Omg that thread was illuminating.
Key points are:
- xmpp was systematically killed by Google by “embrace, enhance, extinguish” where they federated, added bells and whistles, then de-federated after having essentially all users.
- meta systematically removes competition. It is naive to assume anything otherwise, and both meta and the fediverse is international, so governments have less ability to enforce (and enforcement via govs are mostly via the elite and interest groups)
- control over the fediverse can be lost to big tech via updates to protocol that can’t be bug fixed fast enough, a fork being run on big instances via a compromised sysadmin selling out for cash or other benefits
- link sharing is about interesting content (not social inertia like messenger apps and social apps like Facebook) so it is not a perfect analogy.
- there is no negativity on the fediverse yet
- once users become the product (even partially), the fediverse will be driven to enshittification via the same pressures of big tech
Ugh. This crap makes me want to become a Luddite. I wonder if I can move into the Unabomber’s old cabin in the woods. (I promise I won’t make any bombs!)
friendly reminder that Luddites weren’t opposed to technology, just wary of its misuse and how it was going to benefit the people higher up rather than the workers.
Weird, that sounds exactly like my current problem
Wonder why being called a Luddite is nowadays an insult
Also wonder why skinning a babies genitals is considered not child sexual abuse
And why diamonds are considered rare when millions of them sit in warehouses to artificially keep prices up
The answer is always someone profited by making it so, and that should concern you
there is no negativity on the fediverse yet
Hard disagree there. I’ve seen plenty of negativity on Mastodon.
More worrying than that, when directly asked about this by the “Mastodon Migration” user, Rochko’s answer was not “I did not sign any NDA”, no “I have not met with them”, no “I have not heard any proposal from FB”, no “I haven’t signed any documents”, and sure as fuck no “I’m not considering selling out and betraying you all”, no, he said just “I am not aware of any secret deals with Meta”.
That’s a textbook application of the Suspiciously Specific Denial trope.
We have to assume he met with them, signed the NDA and is seriously considering whatever they’re proposing, and there’s rumors that they’re gonna pay money to any participant servers, that would make them effectively vassals of Meta.
This, tbh
“Benefit of the doubt” shenanigans is corporate bullshit 101
@jherazob “I didn’t see any invisible killer hide an as-yet-undiscovered corpse”, how very reassuring.
Could mean nothing but it’s a bad look to be having talks under NDA. We’ll see how it turns out but I’m glad I never got invested in using Mastodon.
Companies like Meta don’t do anything without an NDA. They probably reached out to Eugen and said “hey, we want to talk but first you need to sign this NDA.” They could be asking for his grandmother’s sugar cookie recipe.
Sure, there are plenty of reasons to loft an eyebrow at Eugen. Signing an NDA isn’t one of them.
That he signed the NDA at all means he’s been bought, or is planning to be.
Everyone in open source knows those are tools to shut down prominent voices from being able to call out abuse and rally support. They just make sure to hit every needed talking point in the meeting, and now he legally can’t condemn anything meta does because it is “covered by NDA”
It’s just one of many shitty ways corporations try and exert coercive control over OSS
That’s bullshit.
Especially without knowing the terms of the NDA. It could just be that they can’t talk about Metas App Specifics, and/or that the NDA is limited in duration, so they may be able to talk about everything once the App is out.
Yes, it could be what you are talking about, a complete gag order, but “NDA” as a term is way to broad to say that for sure.It just says that he currently values knowing more about Metas plans higher than being able to tell us about Metas plans.
I mean, depending on the timeline, one could check if there’s any interesting PRs by him, that may infer something about Metas plans.Hope for the best, plan for the worst
Yea the NDA could be benign. Too bad the whole thing is fucking designed to look that way when it’s not.
I’m planning for him to release the next mastodon release under a different license, one far more favorable to Shitbook
I’m genuinely confused why so many people are reacting so quickly to this news like it’s the end of Mastodon. We can’t conclude anything just by virtue of the fact that he signed an NDA. We don’t know the terms of the NDA. It could simply be that he can’t talk about Meta’s specific plans.
More to the point, as the originator of the network and the one in charge of the source code, I feel like it’s his responsibility to be informed of what companies like Meta are planning to do. If an NDA is the price of admission to that knowledge, and provided that the terms aren’t egregious, he should go.
The thing people don’t seem to understand is that you’re always going to have to sign an NDA when talking to a company about unreleased products or features, regardless of which company it is. It’s standard operating procedure. I’ve been avoiding Mastodon for the past week since there’s so many bad takes that have started trending.
Yep, agreed. I’ve signed multiple NDAs at my company recently just to evaluate some tools that have been on the market for years. It’s not what people seem to think it is.
Or it’s not what you think it is, and that corporate koolaid is really sweet
Oh bravo, you miserable dingus.
What does this mean for the fediverse? I presume because it’s split up into a million loosely connected pieces, we should be largely insulated from corporate invasion and interference. You can’t get us ALL, motherfuckers!
I presume because it’s split up into a million loosely connected pieces, we should be largely insulated from corporate invasion and interference.
Eugen isn’t the Fediverse. At least for the Twitter Exodus most Masto instances used a fork that allowed for longer posts than Eugen liked. There’s 0 reason to care about what he’s doing, he can’t control the network.
Then apply that logic to Facebook and relax.
Everyone is losing their minds over this.
Great, just what we needed. Looks like he ignored the risks of facebook (or meta, i still prefer to call with the already stained name) killing the fediverse. Hopefully nothing comes out of this discussion.
I doubt he’s ignoring anything. And I know nothing but I think it’s a little unfair to bash him for this.
Meta does not need the Fediverse to create a ready-populated instance all of its own. It doesn’t need to federate with anyone, it can probably kill Twitter and Reddit with a single stone (if it pours enough resource into moderating and siloing). Just stick a fediwidget in every logged in account page with some thoughtful seeding of content and it’s done.
The danger of federating with Meta is much the same as not federating. It has such a massive userbase it will suck the lifeblood out of everywhere else whether or not it can see us.
The possible silver lining is that there are other very large corporates which can do the same (some of which have said they plan to). We could all end up with multiple logins on corporate instances simply because we have accounts with them for other reasons. And that means a lot of very large instances with name recognition, and easy access, making it much harder for any of them to stop federation and keep their users to themselves.
Being federated with one or more behemoths might well be hell. Some instances won’t do it. Moderation standards will be key for those that do. But multiple federated behemoths can hold each other hostage because their users can all jump ship to the competition so easily.
This is much, much more complicated than just boycott or not. They cannot be trusted one tiny fraction of an inch but this is coming whether we like it or not. We need to work out how to protect ourselves and I’m starting to think that encouraging every site with a user login to make the fediverse a widget on their account pages might be the very best way to do it.
Suposing multiple big platforms join the fediverse and play nice, what stops them from feeding ads to other instances?
So what if he doesn’t talk to them? The protocols and code are available for anyone, and instances are open for federation. Facebook could, without any sort of consultation, deploy their own instance of Mastodon with their own fork of the code and keep all their changes to themself. If they’re going to do it anyways, it’d be better to work with them on it.
The know large instances might defederate from them, that’s why the NDAs.
Eventually, Meta will do to the fediverse what Google did to XMPP. I hope I’m proven wrong.
It’s not about getting the code. They have the code, have for years, and hate it because it forces an open system.
This is about forcing people in “positions of power and authority” over mastodon/lemmy/kbin servers to conform to facebook’s wishes so that they can destroy a competing platform.
Google XMPP or Microsoft Word Document style.
It’s been done before, the only reason for people to cave now is they’re getting paid.
Oh man, I can’t wait until Eugen also turns into a corporate cocksucker and back-knifer.
Mastodon is AGPLv3. That means if you allow someone to communicate with a server, you must offer them the modified source code. Not just when you distribute the modified code like in the GPLv3. So even if they forked Mastodon their code modifications would need to be made available.
However iirc ActivityPub itself is under a more permissive scheme (I think it’s predecessor was using the MIT license?) so Meta could use the protocol itself.
is AGPLv3
Hey, you’re right!
To get around that they’d have to do something drastic, like getting the owner of the code to change the license in next release, and keep him in an NDA while doing so in order to position themselves when the change happens.
Good thing we’re not seeing that
getting the owner of the code to change the license in next release
AFAIK, all contributors need to agree in order to change the license of a codebase. If a contributor disagrees, their part of the code has to be rewritten in order to comply.
Meta could be doing the same thing Truth Social did: set up a giant Mastodon instance and leave it at that.
They don’t need an NDA for that, and he certainly knows better than to sign one.
This is fishy to the extreme
Not really. Most big corporations require a NDA to use their toilets. Slight exaggeration but not by much.
Wait and see.
The blanket use of them isn’t better
We know it’s to hide the abuses
Seriously doubt that.
Me too, unfortunately.
(E: For perspective,) Truth Social was just a mouthy startup for spreading hate, not a nearly trillion dollar company with a lengthy history of anti-competitive activity.
We hope so.
Wouldn’t it be better if they federated so it doesn’t become a walled garden in there? It means we can stay on our own instances but aren’t cut off from their large userbase.
They’ll likely federate with those who worked with them and signed NDA. They are probably going to allowlist federate … My guess
You’re probably correct :(
🤦♂️
Aral Balkan has been posting about surveillance capitalism/centralised networks and corpotate landgrabs for years and said this the other day
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.
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.
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.
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 a name is not the thing it represents. 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 probably 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.
If Meta is interested in joining an open platform based on open-source API standards then why not open meetings Does anyone wonder if Rochko would sell the Mastodon Foundation to Meta
I bet his instances will be one of the few actually federating with them 😔
