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Tim Chambers

To real concerns that Meta might do to Acivitypub as Google & they did to XMPP, this seems helpful including this point via
@darius

"Regardless of bigco shenanigans around open protocols, Kazemi isn’t worried about what happens with ActivityPub. 'The nice thing for me is that if the big companies do jump in [to support ActivityPub] and then sort of walk it back,' he remarked, 'at worst, we’ll be back to where we are right now, which is still a pretty nice place.'”

thenewstack.io/why-developers-

17 Jun 2023 at 20:37 | Open on indieweb.social
30 comments
Blort™ 🐀Ⓥ🥷☣️

@tchambers @darius Seems like that kind of ignores the "extend" part of #EmbraceExtendExtinguish... When they start adding their own weird, undocumented stuff on top of #ActivityPub and then all of the real #FOSS activitypub clients don't/can't implement it, then most people are going to blame them for being broken, rather than GoogBook for not following the standard. Then people learn that only MegaCorps clients "work right" and stay there when the clients stop using activitypub all together.

17 Jun 2023 at 20:53 | Open on social.tchncs.de
Oblomov

@Blort @tchambers even without the Extend part, @darius is still wrong. Big Tech walking in and then out again will completely kill the momentum of ActivityPub, exactly like it did with RSS and with XMPP. In these past months the Fediverse has started getting attention and recognition for the general public, creating a possible inroad to its wider adoption. And this is exactly what will be intentionally destroyed by Meta's rug pull.

17 Jun 2023 at 21:51 | Open on sociale.network
Oblomov

@Blort @tchambers @darius Big Tech's in-and-out will only leave ashes. The destruction isn't technical, it's social.

17 Jun 2023 at 21:52 | Open on sociale.network
Darius Kazemi

@oblomov @Blort @tchambers I don't think big tech entering and leaving will cause people who were here before Nov 2022 to change their behavior much. If the implication is "lack of growth is failure" then you are right but I do not share that sentiment.

17 Jun 2023 at 21:54 | Open on friend.camp
ferricoxide

@darius@friend.camp @oblomov@sociale.network @Blort@social.tchncs.de @tchambers@indieweb.social

Lots of free things existed for a decade or more before the web behemoths existed. We're those failures? Having worked for a company that sold a 10s of $Mns of hardware to AOL just for their Usenet and email hosting. Was Usenet or email a failure before the behemoths.

17 Jun 2023 at 21:57 | Open on evil.social
Océane ⏚

@darius @oblomov @Blort @tchambers The whole point would be to shift, stop, or switch the mass media narrative on the Fediverse. My mum has told me that “apparently, the new social media [was] Mastodon”. For Zuckerberg and his co-groomers, this has to stop.

17 Jun 2023 at 22:09 | Open on eldritch.cafe
Océane ⏚

@darius @oblomov @Blort @tchambers IMHO a solution would be to radically criticize socio-capitalist media and expose them as the form of market abuse, child predation they are. We need to strike them first; B92 users have to land in a welcoming, but also in a radically critical culture. We also shouldn't ignore deformation effects by economic capital towards other (cultural, social, symbolic) forms of capital, or towards the left as a pluralistic, bootstrapping process (spanning from grassroots activism to the Parliament, from unions to feminism to free software). The “US” and the French Constitutions (so to speak) don't meet their goals respectively in the former and in the latter scope.

For example B92 could be nice at first, then progressively become so awful that it would stain our reputation.

Anyway, my 2 cents

@darius @oblomov @Blort @tchambers IMHO a solution would be to radically criticize socio-capitalist media and expose them as the form of market abuse, child predation they are. We need to strike them first; B92 users have to land in a welcoming, but also in a radically critical culture. We also shouldn't ignore deformation effects by economic capital towards other (cultural, social, symbolic) forms of capital, or towards the left as a pluralistic, bootstrapping process (spanning from grassroots activism...

17 Jun 2023 at 22:21 | Open on eldritch.cafe
Tim Chambers

@Blort @darius

I think there you defend against "extend" but Fedi-developers being vigilant and holding the line on the API's etc they are willing to ingest and output.

A bit like Podcasting, where you stay standards-compliant and ignore any dependentcies the Apple or Spotify-only add-ons to the RSS or non-compatible formats.

That has actually worked well so far and kept the standard so "plays anywhere you get podcasts" claim works.

18 Jun 2023 at 5:18 | Open on indieweb.social
Shoq

@tchambers @darius But not really in the same place, if you consider that tens of millions of people are likely to have been made aware of the protocol, people, procedures, and promise of the fediverse. All on their marketing dime.

17 Jun 2023 at 22:52 | Open on mastodon.social
Oblomov

@shoq @tchambers @darius which they will forget about as soon as Meta defederates.

18 Jun 2023 at 5:28 | Open on sociale.network
matthieu_xyz

@tchambers@indieweb.social @darius@friend.camp
I don't understand the EEE argument. When you look at the Wikipedia page. Most examples of Microsoft trying to pull EEE ended up being failures.

Everyone thinks that EEE is that thing that works every time and in unavoidable. That's not the case at all.

What if Meta adds new ActivityPub vocab? I don't know, implement it or just ignore it. Meta is already centralized. If the new vocab is ignored by everyone it's essentially useless. If we do implement it then ActivityPub evolved, which is nice.

We should focus on the real problem: Meta's moderation. Hopefully limiting them and enabling on-approval follows will be enough. But we must stay vigilant, a lot of trolls and bad actors will try to interact from meta.

@tchambers@indieweb.social @darius@friend.camp
I don't understand the EEE argument. When you look at the Wikipedia page. Most examples of Microsoft trying to pull EEE ended up being failures.

Everyone thinks that EEE is that thing that works every time and in unavoidable. That's not the case at all.

What if Meta adds new ActivityPub vocab? I don't know, implement it or just ignore it. Meta is already centralized. If the new vocab is ignored by everyone it's essentially useless. If we do implement it...

18 Jun 2023 at 7:03 | Open on calckey.social
jmjm

@tchambers @darius no. The risk is that big companies will suck the oxygen out of the room. The availability of a professionally made "free" project will stifle competing open source efforts. And then when the big company yanks their rug out from under the party nobody has any place left to stand.

We've seen this movie too many times to ignore it.

18 Jun 2023 at 15:35 | Open on mstdn.social
Tim Chambers

@jmjm @darius

Not at all clear how this would actually occur:

"The availability of a professionally made "free" project will stifle competing open source efforts."

We keep doing what we are doing regardless, if they come along for the ride fine. If they rug pull later, we just keep going. No worse than before, and likely better for the attention.

18 Jun 2023 at 15:54 | Open on indieweb.social
matt

@tchambers @darius Meta, Google, etc. are enormous. Whatever they direct their attention to, and away from, will change. There's no getting around that.

I'm silent on whether advance de-federation of Meta is good/bad. I just don't know enough.

Email is a federated open protocol. It's alive for the independent operator, but only so long as they don't want to interact with the big boys. So that's a mark in the successful EEE column.

Html5 and CSS is a mark for openness though. I remember the...

18 Jun 2023 at 16:02 | Open on indieweb.social
matt

@tchambers @darius
...Html5 and CSS is a mark for openness. I remember the incredible lengths we had to go through to make a web page work with all platforms and their individual attempts to EEE.

That success came because of strong efforts from places like Mozilla Foundation and web dev communities like A List Apart to make NOT being spec compliant embarrassing for Microsoft.

The lesson here, to my mind, for what's needed for success is a coherent public message.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_St

@tchambers @darius
...Html5 and CSS is a mark for openness. I remember the incredible lengths we had to go through to make a web page work with all platforms and their individual attempts to EEE.

That success came because of strong efforts from places like Mozilla Foundation and web dev communities like A List Apart to make NOT being spec compliant embarrassing for Microsoft.

18 Jun 2023 at 16:10 | Open on indieweb.social
matt

@tchambers @darius
One of the related projects to the web standards effort that I personally think was integral to the larger eventual success was CSS Zen Garden. A public and engaging show case for what is possible with the standard. A flexible framework that anybody could pick up and publish their flavour of beauty and coolness for us to wow at and learn from.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS_Ze

I don't know what the equivalent Activity Pub garden might be, but we should look for it.

@tchambers @darius
One of the related projects to the web standards effort that I personally think was integral to the larger eventual success was CSS Zen Garden. A public and engaging show case for what is possible with the standard. A flexible framework that anybody could pick up and publish their flavour of beauty and coolness for us to wow at and learn from.
18 Jun 2023 at 16:21 | Open on indieweb.social
Darius Kazemi

@maphew @tchambers agree with this point completely. A big piece of my work at this point is to show people the cool and useful and beautiful properties of the fediverse (technical and social) and to communicate it in a way that people who have never heard of GitHub can find exciting

18 Jun 2023 at 16:24 | Open on friend.camp
Mikal with a k

@tchambers @darius

I have some opinions about this (basically: fuck Meta forever), but what I'm finding so fascinating is how this is all being hashed out in discussions like this one. Not just ActivityPub/BigSocial integration, but moderation, federation, text search, quote-boosting – all of it.

It's a real time, real-world, live action drama of anarchy and (small-d) democracy being built.

18 Jun 2023 at 16:25 | Open on sfba.social
Darius Kazemi
Mikal with a k

@darius @tchambers
Yeah, I am very much learning to embrace the chaos here. My inner anthropologist self loves things like this where I can watch what's happening in the fishbowl while still being inside it.

18 Jun 2023 at 16:39 | Open on sfba.social
Claudius

@tchambers nope, that's not how this works. Embracing means that many people will use a Google service, just because it's a big name with a marketing budget. People will join Google instead. Just like people used Facebook Messenger to talk to XMPP friends. When (inevitably) the support will get cancelled or when corporations make unilateral additions to the protocol, then the rest of the Fediverse will be worse off. Not "at the point where we are now". Worse.
@darius @anildash

18 Jun 2023 at 16:29 | Open on imd.social
Darius Kazemi

@claudius @tchambers @anildash I do not see how the effects after the word "then" in your statement follow from the causes you list before "then"

18 Jun 2023 at 16:32 | Open on friend.camp
Claudius

@darius
Look at browsers. We could argue that Google getting into that area would not take away from other browsers. Except that reality has been different. Google is now a heavyweight in standards-organisations and they have practically zero competition. The "competition" is the same engine in different themes. Oh and Firefox which has a tiny market share now.
@tchambers @anildash

18 Jun 2023 at 16:45 | Open on imd.social
Claudius

@darius
Also with Facebook and XMPP, we saw a more problematic thing that applies to networks: when Facebook cut XMPP connections, the reaction was not "oh well, Facebook is wrong here" the reaction was "get off your tiny service nobody ever heard of and just join Facebook where everyone else is".
@tchambers @anildash

18 Jun 2023 at 16:47 | Open on imd.social
Claudius

@darius
Especially Google and Facebook have a bad track record that should be taken into account. I'm much less worried about Automattic (WordPress) for example, because their history is much more aligned with a distributed, decentralised, self-hosted, self-managed web.
@tchambers @anildash

18 Jun 2023 at 16:52 | Open on imd.social
Darius Kazemi

@claudius @tchambers @anildash I am aware of all of this history I am taking it entirely into account when I make the statements I do.

18 Jun 2023 at 17:08 | Open on friend.camp
Claudius

@darius what I'm trying to say: if any of the behemoth players come to the Fediverse, they will come with intentions that are almost certainly not aligned with the intentions of the Fediverse. And they will not play by "our" rules. This will be on uneven, skewed territory where one side has a billion dollar war chest and a centralised top-down vision. The other side has a few small teams of developers doing this mostly in their spare time.

@tchambers @anildash

18 Jun 2023 at 17:27 | Open on imd.social
Eric the Cerise

@darius

Seriously?

I can host my own email server, but I can't send email to anyone with a gmail account ... not because I'm blocking Google, but because Google blocks me ... and because Google is big enough to force everyone else on Earth to block me, too.

That's the future of a #Fediverse with the #FAANG corps included.

@claudius @tchambers @anildash

18 Jun 2023 at 19:12 | Open on mstdn.io
vagabond

@tchambers @darius yep the key point is we have to have a strong "culture" so we can try and hold our #fashionista crew from going down the #dotcons path because it's "better", this is harder than our "logic" thinks it is. Take note.

18 Jun 2023 at 16:57 | Open on campaign.openworlds.info
Darius Kazemi

@Hamishcampbell @tchambers yep! This is the main hard problem I see. Well spotted.

18 Jun 2023 at 17:10 | Open on friend.camp
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