Because money

I bet it’s Cloudflare

OK, been looking at this thread and one thing jumps at me: are we reinventing commercial social media algorithms from first principles here?

Correct, it’s worse, you can very much argue that Google had good faith intentions, you cannot even pretend that Facebook does while keeping a straight face

I wasn’t talking about our users, i was talking about theirs, a direct mirror of what the author described with XMPP

Fuck, that’s how it’s gonna go, and i hate it

At this point it wouldn’t matter, all they need to do is to mess with the protocol and it’d achieve the same thing, Meta and everything in it’s sphere would “work well”, but connecting with true ActivityPub servers would work just glitchy enough to annoy their users and point the fingers towards our side, just like it happened with XMPP

But we DO have strong precedents of previous decentralized services/communities destroyed by the presence of huge corporate networks!

This is not just people going “Meta bad! Blocked!” as you seem to be arguing, this is the only possible reaction if we want to keep what has been build alive and not be razed to the ground, many of us saw this with our own eyes, me included, either we stop Meta at the door or the Fediverse is going to die, they have zero intentions or incentive to play the good guests here.

We old-timers are not warning because “it might happen”, we’re doing it because it has already happened multiple times before

The core of the strategy was delineated by Microsoft when they tried to kill Linux and failed because the strategy was discovered, it’s known as Embrace, Extend, Extinguish . And it only failed because of active pushback for years by Linux users.

Have you tried to run your own email server these days? Many have tried for a long time, and end up throwing the towel, because email is now dominated by a few corporations who can decide to reject your small server at a whim, as a sysadmin i’ve seen this a lot. And email too is an open federated standard, supposedly resistant to failures.

Or XMPP, which was to be the future of chat clients. It was enthusiastically embraced by everyone including Google and Facebook, then once everybody was dependent on their clients they quietly killed support from it.

Let’s envision a future where Meta has the biggest share of the Fediverse, the most convenient clients, the most features, like they used to be. That’s when enshittification step 2 starts, and they start slowly cutting off anything not under their direct control. Just like they did with XMPP, just like it was done with email. And like WhatsApp and various other things, you don’t want to stop using it because you now rely on it for your communication, and when you try to tell people to follow you to the free part they look at you like you’re an alien. They won.

This is not flights of fancy, this all has happened before. Yeah, Charlie Brown, Lucy is not going to take away the ball this time. And we continue to warn it because it’s bonkers to us that you cannot see it.

Apparently he has a history of behavior that led to mastodon.art defederating from Universeodon, seems to be a true techbro (P92 is the Meta thing, he seems to have dollar signs in his eyes at the mention of it)

Why is that? I feel like i’m missing something obvious here but wouldn’t that be a positive?

Out of the loop, what’s this attitude? New at the Fediverse and haven’t heard of this before

Quoting from the article:

The strategy’s three phases are:

• Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.
• Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the “simple” standard.
• Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.

This has been done for open protocols by other companies before, many, MANY times. They’re likely going to “joyfully embrace” the Fediverse, add some “improvements” that will be proprietary and only run on their software, then when people become addicted to “Meta Fediverse”, close things down dramatically so that people only run their stuff. We must prevent that bullshit.

Anyone remembers Embrace - Extend - Extinguish? I don’t expect this to be anything but an effort to crush a potential competitor

It was definitely weird, the Wiki entry skips on some of the weirdest manic parts of it, like the dude claiming to be the “Crown Prince of Korea” and more weirdness, very much felt like a whole manic episode triggered this

While it’s DEFINITELY not a bad idea to not put all eggs in one basket and prevent stuff from even happening in the first place, i think this person is worrying too much about the consequences. We do have a recent important precedent of a very public corporate takeover of a very popular free software service: The Freenode IRC takeover. After the nutcase effectively took over the network’s ownership, people just… left. They remade the service elsewhere (Libera.Chat) and everybody moved, making the takeover meaningless. So, if worst comes to worst i don’t think there’s gonna be a problem. Here’s the info on Wikipedia of the event and the exodus to Libera Chat