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Aral Balkan

The same goes for other large servers.

Look at how many of the people you interact with are on the handful of the largest servers and imagine that just those handful of servers blocked your server.

Come, let‘s take this further…

Apparently Facebook/Meta is “joining” the fediverse. How nice of them. Now imagine that the largest instance is run by Zuckerberg. (Or <insert your favourite Silicon Valley billionaire here>.)

Imagine they become large enough to do the same thing to mastodon.social…

22 comments
RhiMG

@aral

I'm no expert but I think I see what you're getting at.

Malevolent intentions will wreak havoc.

Jaime Soriano

@aral this is what basically happened with XMPP. All big players joined, only to build walled gardens later and excluding anyone that had their smaller servers.

Océane ⏚

@jsoriano @aral “But I hang around in a few nice 60-users chatrooms! #WorksOnMyMachine

Fish Id Wardrobe

@jsoriano @aral The point here is not that that made XMPP go away. It's still here. But hardly anyone uses it now.

We could go back to it tomorrow.

Jaime Soriano

@fishidwardrobe @aral for me the point is to don't trust them, they are doing this only for their business, not for the people.

Fish Id Wardrobe

@jsoriano @aral Don't trust who? Facebook? Sure? One of the hundred or so independent XMPP servers still running? Not so much. list.jabber.at/

Jaime Soriano

@fishidwardrobe @aral yes Meta, or any other big player that expresses support for an open protocol.

shrimp eating mammal 🦐

@fishidwardrobe @jsoriano @aral

>

But hardly anyone uses it now.

Absolutely false. That is a very common misconception that has me scratching my head on a regular basis.

Fish Id Wardrobe

@walruslifestyle @jsoriano @aral That's lovely to know. I must just be having the worst luck with it then.

There's one person I talk to on XMPP and once every six months whatever server I'm on shuts down and I have to pick a new one.

I think we've given up and switched to email.

pino

@jsoriano @aral Google and MS are doing that for email. Mails from my own tiny server constantly end up in some spam folders there.

shrimp eating mammal 🦐

@jsoriano @aral sorry to pick nits, but I've been an avid XMPP user for a couple decades at this point, and my experience really wasn't affected much by the big players doing their walled garden dance. they brought in people who probably would never have used XMPP anyway. meanwhile, all the people who did use it kept using it after the big players walled themselves off, and that ecosystem continues to thrive.

I suspect the same is/will be true of the fediverse. which is not to say that having Meta or whoever joining is a good thing, just that I think there's a lot more resilience to their impact than one might think.

@jsoriano @aral sorry to pick nits, but I've been an avid XMPP user for a couple decades at this point, and my experience really wasn't affected much by the big players doing their walled garden dance. they brought in people who probably would never have used XMPP anyway. meanwhile, all the people who did use it kept using it after the big players walled themselves off, and that ecosystem continues to thrive.

Ankit Pati

@walruslifestyle @jsoriano @aral This.

The big players never took anyone away. They just temporarily added users who otherwise never would have bothered to set up XMPP.

I suspect this won’t be much different, and also that we don’t have the power to stop it. Not without European regulatory oversight, anyways.

Tattooed_Mummy

@aral I'd be keen to see the percentage of people I follow on a big instance , because I'm automatically wary of following anyone on them

Florida atheist:

@aral

OR they get blocked by the people.. i.e. reddit style.. i.e.

NBGAF style.. END IT !
youtube.com/watch?v=62VjlkIg29

/// can happen again:
youtube.com/watch?v=i55dafZQvF

[HUGS] getimiskon :OwOid: :blobcatgooglywtf: :verified_neko:
@aral I think a significant majority of people who joined mastosoc either didn't know or didn't care about the alternatives and joined because other people were there as well, even though the protocols of fediverse try to eliminate this issue. The users were used to it.
Dave Winer ☕️

@aral

They don’t even support linking in posts on Facebook. How is the same company supposed to be part of a distributed network?

Deus

>

Imagine they become large enough to do the same thing to mastodon.social

Now you all know how small instances suffered when they were being blocked because their opinion differed than that of the admins of large instances and Y’all kept silent. Or when people used Fedi software created by someone they didn’t like, you were fedi blocked.

Reminds me of that, “First they came…”

Desikner

@aral If you develop in the public you give away control. It's by design.

1. You block anything related to Meta. You exclude everyone that use Meta.
2. You do not block anything related to Meta. You welcome everyone that use Meta.

Meta will probably embrace, extend and extinguish whether you choose 1. or 2. that doesn't matter, but with choice 2. you at least will have some people who will be signing up with an instance not Meta.

Regardless of choice, you'll end up with 2 separate networks.

@aral If you develop in the public you give away control. It's by design.

1. You block anything related to Meta. You exclude everyone that use Meta.
2. You do not block anything related to Meta. You welcome everyone that use Meta.

Meta will probably embrace, extend and extinguish whether you choose 1. or 2. that doesn't matter, but with choice 2. you at least will have some people who will be signing up with an instance not Meta.

Lorraine Lee
@aral @desikn 2 separate networks I can live with. As it stands I'm agnostic concerning the question of how many fediverses (graphs) there are already.
Nico Berlo

@aral so ? Life goes back to what it was before they came. They won’t break the existing network of instances. You might not be able to talk to people on meta if they ban you though.

Gina B Fla

@aral
Is everything on the fediverse open source?

Nico Jensen :fcsp2:

@aral But the problem here are the users who join one server instead of spreading out, big servers can't really do much for that (Eugen can because of the app but that's something else).
The task is not to demonize Meta for the fact that they come to the Fediverse, but the task is to ensure that those who come additionally to the Fediverse, also distribute themselves and not all go to Meta, because there is star A or Influencer B. And then at some point you no longer have the problem that 10% of the users fall away because an instance falls away (block or delete).

@aral But the problem here are the users who join one server instead of spreading out, big servers can't really do much for that (Eugen can because of the app but that's something else).
The task is not to demonize Meta for the fact that they come to the Fediverse, but the task is to ensure that those who come additionally to the Fediverse, also distribute themselves and not all go to Meta, because there is star A or Influencer B. And then at some point you no longer have the problem that 10% of...

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