therealpygon

conciselyverbose, 9 months ago

You should straight up lose the channels the first time you encrypt anything for any reason.

SemioticStandard, 10 months ago

This is a particularly low effort comment, provides no value, and is therefore unwelcome here. It’s also demonstrably nonsense, as others have shown you.

Please consider engaging intelligently, and in good faith.

HipPriest, 10 months ago

I'm not so sure. Always seemed like a gimmick to me. But I'm a grumpy sod.

flossdaily, 10 months ago

They. Don’t. Care.

Republicans have become a fascist cult.

They literally tried to overthrow our democracy.

It’s insane that we’re treating them as anything less than a modern Nazi party.

ragrum, 10 months ago

What makes you think the shadow accounts are part of the 100M figure? The Android app alone is already in the 50M+ downloads band.

briongloid, 10 months ago

I believe that Lemmy should add the ability for an instance to self-aggregate, were an Admin bundles other instances communities into a /g/ grouping.

So instance.tld/g/community could include the whatever communities across the fediverse they felt it should.

Some instances would use it for general aggregation, others would be more strict as a way to merge identical communities.

But as for now, there is no feature set.

therealpygon, 11 months ago

(E: For perspective,) Truth Social was just a mouthy startup for spreading hate, not a nearly trillion dollar company with a lengthy history of anti-competitive activity.

therealpygon, 11 months ago

It will follow the EEE flow along with their normal anti-competition tactics. First, they embrace: their interest in federation is only to give them the access to content that will make their platform not look empty, allowing them to put their coffers to work on drawing the majority share of users. Then they will extend: they will make sure their platform is compatible with ingesting other server content but others will be unable to federate their content (they will become "incompatible" later, due to "features"). Then they will extinguish competition: they'll cut off what little engagement is left with those (inbound only) federated servers because they no longer need them and the majority of the remaining users will move to their platform because that is where the activity is.

Then Kbin/lemmy will be just like all the other random phpbb instances that no one really uses. Being naive won't make things any less likely, yet there will always be gullible people who argue that "of course they will embrace the technology" and that everything else is just non-sense/wouldn't have worked anyway/blah.

It doesn't take long for the largest servers to have operating costs that they will happily allow Meta to burden in exchange for nearly any concession. The main problem is that, while Kbin/Lemmy is federated, it is federated in a manner that still places content in silos and allows single servers to "own" those spaces. It hasn't really fixed the problem yet, it just spreads the problem out over a few more servers. Until spaces are universal (every server owns a slice of that community, spreading out the community instead of just the users), it will remain ripe for EEE.

therealpygon, 11 months ago

Being first to take what is frequently the next logical step shouldn’t be protected from competition for long enough to make the innovation obsolete. 5 years is more than enough time to establish a brand name and recoup any R&D costs. We can raise entirely new people to adulthood in less time than current patent expirations. If it can easily be undercut by a cheaper alternative, then the “innovation” is unlikely to have been that novel or costly. A more complex innovation would be harder to create and productize which should in itself help limit competition. If you aren’t capable of productizing an innovation, you patented it early just to prevent competitors who were already working on the same innovation from being able to recoup their own costs.

People far too often buy into the “R&D is incredibly expensive” narrative that republicans and big pharma like to perpetuate. R&D isn’t generally as expensive as much as if you aren’t first, you automatically lose everything you invested. Beyond that, R&D is frequently done with the assistance public funding, then snatched away by corporations to prevent competition.

If competition is healthy, and is the self-proclaimed hallmark of capitalism, why are corporations so anti-competitive? Competition IS healthy, but it means that wealth is spread across many rather than the few who control patents, and requires continual innovation if you want to maintain your status as #1 rather than just sitting on a large, frequently purchased, patent portfolio.

The current speed of innovation in AI has shown what things could have been like if less time and money was spent trying to stifle innovation in the name of protecting profits by suing over patents. Every patent is just one more ball and chain shackling society to slow progress for profit.

At least, that’s my opinion.

therealpygon, 11 months ago

(e: I would think the answer is) Society. That is how taxes work.

therealpygon, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

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.

therealpygon, 11 months ago

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.