This is a core problem of distributed systems though. Signal even cites this as their reason to not federate with anyone.
Once you get decentralization going you need everyone to stay kind of up to date or stuff will just not work.
Comment on How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)
0x4E4F@sh.itjust.works 11 months agoYou’ll note in the postmortem about it the recollection is that Google was too slow to adopt features and fix bugs, not the other way around.
You still fall behind on compatibility with the original protocol. Doesn’t matter if you pull up or down, it still breaks compatibilty.
amki@feddit.de 10 months ago
MudMan@kbin.social 11 months ago
It absolutely matters under ActivityPub because, as I said earlier, it comes down to the client to manage the incoming packets. If Meta is out of date with the protocol but the rest of the federation is not (and retains backwards compatibility at all), then everybody else gets nicely formatted Meta content and they get garbled stuff.
It's only relevant if we get garbled stuff and they get nicely formatted stuff. Which should be entirely avoidable if they "pull down".
So no, not the same. And crucially people are still misquoting the article and the article is still misrepresenting the so-called "EEE" strategy.
0x4E4F@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
The difference here is that, one, people are more aware now than they were back then (privacy wasn’t as big an issue then as it is now, thus people are more aware and are on the Fediverse for a reason), two, now the Fediverse has the upper hand (because of Mastodon mostly… they are somewhat of a player in the social media market), three, devs won’t allign with Meta’s moral compass just because it’s Meta (like it was with Google back then… people actually believed that company’s slogan back then).
So, what might have worked back then, probably won’t now, but it’s still good to approach Meta with caution.
MudMan@kbin.social 11 months ago
Huh. I was just saying up here that I don't think anybody genuinely believes the fediverse is a Meta competitor, but... guess I was wrong.
Mastodon does not have the upper hand by any metric. Threads alone has an order of magnitude more active users than the entire fediverse and Meta has multiple platforms with billions of users (and have signaled that they want Threads to reach that size).
You can absolutely argue that ActivityPub is a tech trendsetter and has an edge over BlueSky in that it's already up and running. You can't seriously argue that Mastodon or the fediverse are a threat, a competitor or have an advantage over Threads or Meta. One of the biggest hints that Meta isn't going for "EEE" here is that it's probably not worth the effort.
0x4E4F@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Not a competitor, that’s the corps view on things (the fediverse taking a piece of it’s cake from us not looking at ads and not playinh stupid games on their platforms).
It still shows up in metrics and market share (not on every chart/pie, but still). What I meant was that it can be taken as a serious player by some. I don’t think it really is, but some people do.
And by having the upper hand, I meant as in being more advanced and in it’s adolescent stage, not in it’s infancy (which wasn’t the case with XMPP… maybe it wasn’t in it’s infancy, but it barely reached puberty). My point was that people on Mastodon, devs and admins, know exactly what they like and you can’t really push them around or try and lour them into some scheme, like flushing down millions into Mastodon development (which will put them in their pocket). We’ve seen this tactic with other companies (Mozilla as the most prominent example) and we know exactly where it leads. This wasn’t the case back then, people generally trusted IT companies, they really thought most of them cared about the users. Sure, make a few bucks here and there, but in general, just take care of the users and business as a second thing. Of course, we learned later on that that was never the plan, at all, but it was too late by then.
They do the integration for a reason… what that reason might be, I have bo idea… might be malicious, might not be. In any case, even if they truly have the best intents for their users (which I seriously doubt) and the Fediverse (which I also seriously doubt), that doesn’t mean that the product of those good willed intentions can’t be taken to another level, i.e. used to do bad things. Remember, the dynamite wasn’t invented to be used in bombs.