Technology

Please: All read this piece about how "Embrace, extend and destroy" can destroy a federated network. It happened before and they certainly will try to do it with the fediverse.

Big corpos don't want to take it over, they want it gone.

https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

Embrace, extend, extinguish. Only proven way to destroy decentralized, free, open source solutions.

First stage embrace might not even be malicious, but with corporations it will eventually lead to someone thinking: how can we monetize our position. It is just nature how business works.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

I'm not worried at all about Zuck taking over Mastodon at all, they'll try but they are just so incompetent, because literally every single product idea they have they either stole or bought from somebody else. Great tech, terrible products, zero originality is the Facebook mantra and that is because they have a delusional CEO that they can't fire, because Zuck has delude himself into thinking he's an "ideas" guy like Jobs instead of an "executions" guy like Bezos that he really is, and until he realizes that, he will always fail.

(also, delusional for actually thinking Ready Player One is a good book)

If making a TikTok clone didn't get people to switch from TikTok, why would they think making a Twitter clone is going to get people to switch from Twitter?

The only way I see Facebook being a threat is when they give up on making their Twitter clone and start providing easy subscription service hosting for Mastodon/Lemmy to EEE. THAT would be the time to worry.

i'll join the voices saying this is bad for the fediverse, and bad for users in general. there are LOTS of normie users who are joining threads who will be shut off from learning about all the cool other servers if everyone blocks them. this will mean users who want to interact with them need to sign up on Threads, which is what we don't want.

what we want is that users on Threads see other servers, learn that they're better, and migrate over.

don't block Threads, show them how much better we are.

I really hope the fediverse can block out the meta crap…

Spontaneous idea of how to use copyright law for keeping Meta out of the Fediverse (more for fun):

Introduction: Parts of the Fediverse, including Mastodon, are software licensed under the APGL license. This license is a great choice because it forces the ones running the software to grant users access to the source code. GPL for example would allow to run proprietary services based on GPL code. The AGPL does not. Companies like Meta and Google will likely not use AGPL code because it might force them to also publish their proprietary systems behind the scenes. However, this does not help much for keeping the Fediverse save. They simply implement their own software which will not be open source.

Therefore we may need another approach. Defederating is the simplest and in my opinion currently the best. It's easy and keeps people in control.

However, there could be some 'automatic' approach using copyright law. It's a hack which allows to use existing law to regulate the way instances can federate.:

• instances would Federate only if the other side can provide a certain piece of information called X
• X is protected by copyright law, therefore by default, instances are not allowed to provide X
• However, X is released under a license which for permits to copy and distribute X under certain conditions
• The conditions allow to tune who can legally federate
• Conditions could be
  • The server software must be AGPL licensed
  • The instance must not be owned by a company with a certain amount of annual revenue

Open question is, who owns the copyright of X?