this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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Some instances know their embrace, extend, extinguish history and some don’t.
And for those that don't:
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
I still stand by that defederation as the only line of defense is a losing strategy. Keeping users siloed in Facebook's garden shouldn't be seen as a win for us.
Sometimes the only winning move is not to play. If people hadn't federated with google's XMPP back in the day, google wouldn't have had the same level of control it had to kill XMPP as a competitor.
We need to learn from the lessons of the past, and the past has resulted in the deaths of services when federating with corporations.
"We should debate them... And defeat them on the Marketplace of Ideas." Yeah, right.
I never said defeating them or out competing them should be the goal. The goal should be the survival of services. And corporations will kill these services.
I don't disagree with needing to not repeat past mistakes.
Hate to burst your bubble, but no-one was actually using XMPP with Google Talk except for open-source tech nerds.
And google stopped any chances of that ever happening. The Fediverse should just let itself grow gradually and naturally, as should have XMPP
How so? I don't see the EEE in Google discontinuing XMPP support tbh.
They piggy backed on rapidly growing XMPP and then became lazy with keeping compatible with the rest of the xmpp federation and at some point the s2s connection stopped being feasible as they never implemented TLS for it, and did't really care as most xmpp users were on their server anyways and thus did't use the s2s connection.
Its not a typical nefarious EEE story, but it did a lot of damage to the xmpp federation anyways.
This predates Google Talk and is rather about the XMPP Gmail integration. Back then XMPP was the hot topic in tech circles (Twitter was even prototyped to be XMPP based) and people were switching to it and recommending it to others to replace ICQ/MSN/AIM etc. However, often they recommended others to use the Google XMPP service as back then Google was still naively seen as the "Do no evil" good guy, having just started up recently and giving away free things like previously unheared off 1GB of email storage etc.
So the situation is not quite comparable to AP and Facebook (and XMPP is far from dead), but it is still possible to draw some lessons from it.
So what?
Means there's no incentive for Google to support it.
Then why did they once support XMPP?
Probably to experiment with it, or maybe it was a good idea back then. Definitely not to extinguish it lol
So it's just a coincidence that they ended up killing their competitors? Yeah right.
XMPP was never killed the way Netscape was by Microsoft lmao
What is your definition of win? Market share? Are you thinking in capitalist terms?
Nobody is forcing those people to use Facebook, and they are welcome to come here whenever they like.
The most free people. Best for society. Etc.
|They're welcome to come here whenever they like .
Only if they know it exists and can still connect with the people and communities they care about. This is what the federated approach was supposed to fix, the silos, the community capture.
We know what Meta is, and we know our history, so we know Meta’s goal is to destroy the fediverse. Federating with Meta is not likely to yield your desired outcomes.
The important part, from @[email protected]:
Ahaha, fuck no. If someone did go, please spill that tea.
Can you explain what that means in this context? How does defederating Threads prevent Meta from extinguishing anything?
Or what Google does right now with Chrome and web standards.
For those unaware of Google’s latest web browser malarkey: Web Environment Integrity
EFF/Cory Doctorow/Jacob Hoffman-Andrews: Your Computer Should Say What You Tell It To Say
The XMPP article was good, thanks!
But how would defederating prevent any of that?
It would make Threads unable to see content from instances defederating it and vice versa, preventing the Embrace step.
That's a common misconception actually, any and all data available via federation is already public and easily scrapable even without running an instance of one's own. Defederating only hides (in this case) Threads content from users on the instance doing the defederating, but the data is still public. Not to mention copies of it would still be fully available on any extant federated instances.
But they would still be unable to embrace (and, by extension, extend and extinguish) because users from Threads would be unable to interact with users from other instances. Basically, they'd be unable to get rid of a potential competitor using the EEE method.
But how could interoperability lead to extinguishing? That's the part I don't understand. By what means could Threads "extinguish" the network of instances that stay federated?
The same way we prevented any of that up ’till now: by doing our own thing on our own terms.
It prevents that specific strategy that would culminate in extinguishing. The idea being to siphon users away from other platforms, then add features that other platforms won't or can't implement, and use that to create an image of their own platform being better, having more features. If they succeed at having a lot of users oblivious to what's happening, they will use those features, and when they don't work for people on other platforms, they will blame the other platforms instead of their own, further cultivating the image that other platforms are broken/unreliable. In the end, they leave other platforms unable to compete, forcing users to either have a "broken"/incomplete experience, or migrate to their platforms. (Or leave the fediverse entirely). Or they can simply stop federating at that point, after users have left for their platform, cutting off the rest of the fediverse from content hosted on their platform.
The way defederating prevents a strategy like that is by cutting them off before they can get a foothold - they can't make users feel left out if they don't get to influence their experience in the first place.
Also, if the best people are on the instances threads can't see, their userers will feel left out.