Sorry. I know it’s getting a bit annoying with all these posts obsessing over this subject but still…
Just to make my position absolutely clear from the start of this - I think the entire fediverse should defed from anything under any form of commercial control, which clearly includes Threads (when/if it enables ActivityPub).
I see a lot of instance admins are adopting a ‘wait and see’ approach to defederating from Threads. With respect, I’d like to ask them - what are you waiting to see? Evidence that Meta is an immoral organisation? Surely you can’t be that naive?
Or is it evidence that Threads will attempt dodgy things with the ActivityPub codebase? That they will attempt Embrace-Extend-Extinguish? If that’s so, I again ask you with respect, surely you can’t be that naive? When Meta start introducing little, disarmingly helpful, tweaks to ActivityPub, will your ‘wait and see’ stance continue? And when Meta role out their own version of the protocol, urging Mastodon, Lemmy etc to adopt it - its free! Its better! - will you still continue to ‘wait and see’?
The privacy thing I don’t feel is (currently) much of an issue. Meta could easily scrape all our data tomorrow if they felt like it. What I fear is privacy after they’ve introduced all their ‘improvements’ to ActivityPub and released their own version. Maybe we’ll end up with a two-state fediverse where one state is happy to federate with Meta and the other is not.
The fediverse was built on the principles of open standards and open source, by people, not commercial orgs. It is slow growing, slow to react and in some areas slow to change. These are, in my opinion, amongst its greatest strengths. There is no endless money pot provided by investors, admins are volunteers running instances on VPS’s, software creators are people doing it as a hobby. This is people power, not money power. There’s no profit motive. The second such a massive profit driven org gets a foothold - and is allowed to - that changes. It’s simply inevitable.
Is the fediverse perfect? Of course not. But I believe the problems it faces can be overcome with patience and persistent forward thinking.
Then there is the fact that some instances (and hopefully increasingly more) are seen as safe areas for gay people, trans people, non-white people, women. Opening the door to Meta means opening the door to a whole shit storm of awful people whom we currently don’t have the tools to protect communities from. Is ‘wait and see’ really a good idea given the fact this almost certainly will happen? I mean ‘wait and see’ what exactly? And yes, I know we have our home-grown awful people here and guess what? We struggle to contain them already! Threads got more signups in the first 12 hours of its existence than the entire current population of the whole fediverse. You want to ‘wait and see’ how many of those people are cunts? Because the answer is ‘a lot’.
The fact is - the fediverse doesn’t need Threads, or any corporate involvement. Yes, its already smaller than Threads, it’s smaller than Twitter, it’s smaller than Reddit. But, at the risk of leaving myself open to obvious jokes, why does size matter? There’s already, in my opinion, enough people throughout the fediverse, esp on Mastodon and Lemmy, to have created places where their is good, lively, vibrant discourse. I’d much rather have quality over quantity. There’s nothing actually wrong with slower, more manageable growth. We’ve all got sucked into believing the bigger something is the better it must be and that unchecked growth is healthy. If we’re growing uh, ‘house plants’ then that might be the case, but we’re not. Because the fediverse is not (currently) motivated by profit, we don’t need unchecked growth. I’ve seen so many reddit refugees recently talking about how much better the ‘feel’ is on Lemmy, how much less pressure and angst and nastiness there is. I can’t think of a single scenario in which instantly adding double the amount of people, some of whom are pretty terrible, without decent tools to manage them, all operating under the control of a company known to embrace/extend/extinguish and who’s sole motivation is profit at all costs can be beneficial to the fediverse.
“I know exactly what React is, I prefer to use Vue” shows you literally have zero clue what React is.
You don’t choose when you visit a website. There’s no option that says “render this with Vue.” It’s handled by the website itself. Lemmy uses Inferno instead of React, for example. You didn’t make that choice, and I highly doubt you chose Lemmy because researched that beforehand. And if you did, by going to Lemmy’s GitHub page… surprise! GitHub uses React!
I think you need to take a history lesson on the web. I gave multiple examples of tech Facebook has backed, and yet EEE hasn’t happened to any of them. There are more open techs that Facebook has contributed code to; a lot of Apache projects, for example. And yet no EEE. Curious. Also I noticed you’re avoiding the “EU will come down on Facebook if they get out of line” side of my argument. Also curious.
But I suppose that’s not a surprise. It’s clear you have no idea how things even work; you probably googled (oh, wait, you probably don’t use Google) “React replacement” to find Vue at all. You probably didn’t know Vue was created by a Google engineer and Google uses it internally. I suggest you change what web framework you use, if you have that magic button tucked away. Maybe switch to Inferno?
Not to mention you say you never used the Reddit app. I never said anything about the Reddit app. I was talking about the Reddit website. Unless you’ve never used the Reddit website, either? I trust you’re going to say you’ve never owned anything but a flip phone and do web searches with a phone book next.
You conclude by making a strawman and putting words in my mouth that I never said. You think if I loved corporations I would be here? But you’ve made multiple factual inaccuracies, you never source anything you say, you just constantly pout like the world is ending and try to force everyone else to do things your way.
But you’re right. We do have different viewpoints. I suggest you stop spreading yours as factual, or use that phone book to find sources.
(And for the record, I despise Elon.)
“shows you literally have zero clue what React is”
To develop stuff my friend. How did you not grasp that?
" surprise! GitHub uses React!"
Uh-huh and as I said, I’m sure I’ve used React occasionally I just tend to avoid it if possible.
“I think you need to take a history lesson on the web. I gave multiple examples of tech Facebook has backed, and yet EEE hasn’t happened to any of them.”
And yet, some it has. You seem unable to parse that.
“Also I noticed you’re avoiding the “EU will come down on Facebook if they get out of line” side of my argument. Also curious.”
Not quite what you said. You said the EU will penalise Meta if they don’t federate. All they have to do to avoid that is create a protocol that ensures they can technically achieve that, doesn’t have to be the actual ActivityPub protocol. That’s literally how EEE works. I avoided that so much I only mentioned it twice before.
'oh, wait, you probably don’t use Google) ’
True, I don’t. I use Whoogle. Open source, privacy respecting front end - I’d advise you check it out but you’d probably want to buy it because you think thats how open source software gets better.
‘You probably didn’t know Vue was created by a Google engineer and Google uses it internally’
No, I do know all that. Not really sure what difference any of that makes though.
'Not to mention you say you never used the Reddit app. I never said anything about the Reddit app. I was talking about the Reddit website. ’
Yep, I use the site. I check out the sub I mod using an open source, privacy respecting front end. If there’s anything untoward, I login via the site in a Firefox containerised tab with UBO enabled.
‘But you’ve made multiple factual inaccuracies’
Go right ahead and quote them.
‘you never source anything you say, you just constantly pout like the world is ending and try to force everyone else to do things your way.’
Well, sorry about all the pouting and I’m sorry to disappoint but I have no interest in forcing anyone to do anything. I say my piece, people can take it or leave it.
’ I suggest you stop spreading yours as factual,’
What have I stated as being factual that isn’t factual? Are you sure you’re not mixing up ‘having an opinion on what might happen’ with ‘claiming something as fact’?
‘(And for the record, I despise Elon.)’
Sorry Zuck, didn’t realise it was you.