I’m really happy to see so many people posting this article. While I was a little annoyed at first, I realized that it’s better overall to see this popping up everywhere.
If you haven’t read this yet, It’s great for understanding the upcoming challenges the Fediverse will face.
I had just found that it appears an instance only pulls posts/comments from when their first member subscribes. Even after subscribing any and all comments/posts remain missing for that instance.
This is something that I hope is improved, along with the above mentioned concerns.
Things here get pushed from publishers to subscribers and their servers, and boosting is basically a way of republishing things.
Communities are, in some significant way, bots that boost anything that they see, and they see anything that mentions them, or that is in reply to anything that mentions them. Lemmy and kbin just hide the "To:" field of thr message, which is where the community bot (or "group actor" in Fediverse technical lingo). Boosting things that mention the community bot also triggers the not to boost it in turn, which sends it out to everyone following the bot.
I agree. I understand it’s a lot of data to pull, but even a status bar that can be checked on it’s own page would be a help for people to understand why their comments/posts aren’t showing up/why the stats are unbalanced.
I haven't looked into the protocols in detail yet, but maybe it's possible they're using eventual consistency. Upvote counts don't have to be 100% accurate across all instances all the time, as long as they're eventually accurate at some point.
Part of the issue is an upvote means different things on different instances. I have a Lemmy account (inactive) and a kbin. Lemmy has Upvote, Downvote, and Star buttons which can be compared to Reddit's system, with Star meaning saved. Kbin is different. It has Upvote, Downvote and Boost. For whatever reason, upvote on kbin is equivalent to Lemmy's star (called favorite on kbin instead of saved) and Boost is more equivalent to a Reddit upvote. Boosts and downvotes affects post visibility and your Reputation, while upvotes seem to only save the information (for you) for later reference.
Well now I don't know. Couple of days ago, if you look at your profile there was a favorites section. That section is gone now....just when I thought I was figuring it out.
this seems so messed up. I like kbin, don't get me wrong, but I consider this to be a bug, not a feature. When you have upvotes and downvotes one next to the other, you (a user) expect these 2 to do the exactly opposite action. Not one of them just add something in your favourites while the other starts negating another user's karma.
Also interesting, Apple implemented XMPP in its messaging app way long ago and pulled support a few years back.
When people insist that Apple needs to implement Google's new secure messaging stack for better interoperability with Android, I wonder if they are thinking back to XMPP and saying "Yeah, fooled us once…"
Great fucking article. Nice look into the history of proprietary software. This part stuck out to me:
But there’s one thing my own experience with XMPP and OOXML taught me: if Meta joins the Fediverse, Meta will be the only one winning. In fact, reactions show that they are already winning: the Fediverse is split between blocking Meta or not. If that happens, this would mean a fragmented, frustrating two-tier fediverse with little appeal for newcomers.
We need to convince instance owners not to federate with Meta. History tends to repeat itself and I'd rather not see this nice little corner of the internet die.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The bit with office is when you operating as a business you want ease of compatibility when communicating with other businesses and it is easy to write the cost of the software up as just the cost of doing business. Otherwise you just risk frustrating other parties.
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.
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.
Amen. When people talk about how Reddit or Twitter will always be bigger, I say, "Let them be bigger." What we have out here is fantastic just the way it is. In a global world, "small" is still millions of people.
I use to use Pidgin then move to Kopete. It even baffled me at one point how Kopete could connect to Facebook messenger and chat with my friends from Kopete and customize the chat interface to my liking. Good times good times.
It was "just" a bunch of clients in one though, AFAIK it couldn't connect people from different protocols. Pidgin still exists; I used it probably 20 years back on Linux.
Ahh, I recall using Pidgin, too. I think i ended up favoring it over Trillian. I already had accounts on all the services, so it worked out. I guess thinking about it, if only basic chat was supported, it may not have been terrible supporting everything
I also remember when XMPP wa still the cool kid on the block. Gtalk and other chat networks supported it and allowed federation. I tan my own XMPP server and could talk to users on other servers and even networks. But then Google cut the federation and eventually all external access.
It could have been the next email, but big corporations were already in the chat space and they all walked in their user base.
I’m fairly certain that if email (SMTP) hadn’t been the dominant protocol, we would have walled gardens there as well.
the internet without the existance of email as a de-facto proof of identity and account recovery protocol would certainly be interesting.
almost every single site these days requires you to have an email to sign up. it would be interesting to know what system we would have used instead if email wasn't an option.
Just found out Matrix can do this, although you need to host your own server. There is also Beeper for a fully-managed product, but you need to wait to get access.
Theres Beeper which I bought like a one year subscription back when it wasn't free and honestly its very useful and nice. I linked Whatsapp, iMessage, Signal, IG and discord and while in some cases it doesn't offer the same features it gets the essentials down and its really nice. Theres also another not open source one called texts.com or sth now which looks enticing but im gonna stay with beeper since I like the matrix protocol
Some features around uploading/managine files between google classroom and google drive is broken in Firefox, LibreWolf. But I suspect it's due to the disabling of 3rd party cookies, because it's also broken on ungoogled-chromium.
The blog post "How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)" by Ploum discusses how the GAFAM empire controls the internet in 2023, except for a few small villages that resist the oppression and form the "Fediverse"¹. The Fediverse gains fame and attention through debates around Twitter and Reddit¹. The post also discusses how capitalists are against competition and how Facebook has been careful to kill every competition by buying companies that could become competitors¹. However, the Fediverse cannot be bought because it is an informal group of servers discussing through a protocol (ActivityPub) and running different software¹. The post also discusses how Google made XMPP irrelevant by joining the XMPP federation¹.
A luke-warm summary with comical references that only summarizes the first few paragraphs. I hope people don’t only read that summary and think “but that was Google”.
The article is a warning that given a chance, based on the past actions of Microsoft, Google, other corporations and even Meta itself, allowing Meta to participate in any way with ActivityPub will most likely kill ActivityPub. There is no easier way to ensure profits than by killing any hint of competition that might take users away from their services. This is almost always achieved by seemingly “bearing gifts” in the form of users or financial backing. By participating, they will really be trying to prevent users from exploring other options at all. Once they have prevented the majority of users from leaving their platform, and have become “the” largest player in the ActivityPub space, they will have successfully made alternatives irrelevant. They will then kill these connections, excising the competition from participating in the new “ActivityPub”,, forcing projects to be abandoned by the users who want to continue participating where everyone else is. It’s a highly effective strategy that plays off uses FOMO and project enthusiasts aspirations. The fact that people are even considering this might be a good thing is proof that the strategy works, which is why they use it.
I don’t understand how Google’s shit with XMPP killed XMPP. XMPP is still a thing, and nobody was beholden to be consistent with whatever Google was doing behind closed doors with it.
This is why I’m in favor of not having await and see policy toward Threads. The safest thing to do is assume they’re lying.
Threads users aren’t Fediverse users. Meta isn’t another instance. Even former Meta employees should be treated with extreme suspicion for years if they try to defect.
Nobody who’s ever worked for “Big Social” should be allowed to touch the ActivityPub standard. It should be obvious that their livelihood goes against what it stands for.
Cool, so pick an instance that plans to defederate with them and you’re golden.
Personally, I think all the anti-Threads stuff is paranoid rhetoric and I’d rather see how it pans out. My instance admin agrees so we’ll see how it goes.
Point is you can choose because that’s the entire point of the fediverse. And it’s why I don’t understand why folks are expending so much energy writing paranoid pieces on this topic when they could just defederate and move on.
pick an instance that plans to defederate with them and you’re golden.
That’s not how this works. This is a threat to the concept of the fediverse. It doesn’t matter what instance any of us picks.
Threads already has hundreds of millions of users. Once they activate ActivityPub, they will be hundreds of times larger than the rest of the Fediverse combined. Instantly we will be a tiny minority of the users of this platform. That will give Meta unimaginable influence over this platform and technology.
If you don’t like an ActivityPub participant you block it. It’s in the architecture.
And given the current fediverse is already a tiny fraction of total social media activity, if a bunch of anti-Threads instances hive off to form their own fediverse subgroup, it’ll basically be a no-op from their perspective. They’ll just keep talking to each other off in a little corner by themselves just like they’re doing today. That’s kinda the whole damn point of a federated architecture.
I think it’s a form of clout seeking behavior. When a community is against something, extreme stands against that thing garner approval from within the community. This creates a reinforcement cycle so people keep doing it, doubling down in the sentiment. Simply defederating doesn’t elicit approval the same way talking about it does.
Personally, I think all the anti-Threads stuff is paranoid rhetoric
From Wikipedia:
Paranoia is an instinct or thought process that is believed to be heavily influenced by anxiety, suspicion, or fear.
You might be correct. People don’t trust in Meta and have concerns about potential consequences. According to this definition, paranoia isn’t necessarily negative. Meta has made several questionable decisions in the past, such as its involvement in the genocide in Myanmar.
XMPP still works great btw. It was hard to convince everyone to get an address, but now 95% of my messages are over XMPP. To me compatibility with internet standards is a hard requirement.
I would prefer not to federate with them. Their track record is abysmal and the privacy invasion is horrendous. One of the people over on Mastodon recorded more than 200 queries from the app within an hour of installing it - they are determined to scrape every last detail of your life into their advertising database and, well, fuck that.
Mastodon.nz announced a week or so back that they have no intention of federating with them and I found that to be reassuring: we’re all here because we specifically Do Not Want a corporate body throwing adverts and algorithms at us.
It wouldn’t surprise me if blasting the fediverse with millions of users is specifically designed to weaken smaller instances, just to oh-so-graciously offer their users and ‘safer, more stable’ place to set up.
I agree on not federating with them. In addition to the EEE threat, the fediverse has a lot of growing pains just from the reddit exodus, so adding a shitload of users would break instances and make moderation basically impossible.
This is why I agree with avoiding federation with them for now. We need a more granular federation model than the current All or Nothing setup, to cut down on the whole data sponge thing from the corps. And there’s a need for moderation toolkits that don’t yet exist.
I think if those things existed, federation would be good because one of the shittier things about the corporate walled garden of social media is that their users can’t see outside the walls. If they could, they might choose a different ecosystem.
One of the best weapons against this is probably having a well-formulated idea about this, which can effectively be communicated to people who are not in the loop. For example Right to Repair presents a kind of "our high quality device with schematics vs their short lived crapware". Good naming helps too. I suggest "Fediverse vs Corponet"
Fediverse vs Corponet sounds great! But I wonder if we can go more along the lines of Right to Repair? Something like Right to Publish or Content Independence or something?
Corponet very clearly sounds bad, which is good, but Fediverse requires an explanation to a layman without generating interest, first. Laymen are interested in rights and independence, so I think words like that can act as a hook. I'm open to debate, too
ploum.net
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