Facebook/Meta starts talking about the "Extend" phase of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish as predicted:
"“You could imagine an extension to the protocol eventually — of saying like, ‘I want to support micropayments,’ or … like, ‘hey, feel free to show me ads, if that supports you.’ Kind of like a way for you to self-label or self-opt-in. That would be great,”
(And this will in turn enable more divide and conquer. Also part of the usual strategy to break a movement that is perceived as a possible threat by big organisations)
"It's not our evil plan, you people are already doing it" is the typical argument for Divide and Conquer. Unsurprisingly they bring that argument too:
"For instance, fediverse advocate and co-editor of ActivityPub Evan Prodromou @evan created a paid Mastodon account (@evanplus) that users could subscribe to for $5 per month to gain access. If he’s on board with paid content, surely others would follow."
(the irony being of course that Evan did this with standard ActivityPub, no changes needed)
I have raised the alarm bell already several years ago. Explained how the (at that time mostly dormant) Working Group at the W3C that is responsible for #ActivityPub must be reinvigorated (that happened) and must became a loud defender of the #fediverse (that didn't happen) or else we risk losing our ecosystem to fragmentation and infighting.
@jwildeboer what if as a community we take control of this narrative and out innovate the corporate’s in order to keep this open to all and prevent centralised control? We find a way to incentivise content creators that’s built in and non intrusive. Could we put together an open forum on this, I’m happy to help with servers and tech support to enable this discussion.
@Ric I sketched a possible solution using what already exists at https://social.wildeboer.net/@jwildeboer/112399126046747371 I think that a very simple proof of concept can be spun up in a few hours, using an existing Patreon account and OAuth. Extending from there to a more decentralised way of handling the flow of money will be far more complex. But the basics are already available, IMHO.
@jwildeboer Whilst that works and is great, it kinda defeats the idea of decentralised social networks. You'd need a login 9with payment system) for every video you wanted to support. It would be nice to have a mechanism in @peertube where you can have private content, that's only accessible if you subscribe, and doesn't matter what server it's on.
@Ric Sure. But getting there won’t happen overnight. That’s why I propose a pragmatic approach for a proof of concept/MVP that can iterate towards more complete and decentralised solutions. @peertube
@evan I am not a fan of extensions, as you know, but that aside — Facebook (and others) are fast to blame the standard for missing functionality they'd like to see when good solutions are possible without changes or extensions to the standard. This is then often met with fundamentalist arguments a la "block them all! They are evil!", making productive discussions next to impossible. So I'll try the pragmatic approach and see if there is a simple solution that I can share.
@jwildeboer Yes, I understand that. In the particular case of paid subscriptions, I don't think we need to extend the standard to make it happen. It's easy to handle the payment out of band, and controlling distribution so it only goes to paying followers is trivially easy. Nobody has enhanced SMTP and IMAP to include payments; it was never necessary.
@jwildeboer I also share with you the concern of having a supernode in the fediverse. Threads is going to be about 90% of the network when it comes online fully for two-way federation. The best way to manage that is to attract many other small, medium-sized and large networks so it goes back down to under 50%. In other words: the most sustainable fediverse is a big fediverse.
And creators like @thelinuxEXP have mentioned multiple times that the lack of financial incentives to post their content on e.g. PeerTube vs. YouTube acts as a deterrent for many.
And the Fediverse community in general has already a strong sense of “reward-based” ethics - many already make LibrePay/Patreon donations to their instance admins and favourite content creators, so why not embed such ability in the protocol itself and bypass the middlemen?
Allowing micropayments in ActivityPub (per-post, one-off, recurrent etc.) would actually attract many creators who are currently stuck against their will on proprietary platforms, are at the mercy of YouTube’s mercurial monetization algorithms, don’t have much freedom in deciding how they want to get paid, and have to give back a non-negligible share of their revenue to the platform itself.
Imagine instead a world where micropayments are handled at protocol level itself, a piece of content or a profile that requires the user to make a payment would transparently respond with an HTTP 402, the money would move from the donor’s account to the contributor’s without any middlemen to shave off profits, no external algorithms are in charge of what can be monetized and how, and creators don’t even have to worry about posting the same content across multiple different platforms because ActivityPub would take care of the whole distribution problem. I can’t think of a better silver bullet to get content creators to do the jump.
The thing is that if we don’t implement this right on the protocol level because we oppose commercialization on ideological grounds, then Threads may implement it anyway on their version of ActivityPub (and then yes, it’d really be E-E-E), and content creators who do content creation as a job have one more reason to avoid the Fediverse.
I’ve got a bit more of a mixed feeling about ads instead. There’s sensitivity on the Fediverse about donations and micropayments, but almost everyone here hates the ad-based business model to the core. If the payments idea and implementation works right, then I don’t think we need to pollute our walls with such low-quality littering. I’m happy to leave that to Threads if they want to implement it, because I really don’t see much of added value in it and I don’t see why anybody out there would like that idea.
@fabio@Techaltar@dansup@jwildeboer Yeah, honestly, if there was an easy way to support me on PeerTube, I would much likely promote that first instead of YouTube. I would at least try to push PeerTube first for a while to see if that worked out.
Same for the podcast on Castopos, I would invest more time and effort on it if it could easily be user supported without having to mention Patreon in each episode.
@thelinuxEXP@fabio@Techaltar@dansup@jwildeboer What would you see in PeerTube? We have a Support field in channels & videos (video field inherits channel's one). A Support button is displayed below the video player
Something like financially subscribing to a channel to get members-only content, or just setting up a « each time I watch a video from this person, I want to pay 1 cent automatically » sort of preference, these types of things :)
@Chocobozzz@thelinuxEXP@Techaltar@dansup@jwildeboer I would add that any implementation of a payment subsystem should probably be done at protocol level, so individual implementations of #ActivityPub don’t have to reinvent the wheel - doing #payments right is a hard problem, and it doesn’t make sense to fragment the efforts by solving the same problem multiple times on Mastodon/WriteFreely/PeerTube/Pixelfed etc.
The payments subsystem should be better integrated in the ActivityPub ecosystem compared to a “Donate here” link that redirects to a 3rd-party provider. This is probably the right chance of giving the HTTP 402 code the implementation it deserves.
I left the payments industry a few years ago so I’m not sure of what open solutions and protocols are in the market that could be already leveraged, but maybe something like OpenPayments could be a good starting point - there are many efforts on the open banking standards lately, with different degree of maturity, and IMHO a good implementation of payments over ActivityPub could be a great driver for adoption.
I’ve got the feeling that if we don’t do this right then Threads could scoop up this chance for an “embrace” to “extend” pivot.
GNU @Taler is free software, and @NGI_Taler has open calls to let you implement the payment system for your free software. It would totally make sense to apply at protocol level to solve it for #ActivityPub federation.
@Chocobozzz@thelinuxEXP@fabio@Techaltar@dansup@jwildeboer This. Monetization shouldn't be a part of the protocol. Like Chocobozzz pointed out with how PeerTube does it, platforms should allow people to monetize themselves, but to build it into a protocol is a huge mistake. Who makes the decision of how payments are processed? Or is it going to be a crypto grift? These are not discussions the protocol standards body should be having. @thelinuxEXP might want YouTube style built-in, tightly integrated "subscriptions", but this isn't YouTube. We should not be centralizing payments or taking choice away from people. I might want KoFi, you might want to use PayPal, somebody else wants to process through Stripe, another only wants to accept ScamCoin. If you want to accept payments, then accept them, stop thinking in the way big tech wants you to think.
If people want to contribute through PayPal and Patreon and anything else, that’s great, but in this case, integrations are needed so people can link these accounts to get something in exchange for their contribution.
@forthy42 What will happen in that case is that they will claim they can, unfortunately, not allow your instance to federate with them as your instance does not meet the minimal requirements wrt support for whatever extension they deem necessary.
And as they talk a lot about moderation, they could even g0 as far to say that only instances that pay for their (Metas) moderation work are allowed to federate. Which can be for free if you "just" support their tracking, ad and other extensions.
Yes, as co-facilitator of #FEP, that is the point. Highly in favor of a bottom-up 3-phase standards process designed to guarantee an open ecosystem and tech landscape. Wrote a bunch about that on #SocialHub:
From reading over your thread, I feel like there may be some values that you think are implicit in the fediverse, and that you want to enforce at the protocol level.
It may be worthwhile to a) enumerate what those values are (non-commercial, FLOSS?, ...) and consider other structures for advocacy or enforcement.
@jwildeboer@serapath The main parallel I can think of here is amateur radio. In the US, and I think in many countries, ham radio bands are restricted to non-commercial use. Part of the licensing procedure is learning what kind of transmissions are considered non-commercial. And participants enforce the requirements with each other. It would be hard to enforce these rules at the protocol or equipment level, though.
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