I sure hope there’s a large group of servers that refuse to federate with servers run for profit. I didn’t come to be a product and be manipulated with algorithms.
I think among other issues would be the Gmail-ification and iMessage-ification of the fediverse. What I mean by that is open standards like email are dominated today by many people using Gmail accounts as it is popular, “free”, and comes with a ton of features. Then google started “walling off their garden” by adding features that only work between gmail accounts. Similarly, apple also took the open standard SMS and started adding on features only available between other iPhones.
What we might see is some of the coolest features the fediverse has ever seen, but it will come at the cost of most users ignoring or dealing less with “irrelevant” things not on meta ran instances.
Hope we can resist such a change, but that is what I am concerned about.
I hate how it seems like anytime there’s an alternative to big tech, it gets immediately co-opted. Either by the far right or by corporations.
At least with this structure we can still defederate from them and go on about our merry way.
Until they take over and force a change that renders things back centralized into their hands.
That makes zero sense, that’s not how the fediverse works. Explain how they would take over completely independent and unconnected instances that are defederated from them.
Implement new features that only work when you integrate with Meta, then cut them out of the picture if they don’t do what Meta says. The majority of users will stick with the instances that have the stickers and emojis that their friends have. Similar to what Google is doing with it’s browser and the Internet.
So we’d have the exact structure we have now. A centralized platform, or instance, for the people that don’t care and our current federated instances for the people that do care.
This is all a big nothing burger. We’ll just continue to not use meta instances and platforms like we’re literally doing right now.
Aren’t those the same group?
Capitalism only functions when it can absorb the things that can be an alternative to it.
Absolutely! And given that they have a gazillion users they can willingly move around they can drown us out in a day if they want
If it begins looking that way, the (m/f)etaverse could always be defederated. There’s no reason we need to connect with them.
Fetaverse 😂
What about the nb verse though?
Alternatively, imagine a world where the US government passed a “privacy bill of rights” and also required online platforms to be freely interchangeable via open protocols like ActivityPub.
Won’t happen any time soon, and if you ask why, go read !news@beehaw.org for a little bit and come back.
The bad news aside, I think “privacy bill of rights” is the right way of thinking to get people and tech to a happier place.
Why is this a bad thing? With all the email analogies, it’s a good thing to have bigger corporations involved
Pretty much the entire bdsm community everywhere was outed on Facebook because folks carried cellphones to events and Facebook started suggesting friends to one another. Fifteen years ago privacy was sacrosanct and no one shared real life names unless they were very close. Now there is no point to trying to keep your identity secret and it sounds silly to introduce yourself as “Master Darkness” or whatever. I mean it sounded silly then, too, but everyone understood the necessity and it was situationally appropriate.
That is the danger of these large corporations. They aren’t looking to serve the broad community - they are looking to exploit our social graph for profit regardless of the destruction in their wake.
One issue with emails is that it’s actually very difficult to self host email servers now as most of the bigger servers would automatically block unknown servers due to spam
I’ll answer with a blog post by a dissatisfied sysadmin: https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-twenty-three-years-i-have-thrown-in-the-towel-the-oligopoly-has-won.html
To me this sounds like us de-federating them early on to avoid them de-federating us. It’s an open framework enabling multi domain interoperability. As long as fediverse rules aren’t violated no one should get defederated imo
Again tbh, I don’t really think Meta needs Fediverse. They already have Facebook and Instagram. All they need is add one link and they’ll have way more users than the Fediverse has in a matter of hours
