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Григорий Клюшников

As someone unfamiliar with EU processes — how far is this from being signed into law? And how much could it be influenced by companies like Facebook at this point?

9 comments
  Sebastian Lasse, redaktor.me

@grishka

See the train on this supercool page europarl.europa.eu/legislative
;))

A realistic time is maybe 1-1.5 years from now with some decisions. But since the standards won't be directly be in the law, this is extra time.

And if I look at GDPR or google tax, the open question is enforcement :)

  Marcin Koziej

@sl007 @grishka I love the UI with the train! Make something complex and apparently unapproachable a fun thing!

  Григорий Клюшников

Marcin Koziej, makes it a bit symbolic too — trains are a rather common way of getting around Europe from what I can tell.

  smallcircles (Humane Tech Now)

@grishka @sl007

I really wonder about the "good news" part. If in 1.5 years this is signed into law, then all of the enterprise world will focus their attention on creating dominant positions.

With #fediverse evolution stalling, I see 2 possible outcomes:

1. The corporate-fedi, with some hard-to-find grassroots fringes (if #ActivityPub is interop standard)

2. The lost-world fedi (if other standards are chosen) that's slowly forgotten, except by some die-hard fans.

Tragedy of the Commons..

  smallcircles (Humane Tech Now)

@grishka @sl007

Ever more I come to see how our growing individualism is hampering even "grassroots" movements, where self-interest + coincidental cooperation are main drivers to progress.

Most dev of #fediverse are by ppl focused on own apps, their own project silo, and don't really care how things fit into this interoperable fabric unless they have direct, ad-hoc issues to solve.

#ActivityPub has so much potential. We might be #SocialNetworkingReimagined if only we collaborated a bit more.

  smallcircles (Humane Tech Now)

@grishka @sl007

Maybe this is just pessimistic, and I need coffee boost to cheer me up today :)

Wrt corporate world, I'm just thinking of all the money + business suits they'll throw at satisfying any new EU laws.

With that the stronger and watertight the regulation, the more they'll encroach the space that we now occupy with our fresh and humane approach.

We don't have sufficient grip yet to set the scene, drive the story. We don't have a Spiral Island archipelago.

socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/

@grishka @sl007

Maybe this is just pessimistic, and I need coffee boost to cheer me up today :)

Wrt corporate world, I'm just thinking of all the money + business suits they'll throw at satisfying any new EU laws.

With that the stronger and watertight the regulation, the more they'll encroach the space that we now occupy with our fresh and humane approach.

  Григорий Клюшников

Humane Tech Now, if other standards are chosen, there's nothing stopping people adding support for these standards to their projects. IIRC Friendica for example does both ActivityPub and whatever Diaspora uses.

The "corporate fedi"... Well, the most important part, decoupling the data from the presentation/UX, would still happen. Gmail is the dominant email provider, yet I can still self-host my email server and interoperate with gmail, and I can use gmail with a third-party mail client of my choice (which I do — haven't seen the web UI in ages). This ability of the users to use their service in a way *they* want would seriously undermine their existing business model already.

The current business model for Facebook et al consists of tightly controlling the presentation of the data they have so as to:
1. Manipulate users into spending much more time on their properties than necessary — "engagement". Algorithmic feeds, forced recommendations EVERYWHERE, meaningless notifications like "tell your friends what you're doing, post a Facebook update" (I'm not making this up — I have literally received this back when I had the app installed), purposely convoluted UIs (they had a feed redesign project long ago, scrapped it because the new design was so convenient that users clicked less, and spent less time on Facebook).
2. Ads. Inescapable, creepily targeted ads everywhere.

If they're forced as little as to open up their API and allow people make third-party clients, they've already lost and will need to seriously rethink their business model. That's because third-party clients take away this control over presentation — first thing such a client would do is filter ads, recommendations, and other content unwanted by its users. Federation is simply a further extension of this where you don't even need a Facebook account to interact with Facebook users. That would just hasten its demise. Which is long overdue anyway.

Humane Tech Now, if other standards are chosen, there's nothing stopping people adding support for these standards to their projects. IIRC Friendica for example does both ActivityPub and whatever Diaspora uses.

The "corporate fedi"... Well, the most important part, decoupling the data from the presentation/UX, would still happen. Gmail is the dominant email provider, yet I can still self-host my email server and interoperate with gmail, and I can use gmail with a third-party mail client of my choice...

  smallcircles (Humane Tech Now)

@grishka @sl007

Thanks for this elaborate response. Maybe you're right and I was overly pessimistic this morning. A long walk made things look better :)

But on the whole we should be wary, and not take things for granted if we can must more community effort. There's low-hanging fruit for all of us, and much more fun along the way :D

(PS. Your account mention is not auto-included on a reply.. I added you a couple times, but you may have missed part of the thread)

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