Well think of the iMessage example for a second, other phone manufactures wanted to extend upon SMS with RCS to enable cross-platform read-receipts, better image quality on messages, and more⌠and you can use RCS between various android phones, but apple has not yet adopted RCS. Then because of the pre-existing market share of iPhones being so high, if you want read-receipts, high quality image messages, and more you with most of your contacts will either have to convince all of your friends and loved ones to use a third party app or cave and get an iPhone.
The features donât have to be revolutionary, they just have to find ways to flex their market share with their features. And their market share is almost destine to be huge if they put any meaningful effort or money behind it.
Thatâs an interesting example, but note that in Europe, at least, WhatsApp is king. I only mention it because the walled-garden approach Apple favours isnât necessarily a guaranteed outcome, and third-party apps can happily become the norm among non-tech people.
This is true, and line is king in Japan and yet I believe the most common third party messenger app in the US is Facebook messenger despite its obvious flaws. Why, because it has more features than sms, and most people already have an account.
No matter which way you slice it, companies that can profit off communication will try to wall off their market share. Which is one of the things the fediverse aims to cure.
Just a different walled garden.
My Russian friends are all in VK, my Russian relatives are all in Telegram, my Armenian relatives are all in Facebook Messenger, and my American relatives are all in WhatsApp and Skype.
Iâm so tired of this shit TBF. Is it so hard to just install Conversations once for Android and whatever for iOS?
@emi @shipp I think an open standard converted to a walled garden is still better than a garden walled from the beginning.
I can still send emails to GMail accounts.
I can still send SMS to my friendâs iPhone.
I wish everything was fully open, but at least I get to chose my email provider or my SMS app. (Although SMS is completely irrelevant in Europe these days, due to providers still charging money per message.)
We have the power over ActivityPub
Who is âweâ? And who doesnât say that thereâs something on top of activitypub?
Plus, if they do create cool features, why would we not also add them?
Because we donât have multiple thousands of paid developers.
One of the âpowersâ of OSS is that the license usually required changes to be fed back upstream.
If Meta were not to do that the authors of Lemmy could ask someone like EFF to take legal proceeding against them.
iâm not sure if ActivityPub is copyleft or not. meta might be able to build proprietary features on top of it if the license isnât viral.
If there are some big players (like in email), i think the biggest risk is that the big players would end up only talking to each other.
Similar to email, where a random host is likely to be spamming, that might happen here too. (Although Iâm not that familiar with the protocols here)
In the Fediverse you are still 100% under the control of whoever runs the server. Your user accounts canât move between servers. There is no easy way to export communities and import them on other hosts. On top of that, all the federated features are completely optional and can be switched off.
Fediverse really doesnât offer any securities beyond what a plain old Web forum does, all the federation aspects depend on everybody playing nice with each other.
At the moment even basic GDPR conformity isnât given, as there is no way to export all your data from an instance, a deletion request for your data also doesnât seem to be guaranteed to make it to other instances.
If Facebook builds something with ActivityPub and it gets popular they can play the whole embrace, extend, and extinguish game from start to finish.
Plus, if they do create cool features, why would we not also add them?
Limited developer time.
@CanadaPlus this is referring to far in the future. In the long scale of things, developer time is not so limited. Fedi doesnât necessarily have a time limit after all, itâs just going to go stronger over time. I donât see a stopping point.
Ah. Yes, in the asymptotic future limit everything can be implemented twice as long as thereâs social opportunity to do so. I wonder if that applies back to Gmail as well, will we see an open-source federated G-suite?
