Earlier today there was a post about rejecting Meta’s intrusion in the fediverse, some don’t see the danger in it or think it’s unlikely that Meta can do any damage to the fediverse.
Someone posted this in the comments and I think it’s extremely relevant and it deserves its own post so all can see it.
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All you had to do was to tell me it’s like the “Why the bartender kicked the Nazi out” story but for internet stuff.
It’s colonialism 101, baby… they show up with smiles on their faces and as soon as you let them in you find out what they truly are the hard way. Meta can go fuck itself.
Remember to use proper form when punching nazis. Don’t hurt yourself!
Make sure the thumb is outside the fingers :)
And not in the “thumbs up” position: that could break your thumb. Your thumb should be in front of your four curled fingers.
It’s exactly the same. and also the reason why we want to defederate Nazi (and KKK, white supremacist, etc) instances. It’s for our own defense.
I mean we have literally a cyber nuke called killing their brand safety… Making houndeds of instances that host hate speech, semi child porn (ai generated of course) or are so toxic that you cant make money with their content…
Bright side is that people that cared enough to switch from reddit to lemmy, twitter to mastodon etc. might be the ones that you can actually reason with. Spreading this information should be enough to convince majority of instances admins to defederate with meta when the time comes. Also imo it’s debatable if meta will be able to bring such big community we expect.
Thanks for posting this. A lot of people seem super unaware of how these tech giants operate and the risk involved in letting them sit at the table.
I don’t really get why people are quick to trust them. It’s highly unlikely (perhaps impossible) that they do something like this just to support the FOSS ecosystem or for the benefit of their users, so they do it for profit, and for them to profit from it, they have to control as much as possible of the entire protocol.
It’s not rocket science really
This is such a nicely well written,thank you. It really opened my eyes to another perspective
I am sad for XMPP, but Google and others adopting it and then shutting down their services were not the reason.
Skype is. It was proprietary, but so good that using anything else just didn’t make sense.
I still remember using the old Skype as something unearthly easy and pleasant.
It was as lightweight as some lean XMPP or ICQ client, but without (or at least I don’t remember them) text encoding problems, with fast file transfers, VoIP usable on bad channels, convenient GUI, user directory (just like ICQ, only XMPP didn’t have that feature).
Now, it was a centralized service, but this was happening simultaneously to ICQ dying due to lame attempts at banning alternative clients, so the morale of depending on such a thing didn’t quite settle in people’s heads.
I mean, ICQ (or AIM, or whatever) UINs (or IDs, or whatever) were for many people their main ID in the Internet, a bit like mobile phone number. It all seemed eternal.
EDIT: Though the general idea of not federating with big proprietary services which do not behave well is solid. Sort of like many of Usenet servers do. Ah, well, Usenet itself is not that much alive.
I honestly don’t know and wouldn’t dispute it, because at the time I was a small kid. I just went by what most people say online (including but not limited to this blog post)
Well, what this article says is relevant for a small subset of “geeks” when ICQ (or AIM etc) was dying, but many people still used it and similar services, so a simple IM of this kind was still accepted as normal, thus XMPP as the alternative.
Normies (like me) were mostly on Skype or between ICQ (or AIM etc) and Skype. That is, that move to Skype was often spearheaded by “geeks”, after it was mostly over the more conservative people were “geeks” too, as it always happens.
Frankly I’d say what hurt XMPP most was its adoption by various social networks being advertised as a selling point. Like “look, it’s a universal protocol, Google has it, Facebook has it, even ICQ had an undocumented XMPP endpoint for some periods of time when they were playing with it, … <I can add 2 Russian search and email providers and 1 social network to this list, and possibly plenty others> …”.
So when those big proprietary services just decided they don’t want it, what’s described in the article happened. Basically XMPP enthusiasts made their bed and had to sleep in it. Only it shouldn’t have. Many “geeks” of that time were uncritically in awe of Google and Facebook etc, we seem to start forgetting this. People would defend dropping XMPP by them, would hope that these companies together would make some other universal protocol, make up all sorts of unbelievable bullshit to believe that all these companies are cool and big and making future.
That can happen whether it is an existing corporation or an instance that is large enough to do it by itself.
Lemmy.world currently dominates a lot of activity; it has a ton of users and typically has a majority of top posts. If Lemmy.world defederated, it could possibly survive on its own outside of the federation.
It’s not the same. The idea is not to defederate, but to STAY federated, while making your instance seem like the best and only option.
To extend your analogy, it would be more like if lemmy.world stayed federated, but switched over to its own forked implementation of lemmy. Slowly introducing cool new features that only exist on their fork to entice users away to their instance. Maybe you see a message like “sign up to lemmy.world to see this” or “your instance is not compatible with this”. Now you’re forcing other instances to either die or play catch up.
Now obviously the folks at lemmy.world wouldnt do such a thing, because the instance is being run by like minded people who just want to host lemmy. But this is a very real tactic that can be implemented by the likes of google/microsoft/meta.
Now, Lemmy is AGPL licensed which is a nice safety net, but I’m sure a sufficiently motivated company could try to find ways around it.
But it is important to note that the tactic could get implemented by people other than big companies.
And while Lemmy is AGPL licensed, the license doesn’t appear to compel modifiers to publish their code. So, you could have a Lemmy instance develop new features, but not provide the source code for those features.
