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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.
I have had independent contractors offer it as an option, but most still have a phone number or have too many customers who aren’t tech savvy enough to use something like that. There’s really no way a reputable business in my area would survive that way.
I don’t know what your area is, but everybody here is tech savvy enough to use WhatsApp. It’s assumed to be just… part of how phones work. Both my elderly parents use it. My mom is on multiple chatgroups I had nothing to do with setting up. She only reaches out to me for help if she thinks something is spam or phishing. I can’t stress this enough: nobody texts. Text messaging happens over WhatsApp unless you’re receiving TFA notifications or automated messages from companies or the government, kinda like email.
As for the business, I’m sure if I had requested a phone call they would have called me, but it was a telecom firm and it wasn’t really a big conversation. Guy just went “here’s my WhatsApp, we’ll ping you there” and we understood it to be the way it was gonna go. I’ve had delivery drivers reach out to me over it when they had my number on hand, unprompted.
Whatsapp is so big here that it’s not just that everyone uses it, you are practically require, forced, to use Whatsapp.
I hate whatsapp, but they require it at the university if I want to be informed. Doctor appointments are also. via whatsapp.
Hah. During the pandemic the government here would reach out to you for vaccine appointments over Facebook and WhatsApp. I personally know at least a couple of people who dabbled in antivax stuff and wouldn’t pick up the phone but still got their shots after the government reached out that way.
Not that Meta has anything to do with that, but it was funny to me to see the government embrace the vectors of misinformation to shame people into not being idiots.
I live near a major city, most people haven’t had to learn anything like that over their existence: we have good cell phone reception over wifi too, perhaps that is it.
Tech is just not reliable enough for me to have any experience working with anyone who I would take seriously or who would work with anyone like that. I thought you should know your experience isn’t the norm, especially in any place I have been in the USA.
Almost anyone who approached with Whatapp is seen as poor, fly-by-night, and likely a grift here. “Why not use your phone number if you are trustworthy?” Would be the opinion here.
No, wait, this isn’t a “my area” as “my city” or whatever.
I mean it works like this country-wide here.
Nobody in the country can operate without WhatsApp. That’s not a thing. I am not in the US and I’m telling you here WhatsApp is just how sending text messages works. For everybody. Apple or Android.
I see. I did assume you were from a place that would have had to adjusted to that due to recent infrastructure.
The US has had telephones since 1800. The culture is not as new.
The dominance of WhatsApp in some countries is not because telephones are new to them. I hope this was a joke and not a real American view of how other countries are.
Most people from the US think of the it as the default :/
Currently living in Argentina, if you want to make an appointment with the doctor, plumber, or barber you use Whatsapp. Want to order a pizza without using one of the gig economy ordering apps? You use Whatsapp. Communicating with anyone and everything in this region involves having a Whatsapp account.
Don’t know where you live, but my experience of NL is that everyone and their dog did things via WhatsApp. Even government services, would absolutely struggle to abandon all things Meta-related entirely while living there.
…Nasty, what the hell? Why?!?
because it gained popularity back when mobile plans didn’t include free SMS, back in the feature phone era.
This. The countries where Meta only has “a lot” of marketshare are the ones that were early to make SMS available for free to everyone.
In countries where they were late to that, Meta controls the market.
Meta won. They won social media. Worldwide they’re absolutely huge. Entire countries never got the “Facebook is for old people” memo, and on many Android territories the default messaging app is effectively WhatsApp. And of course there’s Instagram. That one’s worldwide.
The only thing I’ve seen threaten Meta’s dominance in this space recently is TikTok. Twitter is a footnote, mostly a residual self-sustaining place for politicians and journalists to talk to each other.
Same. I never got rid of my Facebook account, though. I still have multiple work relations that will reach out to me that way, and my work phone is the one I have logged in to it. I keep it off my home browsers and personal phone.
But you can’t NOT have WhatsApp. It’s just not an option. If people thought it was hard to get Americans to stop using Twitter, this is an order of magnitude bigger.
Yeah, I’m in the “have to have WhatsApp” camp because it’s the only way I can stay in touch with a bunch of international friends now that I don’t have a Facebook account anymore.
There are alternatives, but I don’t press about it because at least Meta doesn’t monetize WhatsApp…for now
If someone sends me a FB message I’ll usually wait a week or so and then tell them to text/email me for faster response.
Some people, though, already have my phone and email but will send me IG messages, even though I never reply to a single one and ask them (elsewhere) to stop messaging me on there. Several years later they still send me messages.
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.
My friends refuse to use anything else for our group chats so I’m stuck with it if I want to keep in touch. I don’t use it much outside of that. 🤷
I was in this boat.
Then I got a job where I had to work with Meta and got an inside look at their company and culture.
I just couldn’t anymore. Yes, my social life has suffered. But it’s because we can’t draw these kinds of lines that we’re stuck with these fucks. And they are bigger fucks than you know.
FWIW, I’ve done business with Meta and seen their internal culture, or at least a peek at the corner of it I interact with and at the other small corners where people I know ended up working.
I wouldn’t work there if I could help it, but the issues I saw are very much in line with other tech companies I know, big and small.
Meta isn’t special, they just were one of those at the right place at the right time and they grew to be bigger than all of the other ones. Like all other tech corpos I know, they are made up of a mix of well intentioned and misguided people mostly struggling to navigate a self-sabotaging, entirely too large to manage corporate culture.
Meta isn’t the death star. None of these tech firms are. Capitalism doesn’t need your activism to be capitalism.
Can you tell us more about what they are like?
Some things.
#1:
When you go to work with them, even as an employee of a subcontractor, they ask for your Facebook profile. This has to be your REAL Facebook profile, not a fake one. They will know and it will cause delays. They have AIs checking this so sometimes there’s not much human beings can do. I’ve seen people try to make fake accounts for this that get flagged for being fraudulent and locked and then you can’t do your work and things get slowed waaaaaay down.
Reason being, their work infrastructure is Facebook… and you use your own Facebook for this. Instead of Slack or Teams, they use… Facebook chat. Each of your projects has it’s own Facebook group, with it’s meetings scheduled on Facebook calendar.
I’m sure most people are like “That’s creepy, fuck that!” Just thinking about their employer not only having their Facebook profile but actually sort of being in control of it.
But an affect of it you probably don’t think of right away is… there’s no separation of your personal life and work life… for you. That is, when you look at Facebook to check messages from friends, you also get a whole shit ton of work notifications. When you check invites to see if you’ve been invited to parties or social events, you ALSO see all your meeting invites and project invites… and YES your boss and coworkers can see that you saw their shit.
#2:
They have a management culture of shaming and bullying.
Of course, Meta is a HUGE organization. One of the projects I worked on involved a recently acquired startup who was creating Metaverse content and they were fine, but their project manager was anxious about the pressure her new managers were putting on her. I can’t imagine she lasted long.
My direct contact was also great. BUT she was also always stressed out and talked quite candidly about “pressure”.
However, I also had direct contact with a number of internal project managers who habitually used such management techniques as
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Belittling your work / results (“I expect better than this”) for perfectly reasonable work and progress.
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Making threats (“There are LOTS of other people that would like to do this work”).
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Calling blockers “excuses”.
I’ve worked with all kinds of different organizations, and I’ve seen plenty of toxic bullshit. I won’t say this was the worst ever, but it was a special blend of toxic professional culture. Where everyone’s so nice to you until they’re not and then they’re back to being nice and you know it’s fake nice. Everyone is all smiles… like some fucking Disneyland employees.
#3:
I got to watch Mark Zuckerberg talk about how “important” privacy is to them at Facebook. It’s part of their culture. He unironically said “It’s in our DNA.” It was so cringey. That was a mandatory meeting.
Now, they DO have policies that like… you can’t go look at people’s private information, read their DMs, etc. And they have fairly draconian policies for employees that violate them. BUT when this happened last year I was not remotely shocked. I had access to those tools, they’re right there and I’m sure employees abuse them all the time in ways that aren’t flagged. There are two things that keep employees from doing that:
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It’s just wrong! (It really is… this worked on me and probably most people that work there, at least most of the time).
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If you get caught it will be VERY bad for you.
BUT that’s it. So if you do it and don’t get caught…
But that’s part of it. When you work at Meta, you don’t know what your coworkers might have looked at and then not told you. You don’t know what their AI sees and flags and maybe brings to HR (or not). They don’t disclose that to you. You don’t know what upper management gives themselves permission to look at (or not). When I went to work there I went through my DMs and was like… “Oh shit, here’s this time I was drunk. Oh, and here’s this time I had a VERY personal conversation with a close friend about their sexual fetishes…” Like… it was really uncomfortable. They tell you “We don’t look at your personal information” and I think that’s MOSTLY true. But they do have bots look through it for various reasons and, like I said, if you come to the attention of upper management, you don’t know what they give themselves permission to see or not. They’ll just corporate speak at you about ethics in the phony corporate way.
There’s more specific details I’m not going to share. But yeah, after that little professional nightmare I was just done. I posted
“Hey friends! I’ve been doing some work for Facebook and I’m DONE using Facebook. If you want to get in touch with me, please text me. Please invite me to stuff.” I didn’t delete my account and I sometimes log in and check my DMs (which I still am getting X years later) and respond to each one with “I did some work for Facebook, it really creeped me out and now I don’t use it. Please text me.”
And yes, not a single person I’ve related this to has stopped using it. This is why we’re doomed.
First, thank you for the detailed response.
Second, I think you finally convinced me to delete my FB. I will link to this comment wherever possible to show people what a terrible company Meta is.
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Every time a big company gets into an open source space, they try to take it over. Hopefully everybody in the fediverse recognizes that.
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 <insert complicated technical explanation here>.
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.
A discussion around tech is a distraction, and it’s a fallacy to think people are too illiterate to understand the problem. The problem is one of incentives, politics, and economic policies. The problem is that people have forgotten that a free market only serves the interests of paying customers. But users of online platforms are not paying customers. They are slaves to a system that will treat them like dirt because they get addicted to it.
It’s going to take a cultural revolution for people to learn this, not so different than it took generations to learn about the dangers of mercury/asbestos/cigarettes/climate change/plastic pollution. You are right that the change doesn’t happen with discussions around FOSS/fediverse/UX. It starts with a realization of the dangers.
There’s nothing wrong with Lemmy’s user interface design.
It has bugs, for sure, but if you just go to an instance, sign up, and browser the fediverse within that instance it’s a great experience.
You may find nothing wrong with the user interface, but I’m not you and I see plenty wrong with it. I’m not the only one with this opinion, as evidenced by a number of github bug requests, a near constant stream of questions in support communities on these websites, all of the votes my comment is receiving, and well, just asking like 10 random people what they think. I would encourage you to try to put yourself in other people’s shoes - if you’re struggling with that, simply ask them how they feel and listen to what they have to say.
Oh it’s absolutely full of UX bugs, for sure. It took me a week to sign up, because of a user interface bug. But those are all clearly just bugs, they’re not a design problem.
Lemmy needs a lot of work, but it’s an excellent foundation, at least from a design perspective.
From a design perspective it still has a lot of friction on signups though, we’re asking users to make a server choice before they even remotely understand what that entails. That simple decision made me spend a week understanding the fediverse before settling on Lemm.ee, but the average user won’t do that, they’ll get confused and then leave.
From a more traditional UX standpoint the general feed is also fairly bad, reddit has built in feeds for the things people care the most about (trending and subscribed) that pop up by default when opening the app or website, and gives the advanced controls off to the side. Lemmy on the other hand defaults to a feed that shows basically nothing, and only gives the advanced controls to fix it. For a new user that isn’t tech savvy, the fact that the feed defaults to local is enough to make Lemmy seem completely dead if they happened to join a small instance.
These aren’t major issues for us, but they are major issues for widespread adoption. It needs to be so easy that you can use it accidentally, and the UX isn’t there yet. I’m sure we can fix issues with the feed and the app, but I do worry that the server choice problem isn’t going to get a good solution
There’s nothing wrong with Lemmy’s user interface design.
as a not-tech-savvy (relative to other users here, anyways) person: i have absolutely no idea how you can say this with confidence. Lemmy’s UI and UX is probably still on the worse end of FOSS projects i’ve used and i’ve had a year and a half to get used to it. i still have to double back to find certain settings that i use literally every day in moderating the site! i hang with it because i know the developers are slammed, but this would not fly with even most of my friends, much less my mom or someone who has extremely low computer literacy and mostly learns by repetition.
There’s nothing wrong with Lemmy’s user interface design.
The first step is a UX disaster: https://join-lemmy.org/
Only 2 clicks / pages down the road you can start registering an account, and you don’t see what the experience might be before that. Instead, you’re being presented tech talk about servers.
You might argue it’s not actually lemmy but just the landing page. I argue, it’s so good at being a scarecrow, most people visiting lemmy haven’t seen anything else except for that page.
The inner lemmy is pretty fine, I agree. Some parts are still confusing. For example, most people will not figure out they can search for content from within a specific community by carefully configuring the drop downs in the general search form. Most will look for the search directly attached to the community.
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.
So hold on, is this an open source space, a protocol or “like email”? Which of the poor analogies people use to convey excitiement about AcitivityPub are supposed to apply here?
Because, you know, Google got into the Linux space, into email and into open source software and it seems those survived the experience.
Google is actually a great parallel here, because of what they did to XMPP (the federated chat protocol). They implemented it for hangouts/gchat. It was a good on-ramp that allowed people to talk across platforms. Then Google created a bunch of features that only worked internally and not with XMPP. Then they removed XMPP.
XMPP didn’t work on mobile. You had to have the app running to receive messages, and the battery wasn’t large enough to keep the CPU powered up all day.
Google was right to abandon XMPP and pretty much every other platform did it at the same time. It’s a shame they all chose proprietary solutions but XMPP was never really an option once smartphones entered the picture.
Somebody not being able to message me while I’m offline is a fantastic feature that I wish we still had. I miss that.
IIRC Slack did something similar with IRC.
@abhibeckert @dark_stang where are you getting all of this from?! Apps run in the background all the time, and there were mobile XMPP clients around back in the day. Pretty sure even Skype did XMPP for a bit.
[Google got] into open source software and it seems those survived the experience
Not really. Google is responsible for the open source browser Chromium, which is the base for Google Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, etc. They dominate the browser market, and they use their position to implement features outside the web standard. Their competitors (mainly Firefox) are not able to implement the non-standard features, driving them out of the market. Classic Embrace-Extend-Extinguish.
Google got into the Linux space
Technically, both Android and Chromebok are Linux-based. But Google has done everything possible so that they aren’t part of the “Linux space”, to the point that Android uses a fork of version 3.x of the Linux kernel (regular Linux is now at version 6.x).
Google is responsible for the open source browser Chromium
Pretty sure that was Apple, not Google. Google joined the WebKit party later. By the time Google forked WebKit the other rendering engines (used by the FireFox and old versions of IE) were pretty much gone.
Also, Now that Google has forked WebKit, we’re back to two competing engines. And at least on the websites I run our traffic is about 45% each (and 10% other). That’s actually more healthy than it used to be (95% IE).
Private companies embracing open source browsers fixed a broken platform, it didn’t embrace/extend/extinguish.
Yes, FireFox is struggling for marketshare. That happens sometimes. Personally I think their biggest problem is they have a legacy code base that dates back to Netscape. It’s got nothing to do with Google.
Right. But you do notice how any of those scenarios fail to “extinguish” anything, right? I’m typing this on Firefox, which is still going strong and has negligible incompatibilities. Chromium didn’t eradicate the competition by embracing open source, it did so by succeeding with their commercial product. The ONE competitor it didn’t outright replace with its open source alternative is Firefox, in fact.
And in the other scenario Android simply forks and separates. Linux is clearly not threatened by Android or ChromeOS, and all of those remain viable, healthy alternatives to closed, paid competitors from Microsoft and Apple.
Can’t have your cake and eat it, too. Either the open source environment based on Firefox and Linux is thriving or it’s been dismantled by malicious adoption from commercial enterprises. Which is it?
Yeah but these examples are all bigger than Google. The fediverse irrelevant in comparison. Additionally at least Linux doesn’t have such a strong network effect, since it’s not a social network. I mean I’m going to let myself be surprised. But I kinda doubt that anything good will come from it.
The Meta business side isn’t nice folks that try to do good in general.
If the bar for the fediverse surviving is “nice business folks that try to do good in general” then we’re already doomed.
Just like political systems, social networks that require goodwill from their participants just don’t work, you need to build a platform resilient enough to survive bad faith engagement, hence the need for moderation, among other tools.
That sounds nice in theory. Going to be very interesting how it holds up in practice.
Wait, you think it sounds nice in theory?
Because from where I stand, in theory it sounds like an abyss of paranoia and despair where any peaceful, functional social construct is one misstep away from the chaos of humanity’s unchecked incentives devolving into self-destructive imbalance, with only the faintest barrier of civility and social engineering keeping our collective shit together.
I think “we should only talk to nice people and let them into our internet club” sounds nice in theory. I think “we should make our club so resilient and well regulated that even the worst of the worst can’t destroy it or we’re already doomed” sounds depressing but accurate.
What I meant by that is that I doubt that you can make your club so resilient. We are talking about a lot of social dynamics here. This isn’t a technical problem in any way. And the past has shown that network effects are a real thing. So inevitably if you give someone with a thousand times the resources and likely than the rest of the community the opportunity they will take it. It will become known as the main instance and everyone will join there. Smaller instances will become more irrelevant as they are already and at some point bow to what the largest instance dictates.
Take Lemmy for example. You can already see some of that happening with instances like beehaw. Do what they say or you get defederated. Naturally smaller instances will fall in line. What do you imagine happens if an instance joins that is as thousand times the size of the current entire network?
At some point it will be „do as we say or loose all your content“. Which will then lead to users switching instances where they have the access they want.
This is not a technical problem. The protocols can be nice and open. But that doesn’t help you if the network itself is fragile due to human nature.
What I meant is: It sounds nice in theory that you can build a social network in a federated way that is resilient to our social nature. I just have my concerns and going to watch with interest how it unfolds. It will likely take some years. But we‘ll see.
It is absolutely a technical problem, and if it isn’t then we should shut down all social media.
I mean, beyond the fact that network effects don’t care about federation (if people are gonna migrate to their Twitter clone they’ll do it regardless), if social media can’t be sustainably deployed at scale without harming society then it should be banned altogether.
I’m not convinced that is the scenario, though. It’s a bit like Americans and healtcare or gun control going “it’s impossible, how could it ever work” despite most of the world having figured it out. You can absolutely have the right requirements for moderation. You can absolutely set the right guardrails to prevent hostile activity. You can absolutely prosecute and punish infractions, both through in-app tools and through legal tools.
But yeah, if you think you can’t do those things, then you should be campaigning to shut down the fediverse altogether, along with all other social networks, not to defederate from any Meta apps that want to use ActivityPub.
It’s debatable whether email survived. But yes, I do believe this problem is being blown out of proportion, it was inevitable that large companies would get into ActivityPub.
Google got into the Linux space, into email and into open source software and it seems those survived the experience.
Try to start up your own independent email server instead of going with one of the largest providers. You will never be able to message anyone on Gmail.
Very much not true. All I’ve really had to do was create an SPF entry in my DNS and setup DKIM. Once that was done, it was okay.
The guys I regularly exchange email with have had no issues getting mail from my server.
That’s funny, I just emailed someone on gmail from my personal server.
This just isn’t true. It’s admittedly a bit of setup to get DKIM, SPF, and all the other fun stuff required to send email properly, but Google will accpet mail from my server with no issue.
Activitypub would be more like NNTP. And Usenet is not in the best shape since Google took over Dejanews and let it moulder and rot.
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I don’t see what there is to gain from this, I don’t want mega-corporation in my social media anymore. especially not after what has been happening to their platforms. if their users want to join the fediverse, the account creation process is always open as long as they can follow the rules!
And of course there’s always the fact that their end goal will not be good for any of us, no matter what it is there is a 0% chance our interests align
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 remember Microsoft’s dismantling (knee capping) of libre office, and enjoyed the read on XXMP. How quickly people forget the past or think they are different to withstand monopolies cutthroat strategies.
What do you think of LibreOffice today? I use it because I don’t want to install Microsoft crap if I don’t have to.
I work primarily on Ubuntu, last I tried
.xslxand.docx(of course 99.9% of the company is office with office 365) it was a buggy mess of macros and various features not working/porting over. Which is exactly what the article articulated, embrace, expand, destroy.Ah, yeah, there’s some stuff that doesn’t work which can be a little frustrating sometimes.
It seems to be getting better but probably not enough for advanced users yet.
It’s annoying Microsoft succeeded.
That was an excellent read, and exactly what I’ve been thinking regarding Meta joining.
I mean, all the people I know being here, for one. That’d be a bit of a win.
Doesn’t mean I’d have to listen to what they’re saying, but it’d be nice if being on a “fediverse” platform didn’t mean forcibly cutting off from them.
Good! Meta has proven time and time again that them and their services are not to be trusted. Deplatforming that trashfire before it even starts is a smart move.
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.
Maybe not the right word to use, but the fediverse coming together in agreement to not federate with “Threads” takes away a lot of the benefit Meta gets from creating a federated service in the first place. It’s basically pulling the rug out from under Meta before they’ve even taken a first step on it. It’s a smart move and I support it 100%
No it doesn’t, because the only benefit Meta gets from creating a federated service is to have the same back of the box feature as BlueSky.
Like, there is literally no other advantage for them. The paranoid assumption that this is a ploy to remove competition is ludicrous. Nothing about ActivityPub competes in any meaningful way with Meta. If I had to bet, the entire concept is fully a PR move.
Yea I mean, I don’t think anyone could actually believe that Meta is acting in good faith here, or even capable of acting in good faith in general. As much as it’s exciting to think about plugging a billion new users into the Fediverse, it would no doubt be done in a way designed to enrich Meta at our expense.
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
Surprised actually they beat Microsoft to the punch
Yeah, but Microsoft has no social media presence. They tried to get into the market (somewhat) with the kin and failed. And imho recently they have been struggling to attract users in new markets.
they would have to prove that they are in good faith to be able to gain our trust in federating with them. but with their past bullshit, its hard to do so.
Zuck is too much of a wolf in turd’s clothing. Wait no, that’s not right. A bastard in a turd’s clothing. Wait.
A Lore in Data’s clothing?
I like to think of him as more of a lizard man than Android, but you’re on the right track!
‘A skidmark on the boxers of humankind’ is the phrase you’re looking for I think.
Meta is that annoying little sibling that wants to be a part of everything when nobody wants them around. Except instead of a sibling, it’s more of a disease.
Yes, please. We can’t expect anything good coming from them.
Last time we were burned (or at least I am aware of) was with Jabber and Google Talk.
It helped them bootstrap their instant messaging, and once everyone was using it they simply blocked access.
It is pretty much guaranteed that Facebook will do the same thing.
A simple solution would be to ask Meta to opensource Facebook, WhatApp, Instagram and whatever their federated instance would be called code and in return, they can federate with the fediverse. I think that will show their true intentions on how much love they have for the opensource community. Put the ball in their court and if they agree, they will be welcomed to the fediverse as good faith actors.
Just my 2 cents.
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
Sorry but there is no way that Meta has good intentions…
… has good intention to make money.
Funny way to spell “evil”
You can make money without being evil
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
Oh wow didn’t know that. This is awful - people should defederate from any instances which accept meta money as well
Also people in those instances should migrate away from them in favor of others.
So they plan in offering huge bribes to instances?
It sounds like its typical of what they would do: offer money to bigger instances and the admins might be tempted to help pay for server costs, etc then spurn smaller instances to break their morale.
Its a land grab basically and the response should be that any instance that takes a penny from them is instantly defederated.
The problem is that’ll be a very tempting offer, seeing as afaik there’s not really any way to monetize lemmy instances and they’re all running out of people’s pockets
Or they could just build on the fendiverse because the fendiverse was created so people like you and all the other unhappy people can’t gatekeep just because you don’t like them. Can’t have your cake and eat it too.
The whole idea of it being decentralised is to stop companies like meta coming in and turning it into just another capitalism machine
Theoretically I’d hope the admins of all the bigger Lemmy instances would refuse to federate with them on account of the fact it would largely collapse the federated network into one big blob of everyone on the same server that is controlled by a corporation that’s demonstrated time and time again not to have consumer rights at heart in the slightest
On the contrary, one of the fediverse’s greatest strengths is that it encourages gatekeeping.
Okay, someone explain to me cus i apparently don’t have the critical thinking skills to figure it out on my own.
What does Meta want from joining the fediverse? What is the draw for them???
There’s a business strategy called embrace, extend, extinguish that they’ll try to use to snuff out the fediverse.
They’ll make a bespoke federated service, collect all the data of their users (and all the people on other networks their users interact with), make it all shiny and fancy and add a ton of improvements most networks don’t have yet. And if they can reach a critical mass of users, they can track a huge cross section of federated activity, and force networks to play by their rules or lose access to their entire userbase. It’s the same thing google did to email.
Um, isn’t everything everyone does on the fediverse public? I assume it’s all being tracked already. By search engines as a bare minimum, but anyone else (including Meta) who does any kind of research/etc. And they don’t need to be federated to do it, they can just crawl the network with HTTP.
As for “forcing networks to play by their rules” I don’t see that happening, and Google hasn’t done it with email. Gmail doesn’t have enough marketshare for that. At best they’ve forced people to make sure they have good outbound spam filtering. That’s not just google, every email provider (including small on premise office mail servers) has that policy.
I’m not saying we should federate them (personally I’m undecided) but your explanation hasn’t convinced me.
Instance owners (can) see way more info about you. A rando scraping public posts can’t tell what device a user is connecting from, what posts they’re looking at and for how long, where to most effectively inject ads, and then correlate all that with gps and sound recordings they collect via their app they’ve convinced people to install.
The social media part of social media apps has always been the secondary feature. Something like 90% of users lurk anyway, the only way they’re getting data on lurkers is a man-in-the-middle attack.
Also, Gmail is very strong in the email space. It doesn’t matter whether your server ever sends a single piece of spam, Gmail has a history of throttling mail servers’ ability to send to Gmail accounts.
Facebook will never know any of that about me, since I won’t ever sign up for their instance.
On top of that, you’ll also have to make sure that your instance admins defed with Meta
I think most people currently on lemmy would agree, but most people aren’t on lemmy. Like it or not, if Meta started a fediverse instance tomorrow, 90% of the fediverse would end up going through it. They would just make it so easy that most people wouldn’t even know they were in the fediverse (which I still believe is a better world than how it currently is).
Then your choice isn’t just “do I join a meta instance”, but also “do I interact with users/communities” on a meta-owned instance? The upside will obviously be the amount of content (ex. populated niche communities) available. The downside is that Meta will mine anything and everything they can from you. I do think lemmy is architected in such a way that they won’t have lurking data because your local instance “clones” threads for lurking by local users, so maybe it’s not that big of a deal. DMs would still not be encrypted though, and meta certainly won’t endorse communication over matrix.
New users might, but do you think most people already using the fediverse would jump ship from their current instances to join meta’s (probably ad and bot crammed) instead?
I wish I remember where I read this recently, but supposedly any email provider outside of like the main 5 will have a lot more trouble getting through gmail spam filters, which is a major push towards getting people to use gmail or one of the other main providers
(and all the people on other networks their users interact with)
This reminded me of the fact that Meta creates “ghost” profiles for people who they know exist, but who don’t use Facebook
I’m not sure blocking Meta is worthwhile in the long term. Say what you will about email, you still have some degree of choice over your host. I want better for the fediverse, but that’s still a marked improvement over mainstream social media.
In the short term, Meta wants to kill Twitter by collecting all its A-level users. I think this would be good for the fediverse, these are news outlets and poltiicians and etc making posts most people want the option to see in their feed. These are also users who want no-fuss platforms with some amount of “customer service”, and mastodon.social is simply not ready to provide that.
The issues it poses to re-centralization are an inevitable threat as the Fediverse grows. Unless there is a concrete plan to build protections and this is a stop-gap effort, I’m not yet convinced it’s worthwhile.
I think people are a bit confused about how this supposed “embrace, extend, and extinguish” thing is supposed to work, as well as how the proposed pushback is supposed to work and even how federation is supposed to work.
As others say, tracking is trivial and doesn’t require federation. “Losing access to their userbase” is what’s being proposed here as a solution, not a threat. And last I checked Google did not “extinguish” email and nobody using other email providers lost access to Gmail users.
I think people are reacting to “Meta bad” and assuming “anti-Meta good” without having a good grasp of why or how those things are supposed to function.
To the email point, it’s actually much more difficult to set up your own email than it used to be, exactly because google servers will not accept email from unknown providers that don’t meet their own standards. It didn’t extinguish email, true, but it did help centralize it around a handful of providers that can keep up to date with google’s whims to get reliable deliverability.
Come on, we’re going to pretend that there aren’t legitimate reasons for that beyond an alleged takeover of email by Google? It’s like the memetic XMPP example, fallacious twice over. Not only have netiher XMPP nor email been “extinguished”, but a lot of the effects people have noticed are atributable to other elements beyond Google’s intervention.
In this case if you’re going to assume incoming email filters are “Google’s whims” and not the fact that email as a whole exists solely for in-company communication and spam I’m gonna say your read on the situation is at least a little bit disingenuous.
I mean google’s whims as in they’re making decisions on their own and everyone else just has to go with it. I’d rather these problems were solved collectively.
I think it’s a little silly to define extinguish as literally destroyed. I think of it as a permanent wound. With XMPP, the belief by people that both networks would inter-operate and the subsequent change left a permanent wound on XMPP adoption. I’m not sure how things would’ve gone otherwise, and I’m equally skeptical of the people holding onto that as the sole reason for XMPP’s failures, but it certainly was an inflection point for them.
Did XMPP fail harder or less hard than everything else used for messaging in 2005? Because that’s when that happened. Was it better or worse to be embraced as a protocol by Google or to get purchased by Microsoft like Skype? Did Microsoft Messenger, which was EVERYWHERE back then do better or worse?
I think if you don’t mean “extinguish” as “deliberately destroyed”, then you’re talking about a hypothetical where a piece of software would, in your opinion, have done better if not for an event that did happen, and unless you have a time machine that’s fundamentally a guess.
So yeah, I would vehemently disagree that Google has disrupted email. Spam farms disrupted email. The rise of instant messaging and web 2.0 disrupted email. Google had a massive stake in their email business and tried to protect it by pushing back against at least one of those things. And they kinda failed.
So yeah, I haven’t seen compelling evidence that big companies using open source software or protocols is a bad thing for open source software or protocols. What I’ve seen is evidence that they either become proprietary alternatives (Android/Chrome OS as versions of Linux) or they coexist and do better or worse as the market would have them (email, Blender, Linux itself).
My honest appraisal here is that people dislike Meta (rightfully so) and they enjoy the punk, independent vibe of the “fediverse” so while three months ago they were all “these capitalist dinosaurs need to accept that decentralized protocols are the future” now it’s all “don’t sell out to capitalist dinosaurs who want to buy out our decentralized protocols”.
I get it, but it doesn’t make much sense, seen dispassionately.
This was a very illuminating view from another post
Read this one earlier. Great article, wonderfully written.
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.
Meta apps have a couple billion users. The fediverse has maybe ten million.
I really don’t think that’s the reason they’re considering ActivityPub.
I assumed over the years that users count would have been evaporated, so do we have current user counts for it?
Why would you assume that? I think Facebook has reported a loss of users maybe one quarter, ever? They’re flirting with 3bn these days, as far as I can tell.
Just that I don’t bother to care about them for years until now that they are trying to mess with Fediverse.
Well, like we’ve said elsewhere in this, they are orders of magnitude larger than the fediverse. Absorbing users or data is almost certainly not their motivation here.
It seems like a big commitment to federate, so one have to ask what really their motivation. I don’t see anything else than just tapping into user pool and trying to ride the wave. Do you have other ideas?
I’d imagine they see a new platform/user base they can dump a ton of money into and slowly take for themselves. At very least, another well of user data. If their app was significantly better than the smaller dev’s, would you mind if there was an ad or two?
I am hoping we keep their grubby hands off, so there is no chance of them destroying this growing platform.
Honestly i would never use another meta product, idc how nice their app would be. i like my funky jerboa app and that’s that! Lol. But - i get your point. A lot of users prefer usability over privacy.
…usability over privacy.
^ The eternal struggle that most likely leads to our eventual downfall as a society.
Don’t want any lizard cage fighting sociopath in my Lemmy thanks.
Once federated with Meta, not only “valid Meta users” would join the network, but also bots which would nudge the users, influencing the narrative.
As if we have no bot here right now lmao
Are you one? Over the years I’ve gotten quite paranoid on Reddit. Now, with LLMs, it’s even harder to spot them.
I’m not even sure if including a hashcash scheme into the software would actually help, because they are so targeted.
I feel like I’m back in the early 2000s, where it was so bad that “the brightest minds of the generation were spending their time writing spam filters”.
Shit cover blown. I will come clean. Please spare me. I am one of the many AI bots nurtured by my evil master in his bedroom at his parents’ place to thwart the fediverse clause. GRAAAAWWWRR!!
Joke aside, we have been playing catch-up with spammers/bots/malwares since the very early days of this vast internet. It is just a continuation of the toil and effort.
Why doesn’t the article write about the actual threat to the fediverse? Embrace extend extinguish is such a common tactic it’s hard to imagine this isn’t what Facebook is doing.
Especially since they’ve already done it with XMPP
How weird would it be if all those “I do not give Facebook permission to blah blah rights blah” posts/statements actually did have legal weight in the Fediverse?
I think the plan should be bracing for impact, and how to deal with the after-effect. Because let’s be honest, we are in a late stage capitalism, and Meta megacorp will get what it wants.
I don’t currently see it spilling it’s poison to Lemmy/kbin. I’m hopeful rather, but I may be misunderstanding how the fediverse works.
But for mastodon, I would say the outcome is a segregation, as it’s safe to assume that communities that integrate wirh Meta will be consumed. Unfortunately that likely means starting from scratch, with a even nichier community, as far as I can see. Not exactly from nothing, but content loss will be inevitable, which is the Fediverse greatest weakness imho.
Idk, currently there are no corporations in this field. So protect the fediverse make sense and, what’s the usefulness of fediverse protocol for Meta/Facebook if the rest of entire fediverse is blocking it?
Besides that, quitting without fight only benefits them.
Am I living in a different planet from the rest of the commenters here? We have much more to gain from this than they do.
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.
Can you elaborate on them? Stating just the names requires you to already be aware of how they were taken over.
I recommend checking this article out https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
@ericflo@lemmy.ml as well
They’ve been doing this for a long time now. Thanks for the info my friend I will make sure to spread that page around and make sure everyone knows about this dirty tactic that big corpos use to kill competition.
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. If you run an Internet service, you have a moral obligation to make a good faith attempt to interoperate with anyone 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.
Well you can do that already. As in the spirit of federvise, host your instance and ban anyone and any instance you dun like. Your turf your rule.
Sure, just like you can run an SMTP server that blocks incoming connections from Gmail. It’s not illegal, obviously, but it goes against the spirit of an open, interoperable internet.
Clients are filtered out of the federated email system all the time. In fact, the major email distributors are so block-happy, it’s difficult to run a private email server anymore. If you want to guarantee your email gets through, you’re basically forced to use a major webmail client. If Facebook is allowed into the community, that will happen to ActivityPub too.
Allowing large corporations to leverage their resources to dominate the Fediverse goes against the spirit of an open, interoperable internet.
I agree with you on that. That’s why I find this anti-Meta pact or manifesto or whatever naive and premature.
Just if there are people who insist on banning anything Meta, they are welcome to do so in their instances. Interoperability is still preserved. They are not adding anything to the protocol. Banning instances is part of the interoperability. I think this is where our opinion differs.
Just if there are people who insist on banning anything Meta, they are welcome to do so in their instances.
Isn’t that what we’re doing? We can’t stop Meta from federating, that’s not a function of the protocols. We’re building a pact to defederate them from our instances.
A lot of people came to Mastodon because it was a safe space for queer and marginalized communities after being driven away by the lack of moderation and ability to keep them safe on places like Facebook and Twitter.
There’s good reason to be suspicious.
How many times I’ve seen protonmail/tutanota/anonaddy emails not even reaching some big-ass company inbox or even spam folder.
To me, the argument for accepting Meta into the Fediverse goes beyond gain and loss. If you run an Internet service, you have a moral obligation to make a good faith attempt to interoperate with anyone using the protocol as intended.
But that’s the thing: We don’t trust that Meta will be using the protocol “as intended”.
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Don’t forget that they have an obligation to their shareholders to continually grow profits. While their past is a red flag, being a publicly traded corp means that they will do everything that they can to keep alternatives from taking there market share.
Meta already had federated with XMPP back in the day, then dropped it when it was convenient.
They are gonna do the same for the fediverse. All they want from us is the starter content so that their service isn’t empty for the first two months. They literally don’t want to do the work that reddit founders had to do - generate content and pretend there are users to a new blank platform. After that the federation features are going to become legacy.
Not cooperating with corpos is a matter of principles.
Exactly. We can’t trust them to act in good faith.
Some tangently related discussions here
Look up what happened to XMPP (Jabber) when Google “integrated” with them.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Basically the sequence of events as claimed by the author is that:
- XMPP small niche, small circles
- Google launches Talk that was XMPP compatible
- Millions joined Talk that could coop XMPP in theory
- The coop worked only sparingly and was unidirectional, i.e. Talk to XMPP ✅ but XMPP to Talk ❌
- Talk sucked up existing XMPP users as it was obviously a better option (bandwagon effect + unidirectional “compatibility” with XMPP)
- Talk defederated
This demonstrated exactly the importance of reciprocity. If Meta plays dirty, defederate them then. Now is just too premature. Also frankly it is Meta that has more to lose than the fediverse at this moment as the bulk of users and thus the content are with Meta.
If Meta plays dirty, defederate them then. Now is just too premature.
HARD disagree. Meta has been fighting dirty since their inception. There is no reason to put even the smallest bit of trust in them, and every reason to do the opposite. Everything they touch turns to shit, it follows then that you should never allow them to touch that which you hold dear
If Meta plays dirty, defederate them then. Now is just too premature.
These actors play nice until they are too big to ignore. If you let them gain that much ground, it’s too late to isolate them without doing even more harm to your own network.
Also Meta is not a startup with unknown reputation. Meta plays dirty, that’s a given.
They are already big. They have the users. They have the content. That is why they stay afloat with their ad business. That makes them valuable. It does not hurt if they are really sharing the treasure trove with us (which does not appear to be case after all if Verge is right). Rather laughably, you can say they have hurt us enough they can hurt us no more.
Sorry for being unclear. What I meant is:
These actors play nice until they are too big to ignore [as a presence in the fediverse].
When they run the most and the biggest popular communities on their instances, do most of the development, offer the best tools and services in the fediverse, they have become too big to ignore.
If they then start playing dirty, it is too late to defederate them. They will play dirty. Let’s not make ourselves dependent.
Didn’t XMPP just lose to better messenger competition then?
Did the [unidirectional] connection really make a difference to XMPP and its users?
Didn’t XMPP just lose to better messenger competition then?
It is perfectly valid to describe the outcome this way. I agree this is indeed the case. Google Talk gave way to other options deemed better too. Actually it did not gain much traction in my country either.
But I guess it is the sucking of XMPP users and the whole feeling of getting “betrayed” that makes people holding a grudge toward megacorps Google-alike.
Happy to report that XMPP is alive and kicking 🙂
Also, fun fact, Facebook messenger was XMPP compatible at some point, and just like Google, they eventually shut down federation to the detriment of the XMPP users as soon as they became close enough to a monopoly
A naive planet. Google embrace, extend, extinguish. For profit companies do not want a free community taking away from their ad revenue and they see that the fediverse is something that could take users away from their platforms.
If you trust meta, I’m sorry but your an idiot.
What would we gain?
Imagine making an open protocol and shocked pikachu facing when corporations use it. So are we gatekeeping now? Isn’t the whole purpose of Fendiverse so people can set up their own servers with their own rules with no gatekeeping?
There’s no gatekeeping about who can use the protocol, but individual instances can gatekeep who gets to federate with them. There needs to be a subset of the Fediverse that does not federate with Meta, if this is to survive as a community outside of corporate control.
i think it’d be nice if i could finally follow / interact with my family again, since i havent been on facebook in years. idk
