"It's not our evil plan, you people are already doing...

Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:'s posts Post Back to profile

"It's not our evil plan, you people are already doing it" is the typical argument for Divide and Conquer. Unsurprisingly they bring that argument too:

"For instance, fediverse advocate and co-editor of ActivityPub Evan Prodromou @evan created a paid Mastodon account (@evanplus) that users could subscribe to for $5 per month to gain access. If he’s on board with paid content, surely others would follow."

(the irony being of course that Evan did this with standard ActivityPub, no changes needed)

Like 6 May at 7:53 | Open on social.wildeboer.net

11 comments

Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

I have raised the alarm bell already several years ago. Explained how the (at that time mostly dormant) Working Group at the W3C that is responsible for #ActivityPub must be reinvigorated (that happened) and must became a loud defender of the #fediverse (that didn't happen) or else we risk losing our ecosystem to fragmentation and infighting.

6 May at 8:07 | Open on social.wildeboer.net

Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

And that infighting is already visible in the comments. Divide and conquer always works and costs close to nothing. Unfortunately.

6 May at 8:20 | Open on social.wildeboer.net

Kevin Karhan :verified:

@jwildeboer that's why it's being done.

Also there's neither penalty nor deterrence to doing so...

6 May at 8:24 | Open on infosec.space

ClaraBlackInk

@jwildeboer Ads and advertising are (unfortunately) too much of a wedge.

I see it with creative folks who argue that they need to eat. And they're not wrong but it's incredibly nuanced in social spaces.

There's a big risk of losing a sense of any space where you just connect with other people when everything is just reaching into your wallet.

Mutual aid and people sharing their work (which deserves compensation) is different but all money looks the same to people seeking to maximize profit.

6 May at 9:24 | Open on writing.exchange

bugwitched 🐝🐇🦨 🎃🧙🐸

@clarablackink @jwildeboer #fedipact does not prevent people from maintaining a presence on fb/threads, which still dwarfs the entire fediverse in size. that fact is simultaneously why defederation is imperative, and why it should be no real loss

6 May at 12:19 | Open on chitter.xyz

ClaraBlackInk

@bug @jwildeboer You're right and I think there are plenty of people who grasp this.

It's just that there's a marketing mindset that sees any empty wall as ad space and it requires a certain amount of community awareness and vigilance to say, "this isn't ad space", especially when someone can begin to throw large enough quantities of cash at it.

I think sometimes well meaning people get caught up in that marketing mindset without grasping what gets lost.

6 May at 13:02 | Open on writing.exchange

ClaraBlackInk

@bug @jwildeboer To say nothing of bad faith actors like Facebook. I was on Instagram before they acquired it, I hate that they're doing this again over here.

6 May at 13:03 | Open on writing.exchange

bugwitched 🐝🐇🦨 🎃🧙🐸

@clarablackink @jwildeboer all it takes is recognizing that the wall is not actually empty, it's already inhabited by cultures (insert a fungus or moss analogy here)

6 May at 14:05 | Open on chitter.xyz

April

@jwildeboer as a long time AP dev there is a long story about why we are at such a position of fragmentation we are right now and we at Lysand started to call it the "Mastodon situation"..
Here a citation from a unpublished version of our webpage:
The Mastodon Situation

It turns out that if you write a fully compliant ActivityPub server, it's not going to be able to federate with any of the major instances. This is because the base specification is not very useful, as it is missing a lot of features that are necessary for a modern social media platform.

For example, Mastodon has a feature called "custom emojis", which allows users to upload their own emojis. This is not part of the ActivityPub specification, so if you write a server that is fully compliant with the specification, it won't be able to display custom emojis.

In fact, Mastodon has diverged so much from the base specification that it becomes very difficult to write a server that can federate with it. Some issues caused by this divergence are sometimes not even documented, leading to unexplained errors.

Complexity

Another issue with the Fediverse/ActivityPub is that it uses complex data structures that are difficult to work with, such as the JSON-LD format. This in turn makes it develop to create new software that integrates with the Fediverse.

Thats why I joined a collective effort to develop Lysand as alternative, easier protocol to Activitypub, with tooling that makes it completly compatible with Activitypub using a Compatibility layer, because this fragmentation really hurts the community and the fediverse as a whole.

Expand text...

6 May at 11:24 | Open on donotsta.re

Evan Prodromou

@jwildeboer why do you think the SocialCG should be a defender of the fediverse?

What does defending the fediverse mean to you?

6 May at 11:32 | Open on cosocial.ca

Océane

@jwildeboer Hi, genuine question because I don't want to loudly splain people. Why are you specifically mentioning EEE and not privatization?

6 May at 12:54 | Open on peculiar.florist