this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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There's a business strategy called embrace, extend, extinguish that they'll try to use to snuff out the fediverse.
They'll make a bespoke federated service, collect all the data of their users (and all the people on other networks their users interact with), make it all shiny and fancy and add a ton of improvements most networks don't have yet. And if they can reach a critical mass of users, they can track a huge cross section of federated activity, and force networks to play by their rules or lose access to their entire userbase. It's the same thing google did to email.
Um, isn't everything everyone does on the fediverse public? I assume it's all being tracked already. By search engines as a bare minimum, but anyone else (including Meta) who does any kind of research/etc. And they don't need to be federated to do it, they can just crawl the network with HTTP.
As for "forcing networks to play by their rules" I don't see that happening, and Google hasn't done it with email. Gmail doesn't have enough marketshare for that. At best they've forced people to make sure they have good outbound spam filtering. That's not just google, every email provider (including small on premise office mail servers) has that policy.
I'm not saying we should federate them (personally I'm undecided) but your explanation hasn't convinced me.
Instance owners (can) see way more info about you. A rando scraping public posts can't tell what device a user is connecting from, what posts they're looking at and for how long, where to most effectively inject ads, and then correlate all that with gps and sound recordings they collect via their app they've convinced people to install.
The social media part of social media apps has always been the secondary feature. Something like 90% of users lurk anyway, the only way they're getting data on lurkers is a man-in-the-middle attack.
Also, Gmail is very strong in the email space. It doesn't matter whether your server ever sends a single piece of spam, Gmail has a history of throttling mail servers' ability to send to Gmail accounts.
Facebook will never know any of that about me, since I won't ever sign up for their instance.
On top of that, you'll also have to make sure that your instance admins defed with Meta
I think most people currently on lemmy would agree, but most people aren't on lemmy. Like it or not, if Meta started a fediverse instance tomorrow, 90% of the fediverse would end up going through it. They would just make it so easy that most people wouldn't even know they were in the fediverse (which I still believe is a better world than how it currently is).
Then your choice isn't just "do I join a meta instance", but also "do I interact with users/communities" on a meta-owned instance? The upside will obviously be the amount of content (ex. populated niche communities) available. The downside is that Meta will mine anything and everything they can from you. I do think lemmy is architected in such a way that they won't have lurking data because your local instance "clones" threads for lurking by local users, so maybe it's not that big of a deal. DMs would still not be encrypted though, and meta certainly won't endorse communication over matrix.
No, but again, most people aren't on the fediverse. Most people will just use whatever the popular platform is, i.e. whatever meta endorses.
I wish I remember where I read this recently, but supposedly any email provider outside of like the main 5 will have a lot more trouble getting through gmail spam filters, which is a major push towards getting people to use gmail or one of the other main providers
This reminded me of the fact that Meta creates "ghost" profiles for people who they know exist, but who don't use Facebook
I'm not sure blocking Meta is worthwhile in the long term. Say what you will about email, you still have some degree of choice over your host. I want better for the fediverse, but that's still a marked improvement over mainstream social media.
In the short term, Meta wants to kill Twitter by collecting all its A-level users. I think this would be good for the fediverse, these are news outlets and poltiicians and etc making posts most people want the option to see in their feed. These are also users who want no-fuss platforms with some amount of "customer service", and mastodon.social is simply not ready to provide that.
The issues it poses to re-centralization are an inevitable threat as the Fediverse grows. Unless there is a concrete plan to build protections and this is a stop-gap effort, I'm not yet convinced it's worthwhile.
I think people are a bit confused about how this supposed "embrace, extend, and extinguish" thing is supposed to work, as well as how the proposed pushback is supposed to work and even how federation is supposed to work.
As others say, tracking is trivial and doesn't require federation. "Losing access to their userbase" is what's being proposed here as a solution, not a threat. And last I checked Google did not "extinguish" email and nobody using other email providers lost access to Gmail users.
I think people are reacting to "Meta bad" and assuming "anti-Meta good" without having a good grasp of why or how those things are supposed to function.
To the email point, it's actually much more difficult to set up your own email than it used to be, exactly because google servers will not accept email from unknown providers that don't meet their own standards. It didn't extinguish email, true, but it did help centralize it around a handful of providers that can keep up to date with google's whims to get reliable deliverability.
Come on, we're going to pretend that there aren't legitimate reasons for that beyond an alleged takeover of email by Google? It's like the memetic XMPP example, fallacious twice over. Not only have netiher XMPP nor email been "extinguished", but a lot of the effects people have noticed are atributable to other elements beyond Google's intervention.
In this case if you're going to assume incoming email filters are "Google's whims" and not the fact that email as a whole exists solely for in-company communication and spam I'm gonna say your read on the situation is at least a little bit disingenuous.
I mean google's whims as in they're making decisions on their own and everyone else just has to go with it. I'd rather these problems were solved collectively.
I think it's a little silly to define extinguish as literally destroyed. I think of it as a permanent wound. With XMPP, the belief by people that both networks would inter-operate and the subsequent change left a permanent wound on XMPP adoption. I'm not sure how things would've gone otherwise, and I'm equally skeptical of the people holding onto that as the sole reason for XMPP's failures, but it certainly was an inflection point for them.
Did XMPP fail harder or less hard than everything else used for messaging in 2005? Because that's when that happened. Was it better or worse to be embraced as a protocol by Google or to get purchased by Microsoft like Skype? Did Microsoft Messenger, which was EVERYWHERE back then do better or worse?
I think if you don't mean "extinguish" as "deliberately destroyed", then you're talking about a hypothetical where a piece of software would, in your opinion, have done better if not for an event that did happen, and unless you have a time machine that's fundamentally a guess.
So yeah, I would vehemently disagree that Google has disrupted email. Spam farms disrupted email. The rise of instant messaging and web 2.0 disrupted email. Google had a massive stake in their email business and tried to protect it by pushing back against at least one of those things. And they kinda failed.
So yeah, I haven't seen compelling evidence that big companies using open source software or protocols is a bad thing for open source software or protocols. What I've seen is evidence that they either become proprietary alternatives (Android/Chrome OS as versions of Linux) or they coexist and do better or worse as the market would have them (email, Blender, Linux itself).
My honest appraisal here is that people dislike Meta (rightfully so) and they enjoy the punk, independent vibe of the "fediverse" so while three months ago they were all "these capitalist dinosaurs need to accept that decentralized protocols are the future" now it's all "don't sell out to capitalist dinosaurs who want to buy out our decentralized protocols".
I get it, but it doesn't make much sense, seen dispassionately.