Everyone who’s into the fediverse concept should read this article.
What I can do is only to post my activity to fedi instances with fun, even if fedi will win/lose.
Don’t get on the popularity game.
Just make fun and keep yourself healthy.
The population doesn’t care about the technology. If we make social media about activitypub more than it is about social media and connecting people - we’ll be shooting our own foot off no mater what meta or anyone does.
Instances and fediverse are great because of the mods, admins and people. Activitypub is the protocol and it’s an open web standard. We should expect web standards and join them but remember the product isn’t the protocol - it’s connecting people
i for one look forward to bridging to p92 and showing them what great communities can be like.
I have no plans to support p92 precisely because it’s going to “push” users together as a commodity. What Meta has jurisdiction over is not its communities but rows of data - in the same way that Reddit’s admins have conflicted with its mods, it is inherently not organized in such a way that it can properly represent any specific community or their actions.
So the cost-benefit from the side of extant fedi is very poor: it won’t operate in a standard way, because it can’t, and the quality of each additional user won’t be particularly worth the pain - most of them will just be confused by being presented with a new space, and if the nature of it is hidden from them it will become an endless misunderstanding.
If a community using a siloed platform wants to federate, that should be a self-determined thing and they should front the effort to remain on a similar footing to other federated communities. The idea that either side here inherently wants to connect and just “needs a helping hand” is just wrong.
You’re not thinking broad enough.
Meta joining and be successful means Reddit has to think about federating or not being successful.
Wordpress is going to have all their blogs on activitypub soon. Tumblr says they’re joining - Mozilla is hirring product and developers to build out their platform.
Also, Meta is a multi billion dollar company - they know how to do UI/UX - they can spend their investment/R&D on solving problems we can’t and we can be nice and welcoming to the users who show curiosity.
It’s a shame we’re too short sighted to see opportunity here. We really have nothing to lose since it’s not like meta will suck all the haters back in
Meta’s attempt to fill the twitter void. At one time it was going to be called Barcelona, but now it’s apparently going to be called Threads. Coming to a Fediverse near you later this summer.
I hate that name, it’s too generic and is going to eat up into other matters that use the word threads. This is going to be annoying.
this article is stupid. boo hoo capitalism. the number one thing that harms the fediverse is easily the frivolous defederation that people do all the time. it’s the reason why I have to have multiple microblogging accounts, and now multiple link aggregator accounts, on different instances, just so I can talk to everyone. these same shitty little tyrants are coming over from reddit and deciding who you are allowed to talk to and what you are allowed to talk about, and it’s splintering the network into neighborhoods that have to guess what the other ones are ever talking about. enjoy your insular echo chambers.
And this is different then you having to have a Twitter, Google, Facebook, Discord, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc etc account how exactly? Difference with federated networks is that those “insular echo chambers” (not my experience, but hey) can work together and in actuality do work well together.
The point of activitypub is to not have walled gardens. If meta is successful then you bed RTeddit is probably going to have to federate.
Tumblr and Wordpress is already coming.
Mozilla is too.
I see it a bit differently. For me, the point of activitypub is to decentralize. One of the wonderful things about activitypub and the fediverse is that while it supports universal federation, it also allows people to contemplate smaller, integrated communities. I never saw it as an “all or nothing” proposition; if a community like Beehaw wants to select their federation partners carefully, that’s absolutely okay.
If an instance decides that Meta, or Tumblr, or notareal.in.stance don’t fit their community vibe and they exclude them from federation, that’s… the fediverse working properly. Having the ability to interconnect is wonderful… but we should not expect that all instances will want to interconnect with everyone else.
this article is stupid. boo hoo capitalism. the number one thing that harms the fediverse is …
So you’re talking about two things, the article being stupid and your troubles with defederated instances.
The solution to defederated instances is to join a fully federated instance, if you really want that. Note, there are various reasons to defederate, including spam accounts. Anyways, it’s easy to find fully federated instances. No need to maintain multiple accounts.
All this was off-topic. Sadly, you did not say much on-topic.
Agreed. I was thinking about reposting it in my little magazine and thought that was overkill. But now I’m re-thinking it …
Interesting article. I’m still pretty new to the concept off federation but I’ll keep an eye out for these kinds of takeovers in the future.
These have been going on for a long time, the author kinda makes a mention to it, with a reference to MS’s long playbook of “Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish”. IE’s growth, MS breaking Java, Office dominance; all had examples from that playbook. While MS hasn’t used it that much now compared to the past, don’t trust any Big Tech company to not do it when the opportunity presents itself.
Meta has already tried it with Instagram stories after the success of Snapchat. The possibility of them attempting it with federated platforms after what appears to be two migrations to the Fediverse (one from Twitter and the other from Reddit) is definitely there, especially given Meta’s reputation.