How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) - eviltoast

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

    • jherazob@beehaw.orgOP
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      1 year ago

      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

        • jherazob@beehaw.orgOP
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          1 year ago

          I wasn’t talking about our users, i was talking about theirs, a direct mirror of what the author described with XMPP

            • jherazob@beehaw.orgOP
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              1 year ago

              Correct, it’s worse, you can very much argue that Google had good faith intentions, you cannot even pretend that Facebook does while keeping a straight face

              • @jherazob I care more about the effects than intent in this case.

                #Meta’s #Threads / #Barcelona / #Project92 doesn’t have the ability to do anything actually negative to the #Fediverse except potentially overload small instances with a flood of traffic.

                I don’t get the fearmongering; lots of talk about “breaking the #Fediverse” coming from people who aren’t really doing a good job of articulating how exactly a new #Fediverse software–because that’s all this is at the end of the day–will break an entire network of software that already works with each other.

                • Hexorg@beehaw.org
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                  1 year ago

                  Example: Meta federates with lemmy. Lemmy is small so it gets more feature requests than it can code up. Meta comes in and looks at the most requested feature that’s been put on lemmy’s backlog. Let’s say it’s some mod tool. Maybe even AI mod tool that sorts comments based on sentiment analysis. And they only implement that feature for Meta clients - not for lemmy. Suddenly mods have a choice - use lemmy and face flood of trolls in their communities or move to Meta and be able to properly moderate those troll waves. Some will stay, some will move. Another new cool feature for Meta, some will stay, some will move. Eventually most users will be on Meta client because it has all these useful features. OP’s article describes the rest.