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.
They'll make non corporate instances illegal, or make software standards that indie instances can't comply with, or just blast enough propaganda that people will think indie instances are "untrustworthy" or something.
Eventually it will be like YouTube now. Who's going to try to create a new YouTube, when they have to compete with the popularity of YouTube? It's all centralized. Eventually the fediverse will coalesce around a few corporate owned instances, who will be defederated from any and all indie instances.
The structure of the fediverse buys us time, not immunity.
Corporations have as much power to fuck up the Fediverse as Microsoft has to prevent Linux from being a thing. They can try (and most definitely will), but ultimately will not be able to stop the FOSS community from taking things where we want to go. Propaganda about "safety" is definitely on the cards, but things like making community-run instance illegal are far fetched (in the US at least, because that would seem to be pretty clearly unconstitutional wrt the 1st amendment.).
So, I'm not necessary disagreeing with you, but I think the fediverse might be our last and only chance to pull the internet back into the hands of the people, at least somewhat. If the Fediverse reaches a critical mass of users to the point where it has become a big business on its own merits I think we can expect a lot more corporate interests from seeping in, but just like Linux that doesn't necessarily stop the community side of things from existing.
What usually happens is that companies will come in and try to do value add. Look at mastodon, you got Facebook/Meta and other companies trying to come in and join the fediverse. They'll bring the numbers and their value add - that's where the extension will come in. You will need people you can trust to in activitypub circles who can make sure that they are only focused on managing the standard without a ton of politics - but once Big Money comes in - a slow degradation begins.
3% of desktop PCs and a much larger percent of servers run Linux. That's a fairly significant fraction of the market. I wouldn't really say Linux isn't a thing.
Realistically, the easiest solution is not to do anything shady, but just to throw money at the corporate instances until they're a better experience than the non-corporate ones. People will flock to the ones that are faster, have more features, or cool extras and abandon the independent instances.
From there, they probably will eventually do a variation of your idea though, I doubt they'll try to make them illegal, likely just defederate based on them slowing down the network, harboring spammers, or find one small group on them doing something unsavory and then start the propaganda machine you mentioned trying to brand all the users on non corporate instances as supporting whatever that group was doing. Even easier would be taking over the development cycle and just implement breaking changes that require items that independent instances just can't keep up with.
It is too late when they "try" because by that time all your friends will be using GoogleTalk because it was shiny and easy to use. And then you had to add your GoogleTalk account to your own jabber client because for some reason you could never really talk to people on their google talk accounts from your jabber.org account. And then google added some weird stuff to the protocol and you couldn't connect to your talk account from your jabber client anymore. So you began using the Google Talk web client and told your remaining friends on jabber.org that they too should come use GoogleTalk because ... and then Google officially defederates and those few people left talking to each other on jabber are finally alone. And then a few years later google announces it shuts down googletalk because they can. And xmpp is so dead that the fediverse invented a new chat called Matrix because jabber is burned beyond recognition.
btw, did those bot farm instances actually did something so far? Like, anything bad?
I watched them grow to insane ammounts a while back but haven't really checked up on them since.
I think the fediverse admins are our best hope of preventing this. Typically, anyone with the skills and interest required to run an instance is going to be aware of these issues. Not all of them will care, of course, but I think most will.
The internet has been around long enough to show us how corporations abuse it. Good admins will avoid falling into their trap.
If Meta's Threads product is going to have ActivityPub compatibility as is rumored, then there's already an inroad about to happen. Right now, that's where all eyes need to be, to judge how you feel about the situation. For myself, I'm enthusiastic. If I have an easy means to communicate with friends who are mostly in Meta's sphere of influence, and organize local meetings, I'll move to that system almost immediately. Doubly if I have access from a browser
The challenge is, of course, that Meta (even as Facebook) has always been about deanonymizing users to better target them for ads. It's possible that Threads may not follow that trend, but you should expect that if you're communicating between, say, KBin and Threads, you'll have to give Meta your real name, and take any scrap of anonymity as a bright sign of hope.
Add comment