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Mastodon's Eugen Rochko in talks with Meta?!😱
(news.ycombinator.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Again, another thread where two billion people joining our network and meeting us where we are ... is somehow bad. If embrace extend extinguish is really the worry, then we have a bad protocol that needs extension to be usable by those 2B people, and we should fix that.
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.
In your scenario, Lemmy was worse than Kbin and didn't suit users needs as well, and didn't evolve the protocol fast enough to keep up. Kbin deserved to win in that case.
Nobody is saying it doesn't "deserve" to win, whatever that means in a federated non-profit social network. The issue is that kbin probably wouldn't be an asshole that intentionally created compatibility issues with lemmy just because they are in a superior position on the market in order to kill its 'competition'. Meta absolutely will without a second thought.
The problem with that argument is that there's value in something being not Facebook/Meta (or Twitter, or another corporate owned and run mega service), but that value isn't as easy to demonstrate as "here's a bunch of shiny features", and once people are locked in, the focus shifts from improving the service to monetizing the service, making it rapidly worse for everyone.
People largely don't think about how the services they use are structured, until any inherent structural issues come back to bite them. Twitter's an obvious example, with people who were dependent on it for their livelihood from a networking/advertisement perspective ending up in trouble when the service went south. Reddit's another example, although how that ends up is still TBD.
EEE does not work by outperforming the OSS alternative. The extensions will be proprietary, and won't be able to be ported to Lemmy.
There is no competing feature-wise against a major corporation. And Facebook doesn't deserve to win.
You pretty much confirmed his point. His entire idea is that it doesn't have to be Kbin that makes better features, Kbin was simply an example. It could be Meta that makes better features. Open source developers will never be able to compete feature-wise with a corporation that will deliberately pour money into making more features than the open source developers, and Meta definitely won't make them open source. Hence, as per your wording "Meta deserved to win in that case", which is exactly what we'd want to avoid.