Read this for an idea as to why people are against letting Meta federate: ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-ne…
It’s not a cut and dry yes or no for me.
Comment on Threads is officially starting to test ActivityPub integration
DaDragon@kbin.social 6 months agoWhy would you want to defederate at all? It’s akin to hiding your head in the sand, except done on a community-wide scale. Just because you can’t see the nazi over there in the bushes doesn’t mean he isn’t squatting there, observing you.
TrumpetX@programming.dev 6 months ago
atocci@kbin.social 6 months ago
I might be looking at this wrong, so please let me know why if I am, but I don't understand the argument that Google killed XMPP. The protocol existed before Google and still existed after Google. I assume the number of people using the XMPP protocol before Google implemented it was small. Then for a little while, Google added all of their users into the network who could now message all the "pure" XMPP users who were already there. After that though, when Google left the protocol and took all its users that weren't using XMPP before then anyway, how did that kill it? Would you not still have the same group of XMPP users who were there before Google? Anyone you could chat with before you could still chat with now.
TrumpetX@programming.dev 6 months ago
XMPP was very popular. Google joined it, and with it, the power to give it’s users on Gmail access to all the other chat products that all had more chat users by sharing the same XMPP space. Users were very happy to use the superior Gmail product and also let go of their old chat tools because they could still talk to everyone just fine!
Google waited until they had most of the users and simply started making non compatible changes to their chat until they finally defederated themselves and suddenly their users could no longer chat with anyone who wasn’t also on Google.
People noticed, but most of the users were no longer willing to drop their now-familiar gchat client because they were now used to it. Users like me who wanted to use Pidgin still were suddenly unable to chat with 80% of their friends unless they gave in and opened up gchat too.
If Google never federated with the system, we might still likely have aim, msn, etc still around focusing on their chat users. But Google did their thing, stole the market and we’re where we’re at now. Ironically, most people I know now disable Google chat because Google has tried really hard to ruin something that was just fine. But no one is installing Pidgin again and have mostly moved to Discord and Slack (at least in my circles).
Spaghetti_Hitchens@kbin.social 6 months ago
Obviously we will have to see what sort of content comes in from Threads, but knowing Meta, they will be serving a lot of ads in it. So instances will effectively be distributing Meta ads for free.
misk@sopuli.xyz 6 months ago
It’s like blocking e-mails from Google. People can’t take a win.
sudneo@lemmy.world 6 months ago
To be honest, not a great argument, considering that the hidden magic that Google and a handful of big players do, specifically in relation to spam, is what made emails substantially an oligopoly. Today if you want to run an email server, you need to jump 20 hoops to hope your email will ever reach the mailbox of someone on Gmail. Emails were supposed to be a distributed protocol too…
misk@sopuli.xyz 6 months ago
How does defederating prevent that from happening anyway?
sudneo@lemmy.world 6 months ago
No really relevant for my point, but I assume that preventing them to be effectively part of the fediverse, can reduce the blast radius of their changes, since they will be (more) isolated.
If they are on the other hand fully part of the fediverse (I.e. nobody defederates them) many people may be incentivised to move to “that instance” because it will realistically have better availability and in the future might have more “features”, which is exactly the kind of extensions to the protocol that other won’t be able to keep up with.
I personally used to care more in the past, I don’t now that much, but I can definitely see the potential danger.
pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
He already is, this is all open? They will include people’s numbers in their “awesome wave of the future” and I don’t want that. The more people ignore them and isolate them, the more they won’t have power over everyone.
Aatube@kbin.social 6 months ago
What are “people’s numbers”? What power would they have if we didn’t defederate?
pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Dude, facebook is evil, we all know that. I have no idea how they plan to take over the fediverse, but they’re planning it. Do you remember when they first announced and then everyone suddenly started calling it the threadiverse? They have plans, hold on to your seat.
atocci@kbin.social 6 months ago
I've been under the impression people started using the term threadiverse to describe the Lemmy/Kbin side of the fediverse because we exist in Reddit style threads and interaction with microblog style fediverse posts is obtuse at best. We're practically in a separate bubble over here, and that was the cause of the new term.
Aatube@kbin.social 6 months ago
What is the worse case scenario for me, a person living on kbin? What the heck could they do to ever possibly affect us
sour@kbin.social 6 months ago
they have more influence
sour@kbin.social 6 months ago
is facebook
why wouldn’t you want to defederate
Aatube@kbin.social 6 months ago
bc there's people on the other side :)
Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world 6 months ago
They certainly have the choice to migrate. If they don’t want to it’s their problem. Fediverse wasn’t meant to be a wide open connect with anyone anywhere unconditionally network, if you want that go to Nostr (it’s filled with Right wing trolls and crypto/nft bros for that very reason). It’s meant to allow for instances to communicate and share content while still being run independently of one another. That also includes the ability to block other servers.
Aatube@kbin.social 6 months ago
Facebook and the like certainly aren't filled with right wing trolls and the fediverse is a very niche thing. They have the choice, but they might not even know it.