Since news leaked out 2 days ago that Facebook has approached Mastodon developers and admins - requiring non-disclosure agreements first - the whole microverse (i.e. mastodon / pleroma etc, the micro-blogging part of fedi) has been talking about nothing but that and Facebook’s imminent entry into the fediverse with an as yet not clearly defined entity called Barcelona or p92. This woud be very roughly comparable to Reddit saying they are going to federate with lemmy.
Yet here on lemmy I could only find a relatively small discussion.
https://kbin.social/m/fediverse/t/62958
Did the lemmyverse not know or just not care that much?
Like much of big tech, they’ve been open sourcing software for years and EEE is a Microsoft playbook that was mainly used to target competitors, not open source software, from before Facebook even existed. People are parroting it because it’s a nice sounding alliteration, but it’s a false equivalence that does not apply because we can fork lemmy at any time.
“Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” might be difficult to make work with Free Software because it can be forked, but that doesn’t categorically exclude it from being a strategy companies can try. It’s still relevant to warn the community about.
Oh it’s past warning at this point, it’s irrational paranoia led by people who haven’t the slightest idea how any of this works. Users are up in arms because Mastadon admins had a meeting, Lemmy users are demanding their instances sign petitions to defederate Meta instances immediately, all citing an outdated business strategy from the 90s that doesn’t even apply to this situation. This isn’t just “free software”, it’s open source, nobody can take this away from you, and I’m pretty sure Meta has other things in mind other than absorbing the existing 1M fediverse users into their 4B userbase.
My point is, everyone needs to calm down, watching and waiting is absolutely the correct move here. There is no operating in the shadows when contributing to open source software, so let them contribute. Honestly they probably just want to hit market faster and it’s easier to build on top of open source software than to build it all from scratch.
This isn’t just “free software”, it’s open source
I didn’t say “free software;” I said Free Software. Quit being a condescending jackass who assumes anybody that disagrees with you must be ignorant, because that isn’t true.
sorry to be so direct, but if anyone is parroting anything, it’s you with the “they would never do that thing they always do, i’m super reasonable” position. EEE is literally covered in the first leaked Halloween document as a strategy to displace open standards.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents#Documents_I_and_II
this is a strategy microsoft has consistently used for years and continues to use to this day. hell, they are embracing and extending javascript right now with typescript.
Once again, you’re referencing documents from the 90s and typescript continues to be open source. Are you expecting javascript to be extinguished?
undefined> does not apply because we can fork lemmy at any time.
Not to be a contrarian, but I feel this is a false claim here. After some time we will lose the mind share that gets people to switch over. People won’t switch from Messenger and WhatsApp to Telegram or Signal. At one point people are just too situated.
I think it’s different with those services, as they weren’t slowly built on top of eachother and as messaging apps they require your personal friends and family to also migrate to fully utilize. I didn’t know anyone personally on Reddit, so the switch to Lemmy was easy as soon as users started moving here overall. Also the build style of a single piece of software makes it easy to fork out when needed rather than having to fully migrate, and since it’s all built on ActivityPub theoretically you could still interact with those instances.
Google successfully EEE the internet. They embraced chromium, extended such that they were the main (only) force that determines internet standads, now they extinguish all competition or obstacles in the ad space by setting the rules. This was done through free open source software.
They created Chromium, which means it isn’t EEE - it just means they created a successful product.
Your three statements are not related logically. They creating Chromium as open software doesn’t precludes an EEE strategy. A successful product says nothing about whether that product was part of an EEE strategy. MSN Messenger was a successful product. Both by being universally adopted on the internet and fulfilling its meta purpose. It was intentionally created for (and features were chosen and developed) to displace and kill AOL’s IM. And it was later revealed to be 100% part of an EEE ploy. Just to bring the point home, Chromium is intentionally kneecapped and devs fight all the time about feature development because Google keeps it below-parity with Chrome, because Chrome’s purpose is to create a de-facto control over browsers, Chromium’s purpose is to wash Chrome’s face. It already succeeded partially by displacing the competence. Now Google’s implement features on Chrome first, even if those features were innovated or implemented before by other browsers, then makes the W3C board change the standards to create the illusion that Chromes was first and manufacturing the facade that it’s the best browser. Thus ensuring their domination of the space. It’s just basic corporate manipulation.
