from thenexusofprivacy@lemmy.world to fediverse@lemmy.ml on 21 Dec 2023 04:01
https://lemmy.world/post/9811533
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/9799372
What’s Meta up to?
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Embrace ActivityPub, , Mastodon, and the fediverse
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Extend ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the fediverse with a very-usable app that provides additional functionality (initially the ability to follow everybody you’re following on Instagram, and to communicate with all Threads users) that isn’t available to the rest of the fediverse – as well over time providing additional services and introducing incompatibilities and non-standard improvements to the protocol
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Exploit ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the fediverse by utilizing them for profit – and also using them selfishly for Meta’s own ends
Since the fediverse is so much smaller than Threads, the most obvious ways of exploiting it – such as stealing market share by getting people currently in the fediverse to move to Threads – aren’t going to work. But exploitation is one of Meta’s core competences, and once you start to look at it with that lens, it’s easy to see some of the ways even their initial announcement and tiny first steps are exploiting the fediverse: making Threads feel like a more compelling platform, and reshaping regulation. Longer term, it’s a great opportunity for Meta to explore – and maybe invest in – shifting their business model to decentralized surveillance capitalism.
threaded - newest
I am optimistic about Meta’s investment in the Fediverse. If you don’t believe the Fediverse can survive the embrace of big tech, I don’t think you believe in it at all. You don’t want an open web, you just want to be the one in control. The goal of a decentralized internet - in my opinion - is to separate content from service. And if you believe that is the future, then you have to accept that companies are going to build new services that will try to monetize that content. But the beauty of that paradigm is you get to choose the service that works best for you without sacrificing access to the people or media you’re interested in. And really, it’s not much different from say, Google, being able to monetize Chrome because it can access your website. I mean… yeah, but that’s kind of the point?
I just want to say I completely agree with you. If we want to withstand the companies at the helm of the Internet right now, we have to make it impossible for them to extinguish us. I think that's what we've essentially done with ActivityPub, and frankly I don't see any way they can try to take us down by normal means.
I mean, what are they gonna do? Pull the VERY loyal people from kbin.social or Lemmy.world into Threads? Or the people from Mastodon?
It's safe to say the people who have been here 5 months (or even more!) are not really keen on using Facebook 2.0, and we aren't really the demographic they're targeting. We also aren't exactly the biggest demographic, with the Fediverse being a couple million people afaik.
I think if anything we have the most to GAIN from federation. People will know about our little public ad-free corner of the Internet. It's downright silly to throw up pitchforks just because "Meta bad" because - at the end of the day - HOW will they destroy the Fediverse?
Yes thank you as I never see this being mentioned around here. I believe the last monthly active users was 300k? While it’s not nothing, meta doesn’t give any shit about a one time acquisition of 300k users who don’t want to use their platform.
We aren’t even “worth” extinguishing right now. These decisions are being made at a level far above us. We just don’t know why yet. I’m expecting them to use ActivityPub as a tie in for Threads/Insta/FB.
Because an open, federated network is an existential threat to them if it ever reaches mainstream popularity.
You can’t make a lot of money from advertisement to grandma sharing pictures of the grandkids as Meta is realizing on their Facebook service with an aging demographic.
They got the “valuable” livestyle and fashion advertisement market pretty much covered with Instagram, but out side of that the “valuable” demographic of content creators were on Twitter.
Threads is about capturing that demographic, and a lot of them fled Twitter to the Fediverse.
Total number of users matter little if you don’t have creators other users find interesting to follow. The shere numbers Meta still has, but it doesn’t have much cloud with the quality content creators.
The playbook is like this: first leech off the community and good will spirit of highly active content creators on the fediverse. Those are only 1% of the total user number, but they have most of the attention of the others and thus drive advertisement revenue.
They will try to lure them over if they can, but otherwise benefit from advertising to remote followers from their platform. Once Threads is basically synonymous with Fediverse as far as normal users are concerned, make it increasingly difficult to stay off Threads for the content creators as well.
At that point AP is dead as a dodo, even if technically still existing.
No. What they will do is follow the activity pub protocol, then make their own tweaks that all the other instances are supposed to follow (despite being closed off tweaks), or we are no longer interacting with them. Eventually our open source standard is overshadowed by their new partially proprietary standard, they have 95% of the users and more functionality so they have no reason to leave, and we are the ones who are doing it wrong. Then we are extinguished and they begin the process of enshitification/extracting every cent possible.
i.e. embrace, extend, extinguish.
The problem is that in its current state, there are inherent flaws which a corporation can abuse to destroy what to a lot of people on it consider to be the purpose of federated social media, which is lack of corporate control.
Consider that a company with the resources of meta could create hundreds of thousands of instances across all federated social media to the degree that you cannot tell what they own and what they don’t until it is a statistical likelihood that your account is on a corporation controlled instance.
Consider that existing instances which are privately owned and operated could sell their instance to a corporation and no one would necessarily be any the wiser.
So you are right, in its current form, I do not believe in federated social media for the future, because it has no preventative measures to avoid such a thing outside of hosting your own personal instance, which a lot of people do not have the resources to do.
It’s not that we don’t believe in it. It’s that we literally went through this already. And now we expect meta to be more magnanimous than google?
Fool me once and all that. I was with you at one point but after Reddit’s bullshit this past summer the glass broke for me. I don’t need 1 billion people here. I’m perfectly content with a small corner of the internet. No control necessary.
Yes, it is about control. Companies like meta with near infinite resources made their money by exploiting the ever living fuck out of data the vast majority of people to this day do not understand to have any value at all despite the evidence of not just one but multiple trillion dollar companies existing soley due to the exploitation of this kind of data.
I am done with being sold to, having my data harvested, being gaslit, being spied on, seeing these companies avoid the shit out of any consequences for their actions, etc.
Ooh, but it is open, if they wanted to scrape the data they just could! Yes, and it would be fucking illegal under frameworks like the Gdpr. If they join the system though? Wells then they have a legal basis again yo just keep tracking you. Not only that, they avoid further sanctioning by being able up show that they work on interoperability, without investing anything at all, simply by exploiting Foss software.
Ooh, but individuals can block instances, no need to defederate on an instance level! Sure and most people won't know about it or how to do it or just not care enough and get to enjoy being abused by these companies yet again in a space specifically chosen for not being that.
Oh, I don't see a way they could possibly exploit this or extinguish it! Cool. I bet their lawyers, psychologists, experts in every field imagineable that has anything to do with using data and driving engagement are exactly as stumped about it as a random user out here. Bet they couldn't possibly have a plan because we don't see one.
Anyone who has even an ounce of trust that meta and all these other exploiters will not find a way to ruin activitypub, has not paid attention in the last 20 years of internet service development.
Activitypub as a technology will survive this. The fediverse as an alternative to these utter monsters of companies might very well not.
Many others are optimistic as well. In general I think Meta’s arrival will be positive for the fediverse (and I just edited the post to make that clearer). In any case I think the fediverse will clearly survive.
If I don’t believe the fediverse can survive the embrace of big tech, I don’t believe in the fediverse? What? Makes absolutely no sense.
Meta doesn’t want to separate content from service. They want to lock users into their own services using their enormous wealth and marketing. It’s the opposite of the open web you are talking about. They will be compatible with the fediverse to influence it and try to control it, by adding features you can only get if you are on their platform. Their goal is to make most people prefer the Meta version of the fediverse.
Why is this a bad thing? This is the system working as intended: a company forced to make a service people want, rather than just taking users for granted. You resist enshittification because you’re not being held hostage through access to content, so the company is forced to make the service good. And this will attract other companies to produce competing services.
And besides, most people already prefer the Meta version… they already have the user advantage. There’s already way more users locked in their services than there is on the rest of the Fediverse.
5-E’s maybe:
I also wrote a blog post on it,
That is painfully accurate of what’s happening if instance admins do not hard block Threads.
Yet another word that starts with an E! Thanks for the link, I added a link to the post near the end of the “Extinguish isn’t the only word that starts with an E”:
Either way, as Ramin Honary suggests, it’s a great opportunity for Enshittification – yet another word that starts with an E!
Meta can fuck right off
This is one of the many reasons to just defederate from Threads.
That’s already available to Threads users regardless of whether or not they federate.
kk, then defederate from them when that happens.
This is a nonsense sentence that says nothing and makes no actual tangible point.
This is nothing but more hysteria.
Try reading the article, others seem to understand the point I’m making (whether or not they agree).
It’s hard to get someone to understand that which they’re paid to not understand. Seems there’s all kinds of Facebook shills up in this thread.
Edit: oh, and would you look at that? Right out of the gate with the exploit stage in full effect .“Threads” has been an internet term for these forum discussions for as long as the internet has been around, but now zuckerfuck wants it all to himself. Now a billion upon billion different forum posts are going to inadvertently mention his stupid-ass platform.
Ok, you mean I could be getting paid to not panic about Threads? If you have a referral link, I'd greatly appreciate it!
Implying that anyone who disagrees with you must be a paid shill is not the rhetorical dunk you apparently think it is.
Everyone who disagrees must be a paid shill huh?
Have you ever heard of Hanlon’s Razor?
I do think every instance should preemptively defederate threads (I did on mine). But assuming that everyone who disagrees must be a shill, rather than just naive or uninformed… That’s some serious next level conspiracy theory.
So much fear mongering.
Right… because Facebook has never bought out or destroyed competitive platforms.
The Fediverse isn't owned by a single entity, so it can't be simply bought out.
Correct, but it will try damn hard to make everything but their own shit effectively irrelevant.
By that logic, the Fediverse is already irrelevant, because it has fewer features and fewer users than major corporate social media platforms.
So many people with no experience of big tech taking over and killing things. You know some of us are older than 20 right? We have seen this many times before. Maybe listen instead of speak and you may learn something.
Oh, believe me, I do listen, and I learn about things that I use on a regular basis. Based on my understanding of the ActivityPub protocol, I sincerely believe that concerns about Threads are exaggerated. It's very cult-like, with talk of "pacts" and tendencies towards prophecy and a "purity" mentality.
Meta can’t even keep Facebook or Instagram functional. They get worse with literally every single update. New things are broken every time I visit. They need to take care of what they have, not go looking for other things to fucking ruin. Stupid-ass anti-trust pig dogs.
I stopped reading when I saw a copy-pasted definition of the word “exploit”.
This article thinks we’re dumb as shit.
I didn’t have that in the original draft, and half the people who reviewed it said “I don’t understand what you mean by exploit”. And no, I don’t think people reading the article are dumb as shit, I assume that most people who already know what exploit means are intelligent enough to skip over the four lines of cut-and-paste text and read the rest of the article.
Maybe it’s trying to exploit us.
So, the Microsoft method - except that never really killed Linux.
It’s really basically number 2 to get you to move to Threads, the exploit part is going to happen on the Threads side, and is basically going to be with ads (which you can block or avoid seeing) or with selling data about the fediverse in one platform (which defederation isn’t going to be able to prevent against). But if embrace and extend is your problem, might as well defederate from kbin and mbin …
explain
en.wikipedia.org/…/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis…
Nowadays, it’s more of a tactic for getting sued out of a couple of million.
Oh, hi dessalines, saw your downvotes, anything you disagree with specifically? Or is upvoting comments that say explain and downvoting comments providing said explanation just your vision of what you wanted lemmy to evolve to? Nice profile pic.
how can you see who downvotes
Thanks for sharing! Really interesting history in this article. It’s scary to think what a world would look like if Sun didn’t sue Microsoft into oblivion and put an end to this strategy.
We could be living in a world where Windows is the dominant desktop OS instead of our beloved Solaris.
To be serious, though, being sued/forced to settle isn’t an indicator that the strategy hasn’t worked. In fact, as is evident by the continued doubling down on the strategy by Microsoft and the unfettered execution of this strategy with Chrome, it’s clear that the value far outweighs the cost of the occasional settlement. The only real deterrent is antitrust regulation and that has been just about entirely defanged. These concerns are especially pertinent for something like Lemmy where there’s no central entity to soak the legal fees to go to court.
Sun’s problem was competing with Linux, which it couldn’t. Nobody wants to pay premium for discount proprietary Linux. Sun’s Java, however, still exists. Microsoft’s browser is far from the norm. There’s more alternatives to popular software than ever, whether it be office suites, video editing, 3d modeling, 2d painting, you call it. No, they don’t compete with the industry leaders that have both stability and far more features, but they won’t die off.
Embrace, extend, and exploit is just something that’s being thrown around to see whether it will stick as an argument, and quite frankly, I already see the 3E’s from already existing lemmy instances whose entire approach to the lemmyverse is essentially that - not that it makes it more ok, just that it’s clear that people have other priorities when they throw the concept aroud.
The ignorance and fear mongering around this topic is astonishing. Look at all the facts. It's pretty clear what's happening here and why it's happening, and it's not EEE. The whole point of federation and decentralization is that it can't be "extinguished". Threads can come and go and it won't matter. The fediverse will still be here. Block it if you want but I'll not be blocking it on my instance. I'll let my users decide for themselves.
What I really hope is that the fediverse doesn’t end up in a fragmented mess trying to catch up with Meta’s eventual extension of ActivityPub… What this project needs is a slow and steady (technological) development driven by the communities instead of trying to fit in with the big players. That’s what really did harm XMPP too IMHO.
My understanding of how xmpp has progressed is exactly what you think ActivityPub needs. Xmpp is still alive and still continuing to drive for further technological standards and classification.
Google essentially dropped xmpp b/c it was such a slow progressing standard that was focused entirely on the technological progress and that march towards standardization and specification.
As i suggested from the start. Defederate any instance that federate with threads. Yea I’m being Trotsky here, split can be a good thing.
Yep, I’ve said for a while that if a schism with transitive defederation happens, it’ll be a good thing. There are many fediverses!
Well, it makes me sad that we would have to, but that doesn’t make me agree less that it would be necessary to keep a real alternative in existence.
Every instance that allows Meta should not be considered part of the Fediverse anymore, but is now Metaverse. Mastodon/Pleroma/Lemmy/… will then just become the running software, but not by default ‘Fediverse’ anymore, that choice will become the admin’s: Fedi or Meta.
In a perfect world we can still keep the big parties out for those that choose to, though at first it will be hard, not only to keep up with instances leaking both ways, but also hard to let go of the unrelated users that had no choice in the matter and are now presented with: change server or follow the server’s choice, and the second choice will be the least trouble for most. In other words: many followers will be lost and many currently followed won’t be reachable anymore.
Can mastadon hosts just refuse to federate with activepub? (I’m probably misunderstanding everything here but hopefully you get my drift).
Assuming you mean “Can Mastodon instances defederate with Threads?”: Yes. Mastodon (and similar services) run on the ActivityPub protocol, which allows them to decide who they do and do not federate with. Many instances have chosen to preemptively block Threads, many have chosen not to. Pick what works for you.
Yes, Mastodon instances can indeed refuse to federate with Threads – you’re not misunderstanding anything. You can track what instances are and aren’t federating at fedipact.veganism.social (the “FediPact” it mentions is an agreement that hundreds of instances have signed to block Meta). Currenntly, about 40% of instances aren’t federating – but most of the largest instances are.
If the plan for the fedivers is to associate with Meta, I will leave it in a heart beat.
<img alt="" src="https://r.nf/pictrs/image/165c2027-67c9-4e27-9acb-67fd778a0709.jpeg">
…but meta is where the hookers actually are…
ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-ne…
That’s a great article. I linked to it in the OP:
Is that a typo?
It’s not a typo but I see what you mean, I meant that it has a lot fewer people in it but it’s not great wording and I’ll fix it. Thanks!
How many people are on Threads? I don’t get it, theres wayy more people on the fediverse than Threads, no?
No, Meta claims that Threads has 100 million monthly active users, the fediverse as a whole has 1.4 - 1.7 million depending on whose statistics you use. Even if they’re exaggerating, it’s still much got a lot more users.
Wut? Email is federated and has at least a billion users.
When people say “Fediverse”, it’s almost always in reference to federated social media. In other words: email doesn’t count.
Exactly. XMPP has hundreds of millions of users too (billions of you count WhatsApp’s non-standard version) and Matrix has close to 100 million but we don’t consider them part of the fediverse either.
The best paragraph is at the very bottom
Glad you liked it, I like to put in a treat for people who read all the way to the end!
Well, threads dot net is already fully blocked on my pleroma instance, like it doesn’t exist.
Any other urls I should maybe add to keep the big culprits out?
That’s the only one that’s currently active as far as I know. mastodon.moule.world/@MOULE/110586556696261405 has a bunch of resources including blocklist for other Meta domains as well.
Chill mate. This is the fedi - you get to actively allow or deny what you see.
No-one can take that away from you.