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Again, another thread where two billion people joining our network and meeting us where we are ... is somehow bad. If embrace extend extinguish is really the worry, then we have a bad protocol that needs extension to be usable by those 2B people, and we should fix that.
Ah yes of course, a few people living off donations are supposed to outperform a multi billion dollar corporation in amount of features and polish within features.
The protocol doesn't matter. Look at lemmy vs kbin. Kbin has "extended" features like microblogs & different UI. There's plenty of people that like those features and thus are using kbin over Lemmy.
Just imagine kbin were much more attractive than Lemmy. More people would start signing up there. More people start "microblogging". Maybe there'll be other features introduced, and Lemmy can't keep up with the nice things being added.
One day kbin decides not to federate with Lemmy at all anymore. Most people are on kbin at this point, Lemmy doesn't have the same quality/amount of features. Now the average user has a choice: do they care about kbin being asses and leave kbin? No, of course not, not if the features really are nicer.
Now replace kbin with Facebook. Or Google, that's exactly what they did with XMPP.
The only thing that is able to save from the triple E attack is the users actually caring enough about open platforms and deciding to not use the non-open ones. Or actually having more resources than Facebook, good luck with that.
In your scenario, Lemmy was worse than Kbin and didn't suit users needs as well, and didn't evolve the protocol fast enough to keep up. Kbin deserved to win in that case.
The problem with that argument is that there's value in something being not Facebook/Meta (or Twitter, or another corporate owned and run mega service), but that value isn't as easy to demonstrate as "here's a bunch of shiny features", and once people are locked in, the focus shifts from improving the service to monetizing the service, making it rapidly worse for everyone.
People largely don't think about how the services they use are structured, until any inherent structural issues come back to bite them. Twitter's an obvious example, with people who were dependent on it for their livelihood from a networking/advertisement perspective ending up in trouble when the service went south. Reddit's another example, although how that ends up is still TBD.
EEE does not work by outperforming the OSS alternative. The extensions will be proprietary, and won't be able to be ported to Lemmy.
Kbin deserved to win in that case.
Nobody is saying it doesn't "deserve" to win, whatever that means in a federated non-profit social network. The issue is that kbin probably wouldn't be an asshole that intentionally created compatibility issues with lemmy just because they are in a superior position on the market in order to kill its 'competition'. Meta absolutely will without a second thought.
There is no competing feature-wise against a major corporation. And Facebook doesn't deserve to win.
You pretty much confirmed his point. His entire idea is that it doesn't have to be Kbin that makes better features, Kbin was simply an example. It could be Meta that makes better features. Open source developers will never be able to compete feature-wise with a corporation that will deliberately pour money into making more features than the open source developers, and Meta definitely won't make them open source. Hence, as per your wording "Meta deserved to win in that case", which is exactly what we'd want to avoid.
Your point is the worse product should win? Open source can totally compete on features: we have way more developers than them. With Linux I can have basically any feature I want if I tinker enough. It's about: what's the best software for people?
If embrace extend extinguish is really the worry, then...
What follows is a non sequitur.
Extension implies that the protocol is missing some capability, otherwise it wouldn't need to be extended. So we need to make the protocol better so they have nothing to add. If we don't add those capabilities, ever, then the protocol is doomed to eventual irrelevance and wasn't worth fighting over anyway.
You're assuming some kind of objective point of view, but there are competing interests involved here. Those "capabilities" need not be things that are in the interest of the end users. For example, DRM, micropayments to unlock content, region coding, state censorship, etc etc etc. Bullshit that capital uses to exploit humans.
The protocol might well be complete and need no "extension" (as you mean the word) for us, and yet Meta might have many things they want to extend it to do. The whole point of this is, we have conflicting interests. Meta can push things that are not in their users interests because they have leverage. They hold our friends and their content hostage. And they lie and manipulate their users, who simply don't care about things like this. Your idea that we are talking about our protocol vs their extensions competing on merits that appeal to users is just totally missunderstanding the objections.
I think you are getting too hung up on the term EEE. You think you know what the individual words mean, so you know what it's all about. But it's just a name for a complex strategy that has been used successfully against us many times in the past. Rather than quibbling with the definition, you should spend some time reading the history.
There is an ultimate objective point of view: adoption. Network effects matter for social software. Even if you don't like things like DRM, micropayments, region locking or whatever, if you don't build in to the protocol ways to do those things, people and corporations will find ways to do them around the protocol - and that's where abuse of power and EEE risk happens. Adapt or die. I've been around long enough to see this happen many times and know what I'm talking about, so attempting to belittle me by telling me to go read history is kind of pointless. Also Facebook destroyed my startup, literally, so it's not like I'm some big fan. I just know a positive-sum development when I see one.
Facebook destroyed my startup
I know a positive-sum development when I see one
Yeah, sorry you don't mind if I take it with a couple grains of salt please? Those two lines look like they could be in conflict with each other without more information.
I developed an early VR game called Soundboxing. It was a VR beat game before Beat Saber. It was doing hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales on Steam, but Facebook repeatedly denied us access to their store with no explanation, bought Beat Saber, basically took over the industry and shut us out. They even sent us early Quest devkits that we spent 6 months porting to, only to be denied again. I'm super salty about it all tbh. But yeah, this is not that, this I see as an absolute win.
If this is not that, then what is it? Because I don't feel either direction which way it's going. Gut feelings aren't the greatest metric to go by anyway.
People have been burned by companies before, see Reddit, twitter, XMPP and a multitude of other situations. And people feel if we forget that and don't at least take precautions against it that it will happen again.
Also it's been the case where companies have had good intentions, only to backtrack 2, 3, 4, or 5+ years down the track, forgetting their original reasoning - while it might be an absolute win now, the future is hard to tell. And on the internet a lot can happen. In 5 years. Just look how quickly the fediverse became relevant. How quickly Linux became a viable option for gaming. Shit changes so fast that it's hard to predict what happens.
Word is literally extended with intentional bugs, extensions will be arbitrary.
We can't add those capabilities, because they will also be proprietary and under copyright or patent. If you try, Meta will just sue you for the lolz.
EEE is not about outcompeting someone.