How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) écrit par Ploum, Lionel Dricot, ingénieur, écrivain de science-fiction, développeur de logiciels libres.
The teaching I get from this is: Dont let Meta dictate the protocol. As soon as they become incompatible, let them stay incompatible until they follow. And be happy with the users who were smart enough to stay with the reliable platform.
This won’t work if Meta gains enough users to swing their weight around. Microsoft does the same thing with Embrace, Extend, Extinguish and it’s not something to just ignore.
This won’t work if Meta gains enough users to swing their weight around
Why not? If they “swing their weight around” and the existing userbase ignores it, nothing happens. The historical worry is that users will leave and go to the more feature rich platform, but this is already a clunky, unpolished, niche platform and the existing userbase has chosen it.
So if Meta joins the fediverse and releases their own extension that the existing community ignores (or more likely takes inspiration from and rewrites in an open way), what are you worried will happen?
To be somewhat optimistic; I feel that we will be a lot les tolerant of Meta’s bullshit. Since the time of XMPP we have learned much more about how inherently evil companies such as Meta are, and can guess much better at what their true intentions are. So I have good faith that this will indeed happen.
Individual instance owners can block Meta instances from federating (exchanging data), and they absolutely, 100% should do so. If enough instances block Meta, it’ll be like they don’t even exist.
The bigger issue is that corporations can present a united front, while federations cannot. This is why hegemonic forces tend to win; as the author says, there’s already division among kbin/Lemmy users about whether blocking Meta is a good idea. You can be damn sure there isn’t similar division among Facebook leadership about whether to destroy kbin/Lemmy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
I strongly agree with the author. But at the same time nobody can and should block Meta from joining.
Will that kill all this?
The teaching I get from this is: Dont let Meta dictate the protocol. As soon as they become incompatible, let them stay incompatible until they follow. And be happy with the users who were smart enough to stay with the reliable platform.
This won’t work if Meta gains enough users to swing their weight around. Microsoft does the same thing with Embrace, Extend, Extinguish and it’s not something to just ignore.
That is not particularly true, unless the server you are one really cares about those users. We don’t have to care.
Why not? If they “swing their weight around” and the existing userbase ignores it, nothing happens. The historical worry is that users will leave and go to the more feature rich platform, but this is already a clunky, unpolished, niche platform and the existing userbase has chosen it.
So if Meta joins the fediverse and releases their own extension that the existing community ignores (or more likely takes inspiration from and rewrites in an open way), what are you worried will happen?
To be somewhat optimistic; I feel that we will be a lot les tolerant of Meta’s bullshit. Since the time of XMPP we have learned much more about how inherently evil companies such as Meta are, and can guess much better at what their true intentions are. So I have good faith that this will indeed happen.
Individual instance owners can block Meta instances from federating (exchanging data), and they absolutely, 100% should do so. If enough instances block Meta, it’ll be like they don’t even exist.
The bigger issue is that corporations can present a united front, while federations cannot. This is why hegemonic forces tend to win; as the author says, there’s already division among kbin/Lemmy users about whether blocking Meta is a good idea. You can be damn sure there isn’t similar division among Facebook leadership about whether to destroy kbin/Lemmy.