This blog post by Ploum, who was part of the original XMPP efforts long ago, describes how Google killed one great federated service, which shows why the Fediverse must not give Meta the chance
Basically the sequence of events as claimed by the author is that:
- XMPP, niche, small circles
- Google launches Talk that was XMPP compatible
- Millions joined Talk that could coop XMPP in theory
- The coop worked only sparingly and was unidirectional, i.e. Talk to XMPP ✅ but XMPP to Talk ❌
- Talk sucked up existing XMPP users as it was obviously a better option (bandwagon effect + unidirectional “compatibility” with XMPP)
- Talk defederated
This demonstrated exactly the importance of reciprocity. If they play dirty, kick them out asap.
Facebook messenger did the same . You used to be able to talk to fb users via google chat all from pidgin or another xmpp client. They are a hostile actor on the web who have already proven themselves untrustworthy. Let’s not forget the Snowden docs or Cambridge Analytica
Seems like just another reason why defederation should be completely removed from the protocol. It’s way too easy to abuse and force centralisation.
There are other far less destructive and abusable ways of dealing with spam and content moderation.
I maintain that it’s better to give the users the control, and allow them to decide which instances, communities, and users they want to be exposed to. Bottom up moderation, instead of top down.
For example, instances can provide suggested ‘block’ lists (much like how an ad blocker works) and users can decide whether or not to apply those lists at their own discretion.
By forcing federation, the network stays decentralized. Maintaining community blacklists that can be turned on or off by the individual user protects against heavy handed moderation and censorship, whilst also protecting users from being exposed to undesirable content.
The case with XMPP is that Google Talk introduced addons and intricacies that were unique to them. So they could federate with you in full with additional bells and whistles while you were stuck in an eternal catch-up. They presented a better alternative regardless of the eventual defederation. Even if we have some viral clauses as in GPL in open-source software that ensures protocol compatible software to be compliant, we can only do that to a certain extent plus enforcement is always an issue. Who are going to spend the vast sum of money in court to defend the “federation”?
This aside, enforcing federation alone does not ensure decentralization. These zero-marginal-cost fixed-cost-intensive businesses of the internet has a tendency to centralize as serving one more seat costs no penny plus one more seat diluates the fixed cost altogether.
Your points are valid, but that doesn’t mean we should do nothing. Enforcing federation and using copyleft licensing are both strong defenses against centralization and network dominance by a well funded third party.
As far as GPL goes, from what I’ve seen, big tech companies tend to take it pretty seriously. There is no reason we shouldn’t be using that, and other license protections if we have the option.
As for natural centralization over time, I think that is a far less urgent problem than the current risks we are facing, those being major network fragmentation due to the use of defederation, and the risk of centralization around a proprietary platform and/or instance.
Removal of defederation and strong copyleft licensing seem to be natural first steps in combatting that risk.
I may misunderstand how the fediverse and the software works but my understanding is content such as images gets copied over to federated servers and so it seems to me like the ability to defederate would be a requirement in order for servers to stay in compliance with the law and be able to limit various illegal and morally horrible materials from being copied onto their server and network.
Given that (unless I’m wrong about how this works or there’s another way around it I’m not thinking of), at the end of the day is it really possible to not have the ability to defederate? There will be times when it would be needed it seems to me. Or for malicious bot servers, nazis, etc. — lots of potential reasons a full defederation would be desired or required.
One key difference between link aggregators (kbin/lemmy/reddit/digg) and microblogs (twitter/mastodon) on the one hand, vs social networks (facebook/myspace/diaspora/friendica) and instant messengers (aim/icq/xmpp/signal) on the other, is that the latter is highly dependent on your real-life social network, while the former is not. People using instant messengers and people on facebook want to use them to interact with their friends and family, so they have to use the platforms that those friends and family are on. On the other hand, people are happy to use link aggregators and microblogs as long as there are interesting people and communities to follow, even if they consist entirely of strangers.
Back in the early days of XMPP, when it was still known as “Jabber”, I tried switching to it from AOL Instant Messenger. I told all of my contacts about it, and tried to get them to set up Jabber accounts. I was super excited that instant messaging was finally being standardized the way email was, and we wouldn’t have to deal with AIM vs MSN messenger vs Yahoo messenger vs etc. I think I was also still bitter about being forced to switch from ICQ to AIM because all my friends had switched. I don’t think I got a single person to start using Jabber, though. At one point I even declared that I was going to stop using AIM entirely, and that people would have to switch over so that we could keep talking to each other. Didn’t work, of course. I just ended up not being able to talk to anyone until I finally went back to AIM.
A bunch of my friends use reddit, but we don’t use the site to interact with each other in any meaningful way. This made switching to kbin really easy. Sure, I’ve told a few of them about it, but it doesn’t really matter to me if they switch or not. As far as I’m aware, XMPP never really became it’s own “thing” and experienced the kind of growth that the threadiverse has. Since we’ve passed the point of being self-sustaining, we can keep growing one user at a time, as individuals decide that they’re tired of reddit and make the jump.
Because of this difference in dynamic, we’re in a much better position against Meta than XMPP was against Google. The fact that we can even consider outright blocking Meta is a really good sign for us, regardless of whether we do so or not. Even if we do end up in a situation where 90% or even 99% of users are on Meta’s platform, we can still refuse to allow them to compromise the ActivityPub protocol. Attempts to “embrace, extend, extinguish” will likely just result in non-blockading instances joining the anti-Meta blockade. With the connection to Meta severed, we’ll just go back to enjoying the company of the 1 to 10% that remain, and that portion will likely be much larger than what we have now.
I’m not sure the distinction would make enough of a difference, and focusing only on XMPP might be doing yourself a disservice. There was nothing social about Office, but the OP points out how the same strategy worked there as well. Users, overall, tend to go where the other users are. Some people left Digg for Reddit because they were unhappy with Digg, but the vast majority simply followed because it was where the users (therefore activity) went. Reddit wasn’t even the best of the many options at that time; what was important was the inflow of users. Once that kicks off, others tend to flock like moths to flame.
As you point out, Reddit was not where you interacted socially, yet it became where you congregated because that was where everyone else was and therefore where the easiest access to content and engagement was. If a Meta product becomes the most popular way to consume ActivityPub content, and therefore becomes the primary Source for that content, independent servers will become barren with just a Meta Thanos-snap of disconnecting their API. They only need to implement Meta-only features that ActivityPub can’t interact or compete with, and the largest portion of users will be drawn away from public servers to the “better” experience with more direct activity. (And that’s without mentioning their ability to craft better messaging, build an easier on-boarding experience, and put their significant coffers to work on marketing.)
Sure, there will still be ActivityPub platforms in the aftermath. Openoffice/Libreoffice still exists, XMPP clients and servers still exist, there are still plenty of forums and even BBS systems. But, there is a reason why none of those things are the overwhelmingly “popular” option, and the strategy they will employ to make sure that happens is the focus of the article, not so much XMPP.
So just speaking from my personal experience, XMPP was absolutely useless for me, whereas OpenOffice wasn’t. Microsoft did succeed in preventing OO from eating significantly into its market share, but OO continued to exist and be useful. It eventually caught up on the ability to read and write MS Office XML files, and in the meantime I only had a few occasions where I had to tell people “I can’t read docx, send it to me as doc or rtf”. To be fair though, I’m not a super heavy user of Office software.
In contrast, XMPP was basically nothing without Google. I couldn’t use it before Google federated, and I couldn’t use it after Google defederated. ¯\(ツ)/¯
Kbin/lemmy/mastodon are in a far better bargaining position than XMPP was, and in a better position than OO as well. They’re perfectly usable without being connected to corporate platforms, and they don’t need to market to corporate customers either. To be clear, I’m not saying that they should or shouldn’t block the corporate platforms. I think it’s actually probably best if some of them do and some of them don’t.
As someone who is on just about every social media and aggregator site there is, I find myself gravitating toward sites that allow for as much interaction (or little) as I would like. My friends and I communicate through Facebook messenger, which obviously requires FB, but I use a browser/app called Ferdium, which lets me open messenger directly without the annoyance of opening the Facebook app itself. But each site has its own specialization that it does rather well. I mean, look at Discord’s little communities, which are really designed to support the gaming community, and say, Instagram, which does photos very well. I get that companies would like the One Site to Rule Them All, but I look at it like I would at McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts. McDonald’s caters to one of my tastes, and Dunks does the other. Like your example with AIM I’ve largely given up with trying to get my friends to sign up for services. I’m older, and remember AOL when it was just starting out and even remember Compuserve when it was little more than a list server.
Never heard of Ferdium before. Just grabbed the AppImage of it and seems like something i can use. Thanks!
You are spot on. The difference between the products/services/values offered by XMPP and AcitivtyPub based fediverse is a very crucial distinction.
XMPP’s value is derived from its connectivity. It is bandwagon effect at work. A single fax machine makes no sense but what about another one? Or another 100 ones? Now you have a positive network externality.
The bulk of the AcitivtyPub based fediverse works very differently. The value is from the content, be it people shitposting or memes or cats. As people who frequent online forums and communities can tell, the majority of members are mere readers. They are content consumers. Content producers are often the minority. The reason why soneone will stick to a particular platform is because of the content and the expectation that more is coming.
This is a really good call out. I’ve been thinking about this article since I read it earlier today, and I never thought about the distinction between user groups and how people used xmpp vs how people use a activitypub Lemmy/kbin.
I think you are spot on.
Which actually makes me think that mastodon might have a little to worry about since its less anonymous and who you follow actually matters. And there is more interaction between (not anonymous) people.
My friends are like your friends in that we all use reddit, but never even share our usernames with each other.
Which actually makes me think that mastodon might have a little to worry about since its less anonymous and who you follow actually matters. And there is more interaction between (not anonymous) people.
Yeah, I guess there’s more of a focus on individual personalities. Still, mastodon has its core of users that choose to use it despite the fact that it doesn’t have the celebrities or the millions of people that twitter has. They don’t need any of the corporate platforms to federate with them, whereas XMPP did. That puts them in a much better negotiating position as far as protocol changes go.
An excellent read. My synopsis is that if any big corporations joined the Fediverse they would fracture it, and that no matter what Meta, Reddit, Google, etc. would never want to see a decentralized platform succeed.
Pretty much the Fediverse needs to never let a big company tie into it. Our group needs to work at growing but at a sustainable rate.
We can’t effectively block corporate injections, unfortunately. The admins of large hub instances are just of the opinion that bigger is better, and that more is more. They’ve been excited by the prospect of, I don’t know, legitimacy or something, for a while now.
The result is going to be the network… not fracturing, per-se, but significantly restructuring itself. Big instances will get sucked into Big Social’s halo, and be like the suburbs to Meta’s or Tumblr’s metropolitan centres. Smaller instances will end up as the exurbs. Content will flow quickly between metro and suburban spaces, and trickle across suburban spaces between the metro and exurban spaces. And which Fedivesre site you choose to use will end up mattering even more than it does now.
Right now, there’s speculative reason to believe that Meta’s offering up incentives to big instance admins. Those incentives will ultimately result in Meta owning them by proxy. They’ll be client kingdoms, to mix metaphors, working on Meta’s behalf, but getting relatively little in return for it.
I think Reddit moderators probably have a good idea about how they’ll ultimately end up feeling.
Exactly right. Human greed doesn’t only come from money.
- “It will be free advertisement and will help the project grow!”
- “Look how many people are using my server. MY server. I’m popular now!”
- And the more obvious, “If I make my server big enough, maybe I can cash out by being bought by this big company!”
In the end and from whatever the source, that bus always ends up in the same place once they convince themselves to get on it.
The thing is that Meta and Reddit are masters of social manipulation through their algorithms. They know what low common denominators get the most engagement. I blame FB for a big number of echo Chambers and that just fed people their own negativity right back, made them spiral into a bad place mentally.
If they have any ability to post to the Fediverse or to track things they’ll do it all over again.
It’s the halcyon days of the Fediverse. Negativity on my feed is nonexistent. There’s discussion. There’s respect for differences. I know things will change with time but it’s important that the big instances never work as proxies for big tech. It’s important that big tech doesn’t get a seat at the table. Voices should remain individual and not some mouthpiece to an industry that wants centralized control.
“Negativity on my feed is nonexistent.”
Absolute first thing I noticed when I came in to test this as a Reddit alternative. It’s so refreshing, and the discourse is so civil.
If there’s a way we can keep this quality, it’d be amazing. I often wondered when I’m on Reddit or twitter how much of the awful negativity is really people’s or bots/algos prodding them into acting this way.
If the current big players best bets are to weasel in on the large instances, are there any simple changes that could be done to prevent their take over or influence? Things that aren’t too heavy handed?
If they have any ability to post to the Fediverse or to track things they’ll do it all over again.
They have that ability, and always will have. They can create as many accounts as they like on as many instances as they like, or run as many instances as they like themselves, use incentivized individuals, or employees, or bots, or any combination of all of the above. No one can stop them, maybe even no one can spot them.
The only thing which is holding them back right now is lemmy/kbin still being too insignificant. If the network continues to grow, more and more big corps will see it as a market and an opportunity, and they will have plenty of ways to interact with it.
@Kichae
You should read this ⬇️
https://alaskan.social/@seachanger/110594353082289234
I don’t think Google cares if the Fediverse succeeds or not. All they care about is that it can be indexed and people will be able to show Google ads on their instances.
Google doesn’t have a Reddit equivalent or even any other social network competitor (anymore; they killed them all). They explicitly chose to exit that entire concept of products.
The only reason XMPP mattered to Google at the time was they were trying to compete with Apple for messaging on mobile devices. XMPP meant that Android devices using Google Hangouts/Chat/Gmail could chat with users on other platforms/services while Apple’s chat app could only do SMS.
I guess what I’m saying is that Google is mostly irrelevant from the perspective of the Fediverse other than the fact that it can index and maybe give priority to discussions of certain products/topics like it does with Reddit currently.
The threat right now is from Meta, that is eyeing the fediverse, not Google.
For anyone paying attention, I’m going to sound like a broken record here, but it bears repeating: business models that treat the user as the product–to be sold, not catered to–is a cancer on the internet.
This ought to be a wakeup call in 2023. If you aren’t the paying customer/supporter, you are less than dirt on the underside of the boot of the big tech firms. You are cattle, in a factory farm, to be treated like shit, only to be slaughtered for profit at the next opportunity.
Attitude’s like “I don’t care about ads” and “my data is worthless to me, so why not trade it in” all mask the more fundamental problem that is that you are being held in a cage full of shit, when in reality you could be roaming free in a pasture.
@MyMulligan @jherazob I disagree.
I think the key thing is to just make sure that you don’t use non #FOSS clients. #GoogleTalk started as a client for #XMPP, people migrated to it, and then #Google dropped support for #XMPP. If so many people didn’t use #GoogleTalk, the #XMPP network would have remained unimpeded.
At this point it wouldn’t matter, all they need to do is to mess with the protocol and it’d achieve the same thing, Meta and everything in it’s sphere would “work well”, but connecting with true ActivityPub servers would work just glitchy enough to annoy their users and point the fingers towards our side, just like it happened with XMPP
what the heck makes you think that all the #Fediverse users are just gonna leave for #Meta because federation with it is “annoying”? lol
Exactly! Let them join…and be ignored.
But how do we ignore them? Can you block an entire instance?
The only official way is for the admin of your instance to defederate from the instance you want blocked, but that affects every registered user on your instance, even if they’re against the action.
I just released a user script that lets you block instances yourself on the client-side as a regular user - basically just removes post and comments from the HTML if they match your block list.
Yes. A lot of that is going on with instances being blocked en masse for allowing too many spam/bot accounts without any corresponding high quality activity coming from users registered with that instance. It’s very much in flux right now, with instance administrators trying to figure out which metrics to use and what lists to trust, but I imagine a more mature/robust process will be used by most serious instances soon enough.
Given growth, it’s pretty much inevitable that certain instances will need funding to survive.
Besides donation drives like Wikipedia, I can definitely see a world where small governments get involved.
Places like Estonia, Israel and Iceland that want to cheaply promote their tech industries and cultural content. Things these countries are doing in centralized spaces like Facebook - but now with more control.
My synopsis is that if any big corporations joined the Fediverse they would fracture it.
I’m not so sure. Facebook has an onion version that runs on the tor network. Big tech dominates the clear web but there’s plenty of room for everyone else.
Ultimately you have user types. In a few more months, LemmyVerse could have a couple of million active users.
I’d bet the vast majority would scoff at a fediverse version of Facebook. It’s just a different crowd - not unlike the tor network where Facebook (probably, maybe?) exists in nmae only.
I’m gonna throw this out there:
If Meta is going to join the fediverse (or implement something with activitypub) there is absolutely nothing we can do to stop them.
It’s an open protocol. They can use it.
The only thing we can do is force them to follow the AGPL and/or fork the code if they get crazy with change requests.
Excellent article and it’s of course a very serious concern regarding Meta’s Project 92.
I want to use this thread to share one other concern that I’ve seen coming up constantly on Mastodon: overzealous instance admins that take things personally.
“You said X about me, I’ll block your whole instance”.
“I don’t like a particular nuanced view that instance staff holds, #Fediblock now”.
“Users of X instance reported me. I’ll block the whole instance”.
A few of these things happened in the last couple of days. We can’t have instance admins defederating because of trivial petty stuff. The only thing this does is drive users to larger instances, among which there might be corporate interests.
