I may be speaking in defense of something I don’t know, but I don’t see a direct problem with other apps (e.g., Threads, Twitter if they change up what they’re doing) to start talking with the fediverse.
The bigger problem is when they start throwing their weight around. The W3C (and groups like Mozilla) have had many strong battles with Google trying weird stuff because they’re the biggest guys in the room (e.g., FLoC).
As long as we can rally behind the loyalist FLOSS geeks, we’ll always be alright.
Yeah, it’s actually a welcome change that they’re federating. However, the way they killed off the last federation we had with XMPP was through the EEE model – they first acted friendly, joined our federation, then they ensured their client would be the best featured, capturing a majority of the people in their user base, and after that they defederated and the community collapsed in their favor. People on non-proprietary solutions had to switch to the proprietary one.
To avoid this, we need to defederate while we’re still ahead. I’d personally draw the line at 25%, but the point is just having it significantly less than 50%. If they defederate before they reach a majority, the community will collapse in our favor, and people with proprietary accounts will be the ones forced to come over here. Worst case, we’ll just exist beside each other as competitors, and in the best case we’ll snuff them out.
We need to be willing to do this to them, because they absolutely will do this to us. Threads is developed by the same Meta who helped kill XMPP a decade ago. (And “helped” only because the main culprit was Google – regardless, they’re not our friends.)
To avoid this, we need to defederate while we’re still ahead. I’d personally draw the line at 25%, but the point is just having it significantly less than 50%.
Mastodon has 13 million users. In the first few hours, Threads already had 10 million users. That battle was lost before it even started.
So how do people go about defederating? Is it just a matter of making new servers, or does it require anything else?
I’m happy to stand up against The Man, but it seems like once the masses get involved they don’t feel personally responsible to preserve what they enjoy. They seem to give general consensus to [Big Tech Company], then [hard-working FLOSS developer] comes in later to fix it.
If I’m going to get “political” here, I almost think people need to be sold more on the importance of self-reliance. One prior historical precedent was around the 1750’s about taxation, and that’s had a nearly non-trivial impact on society. People intuitively grasp land ownership, so it should translate to data ownership as well.
