The classic tactic is known as EEE (Embrace / Extend / Extinguish).
It's not impossible to imagine a scenario where in the future, if the Fediverse is thriving, a seemingly good-intentioned corporation chooses to Federate its own instance on its own hardware. This opens up the capacity of the network even more and makes it more accessible and less intimidating to a broader audience. This is the Embrace phase.
Then comes the Extend phase, where they dedicate a lot of resources to improving their technology and platform and capabilities. They may add some functionality that is not defined in the ActivityPub standard, but it seems really cool or useful, and so a lot of people switch to it, and it becomes the de facto standard place to go on the Fediverse. Everywhere else is a ghetto that doesn't have Feature X.
Eventually, the corporate site, now the de facto, wants to continue to build on its capabilities, and adhering to an open standard is only a liability, especially given that the only people left on the Fediverse are unmonetizable weirdos. So they announce that they're going closed. The majority of people on the platform don't care because it's where most everyone already is. This, of course, is the Extinguish phase.
So yeah, it's certainly a possibility that could come to fruition. The kind of scary part is that to begin with, everyone could have the best intentions. But corporations are amoral and driven by profit incentive, and historically, that need to drive growth and profit has led to staggeringly similar decision-making (see Twitter and Reddit as examples of that). And so even if a company comes in with seemingly truly noble intentions, eventually the need to turn a profit has a high likelihood of leading to the fate described above.
It’s crazy how many people I’ve seen since joining Lemmy who don’t realize this - it happened so many times before, and I would assume will eventually happen with ActivityPub as well… like anything else online, enjoy it while it lasts.
Linux is still kicking as an independent project 30 years in, despite the success of monetizing it. The EEE strategy has been tried by many.
Granted, that's in no small part because Linus Torvalds keeps driving it. It will be interesting to see how he manages succession in the next few years.
ActivityPub, as a protocol, is particularly vulnerable to EEE, since a corporation can create their own implementation and still talk to existing instances - allowing them to gradually extend the protocol, without forcing a mass migration to their service from the get go.
With Wikipedia, for example, they would basically have to create a competing site, and users of Wikipedia will not see any content from that site unless they actively go to it.
Edit: BTW, I don’t see this as admitting defeat; if anything, these migrations from service to service over time show that the corporations never win in the long run.
With Wikipedia, for example, they would basically have to create a competing site, and users of Wikipedia will not see any content from that site unless they actively go to it.
Although, I would argue that what RH is doing is more "monetizing their investment" rather than a EEE strategy. Red Hat has done some wonderful things for the Linux ecosystem, and it absolutely sucks that they are trying to move their work under support contracts when it used to be freely available. But RedHat is not really essential for the Linux enterprise. You can buy robust support for several flavors of Debian, and of course SUSE is still out there kicking it old school.
The big difference is that the Linux Foundation and Wikipedia are non profit organizations. Companies exist to make money plain and simple. You cannot use a company to improve society, since profit is ultimately the only motive. Even the most altruistic of company owners will die eventually, and profit will become the driver again at some point. Non profits are the only way to maintain humanity advancing projects, since money isn't the motive.
So they announce that they're going closed. The majority of people on the platform don't care because it's where most everyone already is.
Isn't this kind of sort of what is happening with Reddit right now? Reddit The Company has dramatically tightened its grip, driving a not insignificant portion of its userbase away. A big destination for those disenfranchised users appears to be fediverse, whether that's through Lemmy or kbin or something else.
If ( and that's still a big "if") fediverse becomes the "new thing," and some company or companies attempt to EEE fediverse, it becomes far simpler for the users disenfranchised from that final "extinguish" phase to find a new home. Because fediverse and ActivityPub will continue to exist, the amount of change users would need to absorb would be far smaller.
I'm also thinking of it in terms of AOL back in the day. AOL, at the time, was its own little walled garden of content, and everyone used it. But the general internet caught up and caught on, and here we are. It's one thing for a corporate interest like Facebook or Reddit or Twitter to make its own little semi-walled garden from the getgo (but we're already seeing backlash against all three, Twitter in particular as it closes viewing without logging in, and rate limits people depending on how much they've paid). It's a wholly other thing for a company to try to take a landscape that is already decentralized and then centralize it.
Facebook, through Snap, can acquire Gfycat and shut it down. Who can "buy" ActivityPub? Who can "buy" SMTP or HTTPS?
What happened with reddit is that they've decided to go IPO and it's a different thing when you are a publicly traded company - that's usually when they go down the road of evil. Everything is about investor value - adn a lot of those investors are other large corporations or very rich individuals and they are as far as I'm concerned sociopathic.
Who can "buy" ActivityPub? Who can "buy" SMTP or HTTPS?
A company doesn't need to own the protocol if they own enough of the traffic on the network. Email is a good example here. Google has such a large marketshare of email that they can impose structural barriers for outsiders sending email to Gmail users. The barrier for sending a lot of email to Gmail users is incredibly high - even if a sender is using proper DKIM, SPF, and isn't on any global spammer lists, Google can and often does rate limit the email coming in. At this point, if you're sending email, you don't have to contend only with the SMTP standards for sending email, you have to contend with Google's arbitrary limits, which are most likely entirely opaque. And because Google owns such a large marketshare, senders need to play ball if they want to actually reach users.
Just so happens I've been working with email for twenty years. I've heard of this Google email thing, and while it certainly exists, it's not an isolated case. Mail server admins are empowered to handle incoming mail in very many limiting ways, whether that be rate limiting, or spam filtering, or message size, or lots of other things.
While there are general standards for these kinds of limits, they all exist at essentially every receiving mail server - and for good reason. You have to implement limits, or it becomes elementary for your mail server to be attacked and endangered.
Because Google has a large stake in email, they are a large target for such attacks. It stands to reason that they would need to have strict limits in order to reduce their exposure. But again, all mail servers have various limits applied, and we're still using SMTP.
Oh, and I forgot to mention: if Google wanted email senders to adhere to their limits, they would make those limits public. They don't, because doing so would just tell malicious senders how to work around those limits.
So then it would seem like SMTP is a pretty poor example of an open standard? Acknowledging that a technology will only work in practice if everyone adds their own unpublished rules around it is kind of admitting that the standard and protocol isn't sufficient.
You're not wrong there. SMTP dates back to 1981, and at that time, there were zero security features, and it was designed to be used for plain text only. Every other feature of email has been glommed on to that core. HTTP, DNS, FTP, they all suffer from the same kind of thing - developed a very long time ago when security and identity were barely a thought.
I don't know the details of how standards for ActivityPub is written, but being that it is much newer, I have to think that more thought has been put to modern needs. Of course, the modern landscape is completely different than it was in the early 1980s, so it's yet to be seen how this will all develop. That said, these earlier protocols are examples of how a protocol can take hold and not be finally extinguished.
Same, they could have easily bundled in third party apps as only something you can use with Reddit gold or something, and I would have happily done that.
Yep, me too. When I first heard about all of this that's what I hoped would happen. But it worked out for the best, because it led me to discover Lemmy and a whole new social platform I may never have known about or tried.
I haven't deleted my account or anything, but after RIF Is Fun closes it's doors, I will likely be on Reddit very seldomly if at all. Most of my browsing of Reddit has been via RIF since 2015. The official app has always been a slow, glitchy, ad-riddled piece of shit. RIF was like using a mobile-friendly version of the old layout and was 1000% more stable. So instead of finding a way to integrate something similar into the official app and fixing their bloatware, they decide to kill third party apps altogether. You'd think EA owned Reddit by the way they're going about things these days.
No skin off my nose if Reddit ceases to function. The Reddit that exists today bares very little resemblance to the website I fell in love with 14 years ago.
I remember the last time my dad bounced me on his knee. I had to be maybe 7 or 8, maybe 10 years old. I remember feeling a bit big for it at the time, and my dad said to me that it was probably the last time he'd bounce me on his knee. And it was.
It was a family get together and a lot of people were there that are now just dead and gone. Thankfully, my parents are still doing well... For now.
It's unfortunate they want so much space from my brother and I. It feels like every time I see them, at least another year passes, sometimes two or three, and they're both much grayer and starting to hit that age where I can tell they just aren't as sharp as they used to be.
Life is an absolute gift, but also such a horribly frustrating bitch about so many things. I do not look forwards to death, save for the eternal respite from life.
People are not moving over here for convenience, it's new young software with many flaws and missing features. I think most of us are just looking for a brighter future of social networks, one not dictated by a megacorporation and instead segmented more under our individual control. It's impossible for this to match reddit in everything since that's a company with thousands of employees and a 10 year headstart, but perfect shouldn't be an enemy of good.
I'm with you. Plus I really miss the pre-socmed days of the internet where it was just specialized forums. Being early at kbin kinda sorta maybe feels similar.
yup, i am here because third party apps or no, Reddit was just a horrible place to be anymore. i'm loving the 'wild wild west' of similar apps and a new social network i'd never experienced before.
I'm really going to miss reddit but at this point my foot's already out the door, even if they reverse all the changes Spez and co. have already shown their hand and are clearly only in it for the money
Yea, I'm 100% done.... Cleaned down and removed both my accounts. 10-15yrs worth of comments, posts etc. and hundreds of thousands of Karma points gone in the blink of an eye.
Reddit would do well to remember that they have no business without its users. They would do well to remember this as opposed to "we will do what we want anyway, regardless.of what you think".
Yep. I deleted my main account info then deleted the account. If reddit backs down, I'm only going on Reddit to see where other people are going and spread the word to kbin, lemmy, etc. Hopefully we can get some 3rd party app support.
Unfortunately, that's the only way it was ever going to go. I'm not defending spez whatsoever, and I think he's a huge piece of shit, but at some point, you, me, and everyone else knew the founders et al were going to cash out. It's just that they went about it in probably the single most underhanded, backstabbing manner conceivable.
Because I and many others would never become adults otherwise.
I want to forgive them, but I'll live the rest of my life this way because of my mom's choices and it's not like she would apologize even if I tied her to a stake and hosted a good old fashioned witch burning, so I just have to live with it.
I feel like it goes against the spirit of the community to share remixed versions of Alden Nowlan quotes, instead of one's own shower thoughts. But that's just me.
If you weren't a redditor, or weren't an active one, I can see not understanding the public grief over reddit.
I was a reddit mod. I attended and ran dozens of reddit meetups. I made numerous friends from reddit. I had 2 relationships because of reddit. I watched 2 couples get married because of reddit, and because I introduced my reddit friends to my larp friends, I caused 2 more.
I have an "Open Sourceror" badge on my reddit profile, because 13 years ago I made a patch for reddit so that /r/friends/comments would show comments, including in an RSS feed, so reddit could be used with Gwibber on Ubuntu. Later they killed the RSS feed access if you weren't logged in, but you could still use it through the API. Now they've killed the API too.
reddit wasn't just a link aggregator site. In lots of places it was a source of community, and a source of advice on niche topics. I dropped my reddit scrolling to near zilch, but I still pop in to give advice for those groups, because they're not going to get it elsewhere right now.
So for some, it was just a place for memes, and they can find them elsewhere. For others, it was 14 years of community. It's only been a month. Bear with me; My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, And I must pause till it come back to me.
I was much younger then, up for hanging out with redditors in bars in philly once or more a week. Maybe someday we'll have a kbin/lemmy meetup, but I have yet to run a Hacker News meetup, so Outlook Not So Good.
I've said it before and I'll say it again and again, fuck Carmen Ortiz, such an senseless tragedy. What else was he destined for, he was so young but left such a great legacy.
I always hate this saying. Even before smartphones where a thing people used to socialize and seek entertainment more than they were studying. People would read entertaining fiction books over text books. People would go to plays, music shows, over going to lectures. People would talk about gossip, weather, or other topics more often than exchanging knowledge.
I would even argue we seek knowledge way more often than we used to because it's available to us. But you can't retain that much knowledge and since it's available to us whenever we need it, there is no need to study it before we actually need it.
And a lot of social media use still is exchange of information. So many places that talk about hobbies is full of information or ideas.
But unless your job involves a lot of research there is no need for constantly looking up knowledge.
Shower Thoughts
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