "covered by NDA"

It's just one of many shitty ways corporations try and exert coercive control over OSS

Meta joins, and makes it super easy to onramp from instabook
Meta slowly starts not following the protocol, forcing the protocol to adapt since they have 90%+ of the users
Eventually, Meta decides to abandon the protocol, and from the perspective of their users, we just went offline
Same playbook Google used (XMPP).

I doubt he's ignoring anything. And I know nothing but I think it's a little unfair to bash him for this.

Meta does not need the Fediverse to create a ready-populated instance all of its own. It doesn't need to federate with anyone, it can probably kill Twitter and Reddit with a single stone (if it pours enough resource into moderating and siloing). Just stick a fediwidget in every logged in account page with some thoughtful seeding of content and it's done.

The danger of federating with Meta is much the same as not federating. It has such a massive userbase it will suck the lifeblood out of everywhere else whether or not it can see us.

The possible silver lining is that there are other very large corporates which can do the same (some of which have said they plan to). We could all end up with multiple logins on corporate instances simply because we have accounts with them for other reasons. And that means a lot of very large instances with name recognition, and easy access, making it much harder for any of them to stop federation and keep their users to themselves.

Being federated with one or more behemoths might well be hell. Some instances won't do it. Moderation standards will be key for those that do. But multiple federated behemoths can hold each other hostage because their users can all jump ship to the competition so easily.

This is much, much more complicated than just boycott or not. They cannot be trusted one tiny fraction of an inch but this is coming whether we like it or not. We need to work out how to protect ourselves and I'm starting to think that encouraging every site with a user login to make the fediverse a widget on their account pages might be the very best way to do it.

So what if he doesn't talk to them? The protocols and code are available for anyone, and instances are open for federation. Facebook could, without any sort of consultation, deploy their own instance of Mastodon with their own fork of the code and keep all their changes to themself. If they're going to do it anyways, it'd be better to work with them on it.

The thing people don't seem to understand is that you're always going to have to sign an NDA when talking to a company about unreleased products or features, regardless of which company it is. It's standard operating procedure. I've been avoiding Mastodon for the past week since there's so many bad takes that have started trending.

They don't need an NDA for that, and he certainly knows better than to sign one.

This is fishy to the extreme

Ah yes of course, a few people living off donations are supposed to outperform a multi billion dollar corporation in amount of features and polish within features.

The protocol doesn't matter. Look at lemmy vs kbin. Kbin has "extended" features like microblogs & different UI. There's plenty of people that like those features and thus are using kbin over Lemmy.

Just imagine kbin were much more attractive than Lemmy. More people would start signing up there. More people start "microblogging". Maybe there'll be other features introduced, and Lemmy can't keep up with the nice things being added.

One day kbin decides not to federate with Lemmy at all anymore. Most people are on kbin at this point, Lemmy doesn't have the same quality/amount of features. Now the average user has a choice: do they care about kbin being asses and leave kbin? No, of course not, not if the features really are nicer.

Now replace kbin with Facebook. Or Google, that's exactly what they did with XMPP.

The only thing that is able to save from the triple E attack is the users actually caring enough about open platforms and deciding to not use the non-open ones. Or actually having more resources than Facebook, good luck with that.