Technology

Yeah, I don't know where you're from, but over here if you don't have a Whatsapp account in working order you can't... do things.

I hired a company to wire my house and they won't communicate over anything else. I am in maybe five friends and family groups where every social event in my life is put together. I recently noticed a family member and I didn't have each other's numbers anymore, since we only ever communicate over Whatsapp. At work events people will show you a QR code for Facebook or Whatsapp and expect to receive the same back.

I get that a lot of people, especially in the US, don't notice, but Meta won this fight like a decade ago. I don't like it, but that ship sailed as far away as Amazon dominating online shopping.

They’re the reason for Trump being elected

Trump was elected because the Electoral College voted for him. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, AKA the one you participated in. The American populace don't decide the president. Your vote is not you deciding who wins, it's you expressing your opinion in the hopes that the electors your state party officials hand picked will actually listen to the interests of their constituents.

It kind of doesn't matter whether everyone in the fediverse recognizes it or not. People around here often forget that they are in the vast minority when it comes to tech literacy in the world. Most people are not interested in the experience that lemmy currently offers, because it's far too complicated and people asking simple questions are often met with scoff and scorn, because the question has been asked before and they should have just searched for an answer or because it's so simple, obviously it's just .

The fact that none of this is approachable to a tech naive person is precisely why microsoft killed OSS in the late 90s, why google killed XMPP, and why it's extremely likely a place like meta or another company might succeed in effectively killing off a platform like activitypub (altho I don't think it'll kill it entirely, I do suspect that they will slowly kill it by bleeding users over to their platforms). You see, what these large brands have is recognition - people who are not tech literate still know what google is, what facebook is (they may not know they've rebranded to meta), and what microsoft is. These companies have the resources to throw actual designers at this space and provide a front end interface that is friendly to just about anyone. Combine good UX design with a company that people recognize and a huge platform from which to advertise to users (imagine logging into facebook and being presented with all the cool new things you can do on the fediverse) and you'll get normal people trickling into the platform.

Here's where things succeed - these platforms will start as open, and so all the normal people will now be able to talk with their tech friends who are also in the fediverse, and slowly these platforms will become monoliths. They'll start curating the experience more as user reports roll in, and as they tighten the reigns. Over time you'll find that you can't reach these users unless you're also on their platform, and your non-tech literate friends will ask you to migrate to their platform so you can continue to interact through the same channels that they've been interacting with you. While you may be unwilling to migrate, some people will be, and slowly but surely the platforms will dominate the space. They might be sunset eventually as a way to kill off the protocol, or they might just simply turn into their own walled garden.

The only way forward I can see which is resistant to attacks of capital of this nature are when an open source protocol actually starts to center design during the development of the platform. You can't just tack a user design expert onto a platform like lemmy and ask them to make things make sense, because federation itself needs a whole new set of terminology, designed by people who understand how non-tech literate people think, and a whole new backend to support a front end that's truly user friendly. But user design is not friendly to github and most developers aren't designers, so this isn't something I see being accomplished anytime soon. The best that can happen right now is for better dev platforms to be designed for front-end and UX designers (something akin to github but useful to designers), to work on implementing these kinds of people from the beginning, and for open source projects to start reaching out more to designers, to start spending donated money on designers, and to center design as an important principle to OSS protocols.

Looks at article.

Yeah, I think they might realize it lol

Happy to see it though, I've been saying they should be defederated right out of the gate ever since I first saw these rumors.

What do you think the odds are this platform was put together with react?

Edit: have a better informed opinion after reading this ariticle. Support every instance that doesn’t federate with them, shun those that do.

I'm going to assume you misspoke there, but the notion of fediverse instances "deplatforming" Meta is... quite the notion.

Defederating from Meta is not so much "deplatforming" them, as refusing to be in their platform.

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

Surprised actually they beat Microsoft to the punch

This is still a ‘frog and the scorpion’ kind of situation I think, Meta is fundamentally predatory and incapable of good faith as a matter of collective psychology and culture. They’re a direct analogue of Big Tobacco and should be as welcome in the Fediverse as a diagnosis of the Ebola virus in my opinion.

welcomed... as good faith actors

Haha! I will never see Meta as a good faith actor on the internet

Saw this elsewhere

oh, here's some JUICY rumored details about meta's plans for the fediverse

tl;dr "Meta will only federate with select larger instances from the beginning. There will be contracts which also provide for financial compensation for the instance owners."

can't entirely verify their validity but it's still worth posting just in case

There's a business strategy called embrace, extend, extinguish that they'll try to use to snuff out the fediverse.

They were bleeding users so they want some ways to tap into existing user pool and they think it is easy to get that by simply federating, but they are about to find out the hard way why it won't go the way they want.

This was a very illuminating view from another post

Not really no.

The process of "embrace, extend and extinguish" has been used multiple times to destroy FLOSS projects from the inside.

Of the top of my head:

• Kerberos
• Office formats
• XMPP

I've just got back from a run so my brain is not fully connected, so others can give other examples.

Meta do not want to join the party for fun. They want to join because it is the only way they can smother it.

I've been reading up on this very thing today. Let me put it to you in paraphrase as I heard it. What we have to lose is a truly federated network - it has happened before, and it can happen again. Facebook, when faced with an app that most users preferred, chose to buy it, and now Instagram is just as big a project concern as the rest of Meta.

You can't buy a federated network, but you sure can improve on it, just as Google did with XMPP in days of yore. Once a federated chat protocol much as we're on a federated social network, Google introduced Google Talk in 05, and federated it via XMPP in 06. They introduced a variety of features and QOL over the years, and being as big as they were, they held a vast majority of the users across all XMPP platforms.

Then, in 2013, they announced that Google Talk would be phased out and as a result, a huge chunk of the federated community would be walled. All of a sudden, a thriving federated community was mostly just Google.

People join just to talk to their friends, and to make friends; if most of those people went to Google for their features and most of their friends were there too, there was no big loss for them. It'd be like if Reddit used to be an instance all on its own and then suddenly decided to unfederate completely.

That's not to say that all this will happen with Meta, but I guarantee that is their goal.

To me, the argument for accepting Meta into the Fediverse goes beyond gain and loss. What it boils down to is that if you run an Internet service, you have a moral obligation to make a good faith attempt to interoperate with anyone who's using the protocol as intended.

By a similar token, if you run a mail server, you should accept SMTP connections as far as possible. Yes, you can ban spam, but you should not ban connections from Gmail even if Gmail is a privacy-destroying bad idea. By all means, allow individual users to set up their own block lists, but this should not be done at the server level.

Look up what happened to XMPP (Jabber) when Google "integrated" with them.

https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html