As many of you know, I work for Big Software Company. Embrace/Extend/Extinguish is something we do. A lot. As in I have watched them kill well over 20 products in 15 years. Probably closer to 50. This strategy is real and software companies absolutely do deploy it, all the time.
There's a bunch of good articles out there on Embrace/Extend/Extinguish, so if you're curious, I encourage you to google it. If you want the tl;dr version, it's in the next post.
EEE is a strategy where a propeietary company Embraces a competing open standard, and partially extends their own product to work with the open standard.
The idea is the users of the open standard software will start asking Big Software Company to improve their integration. BSC will then say no, and say if they want function X they must move onto BSC's product.
Over time, enough people move onto BSC's product that BSC can say, well, we tried, but it's really not worth supporting this open standard anymore for so few users. Product EOL. Bye.
Again, I work for BSC and we do this ALL THE TIME. We killed off 3 major products in 2023 and I already know one we're killing in 2024.
EEE is real and if anyone tries to tell you it's not, they're either stupid or lying.
Do you have evidence for your implicit assumption that embrace extend extinguish isn't just a ideologically distorted view of the natural and reasonable behavior of people flocking to the platform they like most?
@folkerschamel Yes I sure do! Because a big part of what my company does, how we make money, is kill off other products that the users like better, as we see in survey after survey, so what we do is deliberately make the friction of staying on that product so unbearable that most users will migrate to our product that they don't prefer to get the friction to stop.
And then we tell the holdouts that we won't let them interact anymore.
@folkerschamel This is a really well documented strategy in the world of software, by the way, please do not just take my word for it, do some google searches and learn about all the times this has been deployed, usually to kill a quality small or open product with a passionate user base and force them onto, say Microsoft Office.
@folkerschamel Here, some evidence (of a very concrete set of old cases) that these tactics are deliberate and intentionally harmful towards other actors, and not just them beating the competition with better products/services: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents
Well, interestingly #microsoft is actively embracing #linux (see WSL, #azure), #edge is based on #chromium, dot.net is not using the #java standard, #microsoft messenger is dead, and #pop3, #imap and #smtp are one of the most widely used open #internet standards. Not exactly a success story for EEE.
And if people prefer #threads or #twitter over #mastodon, then no wall around the #mastodon garden will help. I just don't see how EEE plays a role here.
@folkerschamel@kindspells I don't think you really understand what you're talking about. IMAP is the example of EEE, where you can't really start your own mail server if you want to talk to Google, or use any IMAP client to use it. It's a miracle the protocols haven't died yet. Microsoft Edge is a bad example, too, because Chromium is Google's EEE project. Microsoft has to battle it themselves by introducing differences, making Edge not-quite-Chromium-based.
@folkerschamel@kindspells Microsoft is a very bad actor. They already own the de facto default code forge, so I can imagine them bringing people over to their platform, their CI, their CLI, and "oops! We killed Git for our proprietary solution!". And their (indirect) acquisition of NPM is even worse, because there aren't even alternatives to it, and JS and TS (oh, also by Microsoft?) keep growing. There is literally no barrier for them to completely own the Web, yet again.
@folkerschamel@kindspells MS embracing Linux may just be a start of EEE, we just don't know. Couldn't you imagine them making a Linux distro that “works best with WSL”, then making it the only version to download from MS Store, to use on Azure, to run GH Actions on? Suddenly, every FOSS project is being tested and run on Microsoft® Linux™, so people start switching to it on their desktops, too. The differences to Linux will grow until no interop is possible, all while being FOSS. Extinguished,
What you call "miracle" is simply that EEE is not a thing here. You use a lot of loaded but vague language like "bad actor" and "may just be a start" and fantasies of how things may play out in your view, but I still don't see how this matches reality.
Blaming the failure of an #opensource project on an open standard and thinking that a walled garden would have saved it is naive in my opinion and also harms the open source community because it avoids addressing the real reasons discuss and draw conclusions from it.
Oh but Jim, you say, what does this have to do with #Threads and #Mastodon?
Well, you can be forgiven for not knowing that, because nearly all of the discourse around Threads is about moderation.
Threads doesn't moderate, it allows hate speech, harassment may not be dealt with, etc. And this is true! But thats not why Threads is dangerous to the Fediverse. In that respect Threads is no more dangerous than any other poorly-moderated server.
Here's why federating with #Threads is dangerous: fiduciary duty.
A lot of #Fedi#Admins frame federating with Threads as "building community" or "letting the users choose", or "greater connectedness", or "driving Fedi adoption".
#Meta cares about delivering shareholder value. For them, that means two things:
Obtaining your personal data to sell, and
More eyeballs in front of more ads.
That's it. There's no deeper anything. Meta cares about those two things and those two things ONLY. To put effort into anything else would be a breach of the board members' fiduciary duty to the shareholders.
Federating with #Threads is not dangerous because of potential abuse and harassment. That's a real concern, but it's manageable.
Allowing #Meta to federate with your server is an existential threat to the open social universe. This company wants data and eyeballs, and we are a data and eyeball mine they intend to strip.
Now, if you've gotten all the way here and still think #Threads integration is good, well, go for it! I can't stop you.
But I'm begging you, #Fedi#Admins: be honest with yourselves. This is not about user choice or community building or any of that. And the concerns are not moderation or harassment. This is about #Meta intending to strip mine the Fediverse for new eyeballs and data. That's it.
Take it from a guy who's shut down many more datacenters than he's built; big software companies deploy exactly this strategy to kill competing ideas all the time.
@andthisismrspeacock I'm not convinced TBH. Yes, the corporations did kill XMPP and a few other protocols. Email is severely injured.
But IMO with the fediverse the situation is different. It's not like there was a blossoming ActivityPub and now corporations seek to seize the control over it. No, most people here are refugees who came here to get away from the corporations. They already had an opportunity to be on Twitter, Facebook or wherever, yet they took an effort to be here.
As an example, think about @protonmail users. Nobody registers their first email account there, it exists for the people who want an alternative to Gmail and who are willing to pay for it. But at the same time, if they stop sending or receiving messages from GMail, it will hurt them and their users. Less people will do the switch.
@bemyak@andthisismrspeacock@protonmail but XMPP and email, as examples, still exist, still work as they did before corporate shenanigans (even spam barriers aren’t bad as they used to be now). Gtalk & fb messenger only had XMPP interoperability for a short while & was never publicised- it was a secret bonus until they closed it. Anyone rolling their own XMPP setups still do, as with email.
@andthisismrspeacock I liked your thoughts and I think I agree, as my opposition to the idea that threads must be banned was a moderation based one. I still have some questions:
Isn't the system designed to be resistant to EEE? Wasn't the point of decentralisation to make it harder on a structural level? How will threads gain a foothold if it gets defederated within days for its moderation problems?
@trekman10@andthisismrspeacock
This has already happened in the past, only slightly other flavor, with decentralized systems. Back in the day, facebook chat was yet another XMPP server. You could have your facebook account listed just alongside all your other XMPP accounts and got a complete roster of your decentralized IM network. One day they cut off XMPP integration, people opened XMPP less and less and your online contacts got more and more sparse.
@trekman10@andthisismrspeacock
Another example: Slack had an IRC bridge once (around 2017) and was - in fact - a IRC server with a fancy web interface. I could use slack alongside all my other IRC servers in my IRC client. One day they shut it off forcing me on their shitty web-interface or even worse: their desktop client. People open their IRC client less and less, people die out.
@trekman10@andthisismrspeacock
In both my cases, the problem is not, that the decentralized system is rendered useless technically but by migration of users going the most convenient way. If a user has to use the mandatory thing he happily drops the optional thing.
@trekman10@andthisismrspeacock the big instances are persuaded to adopt whitelists. Small servers are blocked by default unless going through an expensive and timely process. People move to big servers, little ones die. Now there are a handful of big servers that decide to build a layer over ActivityPub, and the protocol falls into obscurity. The end. 
It's distinctly possible. Although, small instances who decide from the beginning not to federate with Meta and start to build their own alternative ecosystem are likely fare better. It's party of why think the likely outcome is a schism into "Meta's fediverse" (big servers) and "free fediverses" that reject Meta.
And since I'm here, I'm curious what y'all think. One of the arguments Meta supporters make is that there are significant differences from the XMPP situation as well as similarities. It's certainly true at least to some extent -- for one thing we have the benefit of looking at what happened with XMPP and potentially learing from it. What (if anything) do you think there are other significant differences? And/or, are there similarities that they're discounting?
@nf3xn@andthisismrspeacock This is a strange way to frame a company like Meta/Facebook. They have a long history and people came here specifically so they could exit the sphere of corporate influence. Trying to sneak it back into our online lives is a threat.
If they have a history, then there is no reason why entities cannot be ethically blocked before they join.
@nf3xn@andthisismrspeacock Many of us don't have FB accounts. I've never had one myself, and I dare say all the way back in the 2000s "I told you so". :blobcatnerd:
Even if some critics have Meta accounts, they're still on fedi as something apart from commercial social media and I understand they position in that case.
@andthisismrspeacock this thread (appreciate the irony) is a well constructed argument. Would you say threads’ current lack of adverts renders any of the points invalid?
@andthisismrspeacock Agree. It is possible Threads will start pushing “ad” posts. Perhaps via endless random accounts, making it difficult to block unless you block threads.net entirely. More likely is the gathering of data from interactions. Not sure I can see much of an upside for the Fediverse.
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