How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)

Man, I'm not gonna relitigate this but no, Google Talk didn't kill XMPP. XMPP is not, in fact, dead. WhatsApp killed Google Talk and pretty much every other competitor and XMPP would have been in that boat with or without Google Talk.

This is gonna keep coming up, it's gonna keep being wrong and I'm really not gonna bother picking this fight each and every single time.

fwiw, XMPP/Slack/Discord/etc basically solve the same problem that IRC already solved. Software Engineers just reinvent the wheel again and again as everyone loves a green field.

That said, Meta cannot be trusted. They're going to do a year or two of embrace and extend, pretending to be good citizens. Then they will invent some crisis that causes them to want to de-federate, likely that content on other servers is not moderated to their standards or that convoluted features of their extended protocol are not being met. This take seems pretty spot on to me.

Nothing good will come of federating with meta, the fediverse should simply stay out of their reach and realize whatever potential it may have.

I think there might be another way to hurt it though that this article doesn't seem to mention. Funnily enough, it's also a theme of an asterix and obelix comic book, which the introduction referenced. This way would be monetization. Threads might try to "help" the fediverse by feeding the bigger instances money, therefore the hosts of the instances would be more open to negotiations with meta and accepting of their policies.

I will compare this to YouTube which started paying all it's big creators until they became dependent on the platform for a living and then started slowly implementing more and more rules that limit their freedom of expression. Remember how much PewDiePie used to swear in his getting over it videos? In another "pew news" or whatever it was called video I happened to watch he directly mentioned that he censors himself because he isn't going to put his job on the line just to say "fuck". Profit invites creators to comply with YouTube's regulations even if they aren't enforced violently always.

The same pattern was used in the asterix comic I mention above. Ceasar decides to open a building complex almost next to the problematic for him village and so the residents flood the markets and are shocked at the low prices compared to Rome. As a result, the villagers start increasing prices and advertising their goods and services, neglecting their previous morals and ethos. In the end, however, the Romans lose again after (panoramix, I think?) makes them realize how much separation this has caused them, living only for their business. As a result they kick the Romans out of their village, once again united, and Caesar's plans fail.

I think both these stories could serve as a potential warning to anyone who might consider selling themselves out if meta adopts such a policy.

So Google used Microsoft's "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" strategy and looks like Facebook is aiming to use ut as well

The year is 2023. The whole Internet is under the control of the GAFAM empire. All of it? Well, not entirely. Because a few small villages are resisting the oppression.

European detected.

For mastodon if it can help:

• Open your favorite text editor and write threads.net

• Save it as csv

• On your profile on Mastodon, click "edit profile" and scroll to "import/export".

• Choose "import", it will open a menu.

• In this menu be sure to click on "Following list" and choose "Domain blocking list".

• Browse and select your CSV

• Click upload

This is a fascinating read and very relevant given that Meta is moving closer to connecting Threads (per OP). The article gives a good example with How Google killed XMPP

Meta does not give a shit to absorb the fedi. We are like a thousandth of their size, just a blip on their radar. I have no idea where people get this idea of self importance that Meta cares about their 10 user server.

This time I don't think it is an extenguish scenario. I think this is more of a preventative move to one-up the EU on interoperability. They want to be able to say "look how good we are, we already were interoperable for x time!". But of course this could also not be the case and they might just want to kill the network, but I even find that unlikely. Xmpp isn't dead in fact I use it every day as my phone number for texts and calls and I quite like it. Super robust, I basically never saw any federation weirdness like you could see on mastodon or Lemmy. So in my eyes xmpp didn't get killed, they got beat by someone who had ressources and made a better product. And it's not that I don't think meta can make a great product that users like, but I kind of think that, especially when the competition exists (xwixxer) compared to basically none for Facebook and Instagram

If something killed XMPP for me - it was Matrix. On open source replacement that is not only more popular, but has more active development and it's easier to use. No big company required. And since XMPP is still alive for its niche user base and EU is probably the reason for Threads federation - I don't think this is the right hill to die on.

Is there anyway to implement (without spinning up your own private instance) the ability for individual users to opt out of federation of their content to certain instances, or would that introduce too much overhead and complication?

Given new EU legislation, it is likely that in the future, they may be forced to correctly implement ActivityPub, and to federate with instances not violating their content policies.

Well, if metha decides to interop, activity pub can launch some propaganda to make users "just switch", I guess. I mean it's somewhat different from the situation with xmpp and google as most sane ppl already know fb's crap isn't good for your data... So maybe smth like "remember that cool shiny thingy people were leaving xitter for? Guess what, now you can talk there with your grandma without subjecting yourself to fb's shady practices" could work given interop works good enough.

P.S. that specification under a EULA actually sounds like a good idea if you put it a bit differently: whatever implements this specification should be published under one of $insert_a_set_of_licenses. Then whatever proprietary garbage creator that decides to join will be forced to do this via bridges, and others can tell them to fix their crap 😁

We already talked about XMPP a few months ago, if anyone is interested in reading about some experiences with XMPP for more context.

https://lemmy.world/post/1121594

articles like these are why mastodon and the fediverse will continue to be irrelevant and niche

XMPP still works great btw. It was hard to convince everyone to get an address, but now 95% of my messages are over XMPP. To me compatibility with internet standards is a hard requirement.

Also, Mammoth 2. The new app developed by Google for browsing Mastodont contents. I'm definitely not worry at all by that.

EDIT

Glad to be wrong on this one.

I picture the aurhor of this fearmongering headline evil laughing while writing it.