Alternatively, imagine a world where the US government passed a "privacy bill of rights" and also required online platforms to be freely interchangeable via open protocols like ActivityPub.
Won't happen any time soon, and if you ask why, go read !news@beehaw.org for a little bit and come back.
Absolutely! And given that they have a gazillion users they can willingly move around they can drown us out in a day if they want
I think among other issues would be the Gmail-ification and iMessage-ification of the fediverse. What I mean by that is open standards like email are dominated today by many people using Gmail accounts as it is popular, “free”, and comes with a ton of features. Then google started “walling off their garden” by adding features that only work between gmail accounts. Similarly, apple also took the open standard SMS and started adding on features only available between other iPhones.
What we might see is some of the coolest features the fediverse has ever seen, but it will come at the cost of most users ignoring or dealing less with "irrelevant" things not on meta ran instances.
Hope we can resist such a change, but that is what I am concerned about.
Even though email is supposedly "open", and federated, is no longer is really the case. Big services like Gmail are suspicious of non-big-name servers, and often flag email coming from them as spam.
About a year ago I came across an article from a guy who'd been running his own email server since the 90s, and finally gave up. I couldn't find that article in my quick search, but I did find this:
https://twitter.com/greg_1_anderson/status/1425113874722820100
"I run my own email server. It's no longer a good idea, because the anti-spam arms race makes delivery from small independent servers very difficult, even when you keep yourself off the block lists, so it's a continuous struggle. Would switch, but I have too many domains/addresses"
This is very true, I have hosted my own email before and if you are doing it yourself and not going through a big player like google to host it then your stuff sometimes gets treated as suspect by filters. Used to beg people with Gmail accounts to flag my emails as "not spam" whenever it showed up in the spam folder.
We have the power over ActivityPub
Who is 'we'? And who doesn't say that there's something on top of activitypub?
Plus, if they do create cool features, why would we not also add them?
Because we don't have multiple thousands of paid developers.
One of the "powers" of OSS is that the license usually required changes to be fed back upstream.
If Meta were not to do that the authors of Lemmy could ask someone like EFF to take legal proceeding against them.
Because we don't have multiple thousands of paid developers.
Having worked at a company with thousands of developers, that's a significant advantage for us.
In the Fediverse you are still 100% under the control of whoever runs the server. Your user accounts can't move between servers. There is no easy way to export communities and import them on other hosts. On top of that, all the federated features are completely optional and can be switched off.
Fediverse really doesn't offer any securities beyond what a plain old Web forum does, all the federation aspects depend on everybody playing nice with each other.
At the moment even basic GDPR conformity isn't given, as there is no way to export all your data from an instance, a deletion request for your data also doesn't seem to be guaranteed to make it to other instances.
If Facebook builds something with ActivityPub and it gets popular they can play the whole embrace, extend, and extinguish game from start to finish.
If there are some big players (like in email), i think the biggest risk is that the big players would end up only talking to each other.
Similar to email, where a random host is likely to be spamming, that might happen here too. (Although I'm not that familiar with the protocols here)
I'm personally happy to take a wait and see approach - because the whole point is that WE have the power. Meta HAVE to play by the rules, because if they don't they get defederated, and it's going to be very difficult for them to convince people to federate with them again after that. If lots of instances start defederating them, then their users are going to start complaining to them that they don't understand why they can talk to some people, but not other people. We have the power here folks.
EDIT: To add - the Fediverse is supposed to be an inclusive place.....
I’m personally happy to take a wait and see approach
I am not. Facebook is largely responsible for poisoning the Well that is the internet. They have shown what they truly stand for. I am completely uninterested in any platform that has a single thing to do with that company.
EDIT: To add - the Fediverse is supposed to be an inclusive place…
Yes, inclusive of human beings. NOT large corporate interests. Your views are wrong and you should feel bad.
Oh I'm sorry. I was under the mistaken impression that we were talking about billions of humans. But I see now that you have forgotten about them because you are only interested in Meta, and not the actual humans using meta.
Also thank you so much, apparently instead of just having a debate. You immediately resort to bullying and insults.
Guess this really is Reddit 2.0 🙄
I was under the mistaken impression that we were talking about billions of humans. But I see now that you have forgotten about them because you are only interested in Meta, and not the actual humans using meta.
Those billions of humans can still be free to come use the Fediverse through non-Meta instances. Nobody's forgetting about them; just rejecting Meta's ability to exploit those people as they interact with our platforms and infrastructure. You are attempting to co-opt the language of inclusivity here. Not cool.
But the vast majority of them don't know about the fediverse, and will stick with the status quo. They are only going to find out about the fediverse by becoming part of it, without necessarily knowing that they are becoming part of it. The vast majority of meta users, either on facebook or instagram, or even whatsapp - just want to be able to talk to their friends.
Irrelevant. See above.
Why is this a bad thing? With all the email analogies, it’s a good thing to have bigger corporations involved
Pretty much the entire bdsm community everywhere was outed on Facebook because folks carried cellphones to events and Facebook started suggesting friends to one another. Fifteen years ago privacy was sacrosanct and no one shared real life names unless they were very close. Now there is no point to trying to keep your identity secret and it sounds silly to introduce yourself as "Master Darkness" or whatever. I mean it sounded silly then, too, but everyone understood the necessity and it was situationally appropriate.
That is the danger of these large corporations. They aren't looking to serve the broad community - they are looking to exploit our social graph for profit regardless of the destruction in their wake.
I'll answer with a blog post by a dissatisfied sysadmin: https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-twenty-three-years-i-have-thrown-in-the-towel-the-oligopoly-has-won.html
To me this sounds like us de-federating them early on to avoid them de-federating us. It’s an open framework enabling multi domain interoperability. As long as fediverse rules aren’t violated no one should get defederated imo
Again tbh, I don’t really think Meta needs Fediverse. They already have Facebook and Instagram. All they need is add one link and they’ll have way more users than the Fediverse has in a matter of hours
One issue with emails is that it's actually very difficult to self host email servers now as most of the bigger servers would automatically block unknown servers due to spam
I doubt they would be willing to let people host and control their own versions of federated facebook, and I'm wondering then what would make it "decentralized" exactly. Are they just using decentralized as a buzz word because they are using ActivityPub?
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