What’s happening?
Meta is definitely going to join the Fediverse with Project 92, and they’re allegedly paying off admins and devs and getting them to sign NDAs. this pact is to thwart their attempt to join and conquer the Fediverse
I’m not sure I understand, what are we worried they might do with this?
become the “default” server for the entire Fediverse, add on features that aren’t part of the spec, then cut off ActivityPub support. embrace, extend, extinguish. and mine everyone’s data along the way too
I have not seen anything, like zero, on fedi admins being “paid off” by Meta. There was an NDA’d meeting, apparently, yes, but I have not seen a single thing about admins being paid off. Let’s not invent stuff, shall we?
I don’t like Meta, I don’t like Facebook and I don’t like anything Zuckerberg does, including him. But I think that we’re overreacting and creating assumptions that perhaps won’t be true.
Everyone is free to de-federate or not to de-federate from that project. But let’s think for a minute. ActivityPub projects are open source, that means that everyone can read the code of a specific project, being Mastodon or Lemmy. That won’t change, it’s not so easy, luckily for us.
Can they add on features that aren’t part of the spec? Sure, they can, but everyone is free to add those features to their projects, it’s not mandatory. Their project won’t be another Mastodon instance, or another Misskey instance, but an independent project inside ActivityPub. It’s like saying that Pleroma is Mastodon, that’s not true.
Can they cut ActivityPub support? Well, it’s their problem, ActivityPub is alive right now without their support, and we’re doing pretty well.
Will they mine everyone’s data along the way? That’s the most serious concern for me too. But unless we look at their code, we don’t know yet.
We old-timers are not warning because “it might happen”, we’re doing it because it has already happened multiple times before
The core of the strategy was delineated by Microsoft when they tried to kill Linux and failed because the strategy was discovered, it’s known as Embrace, Extend, Extinguish . And it only failed because of active pushback for years by Linux users.
Have you tried to run your own email server these days? Many have tried for a long time, and end up throwing the towel, because email is now dominated by a few corporations who can decide to reject your small server at a whim, as a sysadmin i’ve seen this a lot. And email too is an open federated standard, supposedly resistant to failures.
Or XMPP, which was to be the future of chat clients. It was enthusiastically embraced by everyone including Google and Facebook, then once everybody was dependent on their clients they quietly killed support from it.
Let’s envision a future where Meta has the biggest share of the Fediverse, the most convenient clients, the most features, like they used to be. That’s when enshittification step 2 starts, and they start slowly cutting off anything not under their direct control. Just like they did with XMPP, just like it was done with email. And like WhatsApp and various other things, you don’t want to stop using it because you now rely on it for your communication, and when you try to tell people to follow you to the free part they look at you like you’re an alien. They won.
This is not flights of fancy, this all has happened before. Yeah, Charlie Brown, Lucy is not going to take away the ball this time. And we continue to warn it because it’s bonkers to us that you cannot see it.
Have you tried to run your own email server these days?
I only have the enough knowledge to write “Hello World!” in Python, and maybe in C too. But that’s it. But even being dominated, there are other small companies that offer email services, like tutanota or proton.
But that logic is not right in my head. Because, according to that logic, if Friday was a rainy day, Saturday was a rainy day and Sunday was a rainy day, does that mean that all days of the year will be rainy days? Logical induction doesn’t always work.
I agree that Meta and Zuckerberg are evil entities, we see that everyday. But this is our playground, this is our territory, and they’re outsiders who know nothing about how the things work here.
Do they want to come here? Sure, this is an open place for all who wants to join. Do they want to interact? I’m glad to interact. Do they want to start EEE maneuvers or enshittification? Then let’s show them who is boss.
Good comment. Everybody can mine the public data of the fediverse, so you don’t have to own an instance to do so. I think this is an interesting move from Meta. It is a different situation than the times Facebook and Google did embrace, extend and extinguish. Now the userbase of ActivityPub is much bigger than for example XMPP was back when FB&Google supported those. Let’s see how this pans out.
The good thing about this is that we know Meta’s plans. It’s not a secret. It would be worse if, suddenly, a Meta instance appeared right here with its millions of users and we were naked.
We should be prepared by the time Meta comes to the fediverse. But this is not the wild west. First we ask, and afterwards we shoot if necessary.
