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Top-level
 @davidrevoy Am I misunderstanding the scale of the potential problem? Like, Facebook can set up their own instance, and then.....? I know that they want money and data (to sell for money), but does making their own instance give them access to data on other instances that isn't already public? Is the concern that a huge Facebook instance sucks up all the oxygen and new users who'd otherwise go elsewhere? I feel like the naive noob in the room. 21 comments
 @comradeferret @TranshumanBlues Well, imo the main issue would be about how a dominant player could impose their rules, their extension to the protocol, or become the only player with enough manpower to keep up with complex spec (spec they would push/lobby). A bit like the situation of dominance of email by gmail, Internet navigation by Chrome, word processors by Microsoft, etc... They know how to ruin something to their advantage for buisness, imo...  @davidrevoy @comradeferret @TranshumanBlues Exactly, they can make their own instance with features unique to it, they can make it most responsive despite having most users. They can make the sweetest app supporing only that instance, give it proper marketing. Lots of users would flock to them instead of trying to achieve the same on smaller instances and, once most users are on board, they might defederate others because, maintaining compatibility with others isn't cost effective, you know😩 @TranshumanBlues @davidrevoy - Possibly, such a development is part of the fear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September Usenet was great before AOL users (and spam) flooded it. I assume that any social medium will automatically collapse and become crap if a certain user base has been reached. It is not the algorithms, it is not the commercial background, and it is not advertisement. It is a social thing.  @TranshumanBlues @davidrevoy @Andres @TranshumanBlues @davidrevoy - Very good comment, thank you. There was a time when different messengers could communicate. What a great loss! @allo @Andres @TranshumanBlues @davidrevoy But Meta never enabled federation with other XMPP servers, so I'm not sure it matters @nyquildotorg Also GTalk was federated until the end, but they didn't migrate to TLS when the rest of the XMPP-Network decided to disallow unencrypted connections. @Andres @TranshumanBlues @davidrevoy hot take: Google didn't do anything to XMPP. They built Google Talk using XMPP, but never used federation as a marketing ploy to get people to use it. Existing nerds who were already using XMPP are the only ones who ever knew anything about Google Talk supporting federation. When Google Talk shut down, every single XMPP user who knew what XMPP was was unaffected. And are still unaffected. 🤷  @TranshumanBlues @davidrevoy I’m with you in this one. There were quite many polls recently which results i didn’t quite understood. They will also not be as much in control over their users by keeping them in their walled garden. If it looks better on any other instance/service they will be able to just hop over. Im hopeful that the fediverse will profit of it, but maybe i’m just missing the bigger picture here…  @TranshumanBlues Facebook has shown time and time again that they will not do anything for the good of anything but itself, and should not be trusted. It is idle to speculate *how* their project would be bad for us when we can already be morally certain about *whether* it will be. That said, data scraping is one bad behavior, protocol h*ckery is another, and flooding out the timeline is expected. @TranshumanBlues oh and to your final point, yeah of course they'd want to keep everyone inside their garden, but I'm more interested by the implication that the fediverse population size is significant to FB; they must be getting desperate to maintain growth numbers  Context: The Cambridge Analytica scandal: AOC grilling Mark Zuckerberg on Congress (it's not a gotcha, he keeps trying to evade hard questions that he should answer): Facebook enabling genocide in Myanmar: > People just submitted it. I don't know why. They "trust me". Dumb fucks. @TranshumanBlues So it's not the risk that someone will take that data. Facebook will take it, process it and package it ready for consumption. For a comparison, let's say the data is Uranium. One could say: Oh hey, this is dangerous, we better keep that safe. Mark Zuckerberg sees it, calls the kremlin, and says: Oh hey, we found some uranium ore in there. Pay us and we'll enrich it and build a nuclear warhead for you.  @TranshumanBlues @davidrevoy it's multiple things. any server that federated with FB will send data of any posts it receives to FB as well as what's made. also you only need to look at what's happened to community spaces on the web since FB rose to realise that they will kill Fedi too, because their drive is monopoly of the attention market. letting FB in would eventually cause the death of Fedi. see what Google did to XMPP for reference |
Gregory's Server
@TranshumanBlues @davidrevoy we should have pose it at every turn, is the main point. We can say that the fediverse is open for anyone, and that if you don't like it, you can just block them, or unfederated, but that doesn't solve the actual problem of evil tech corporations. It isn't enough to hope people will independently force them out. If we could do that, we would have done so already; they're too powerful, too wealthy. They need to be systematically strangled.