this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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I think among other issues would be the Gmail-ification and iMessage-ification of the fediverse. What I mean by that is open standards like email are dominated today by many people using Gmail accounts as it is popular, “free”, and comes with a ton of features. Then google started “walling off their garden” by adding features that only work between gmail accounts. Similarly, apple also took the open standard SMS and started adding on features only available between other iPhones.
What we might see is some of the coolest features the fediverse has ever seen, but it will come at the cost of most users ignoring or dealing less with "irrelevant" things not on meta ran instances.
Hope we can resist such a change, but that is what I am concerned about.
@emi @Helix those standards don't really change though. We have the power over ActivityPub. Plus, if they do create cool features, why would we not also add them?
Who is 'we'? And who doesn't say that there's something on top of activitypub?
Because we don't have multiple thousands of paid developers.
@Helix we have a legion of trans coders in pink striped programmer socks. They can do anything!
One of the "powers" of OSS is that the license usually required changes to be fed back upstream.
If Meta were not to do that the authors of Lemmy could ask someone like EFF to take legal proceeding against them.
Facebook can easily circumvent most requirements like that if the license isn't invasivively copyleft. Usually web standards have permissive licenses.
i'm not sure if ActivityPub is copyleft or not. meta might be able to build proprietary features on top of it if the license isn't viral.
If it is copyleft, they will probably try to reimplement it permissively.
ActivityPub itself is just a protocol, everybody can reimplement it. Lemmy and Mastodon are AGPL3 and thus copyleft along with "you must release source code for your server".
Though if Meta does anything, I'd expect it to be written from scratch and MIT licensed. Companies don't like to get near anything GPL as long as they can avoid it.
Having worked at a company with thousands of developers, that's a significant advantage for us.
Well think of the iMessage example for a second, other phone manufactures wanted to extend upon SMS with RCS to enable cross-platform read-receipts, better image quality on messages, and more... and you can use RCS between various android phones, but apple has not yet adopted RCS. Then because of the pre-existing market share of iPhones being so high, if you want read-receipts, high quality image messages, and more you with most of your contacts will either have to convince all of your friends and loved ones to use a third party app or cave and get an iPhone.
The features don't have to be revolutionary, they just have to find ways to flex their market share with their features. And their market share is almost destine to be huge if they put any meaningful effort or money behind it.
That's an interesting example, but note that in Europe, at least, WhatsApp is king. I only mention it because the walled-garden approach Apple favours isn't necessarily a guaranteed outcome, and third-party apps can happily become the norm among non-tech people.
This is true, and line is king in Japan and yet I believe the most common third party messenger app in the US is Facebook messenger despite its obvious flaws. Why, because it has more features than sms, and most people already have an account.
No matter which way you slice it, companies that can profit off communication will try to wall off their market share. Which is one of the things the fediverse aims to cure.
Yup, hard agree with you on that last point.
Just a different walled garden.
My Russian friends are all in VK, my Russian relatives are all in Telegram, my Armenian relatives are all in Facebook Messenger, and my American relatives are all in WhatsApp and Skype.
I'm so tired of this shit TBF. Is it so hard to just install Conversations once for Android and whatever for iOS?
I'm hoping RCS' burgeoning ubiquity on Android breaks some of the walls down in Europe, at least.
XMPP would be better, but this is something, yes.
We'll probably have to create our own implementations, but I don't see the issue in that either.
If there are some big players (like in email), i think the biggest risk is that the big players would end up only talking to each other.
Similar to email, where a random host is likely to be spamming, that might happen here too. (Although I'm not that familiar with the protocols here)
In the Fediverse you are still 100% under the control of whoever runs the server. Your user accounts can't move between servers. There is no easy way to export communities and import them on other hosts. On top of that, all the federated features are completely optional and can be switched off.
Fediverse really doesn't offer any securities beyond what a plain old Web forum does, all the federation aspects depend on everybody playing nice with each other.
At the moment even basic GDPR conformity isn't given, as there is no way to export all your data from an instance, a deletion request for your data also doesn't seem to be guaranteed to make it to other instances.
If Facebook builds something with ActivityPub and it gets popular they can play the whole embrace, extend, and extinguish game from start to finish.
Limited developer time.
@CanadaPlus this is referring to far in the future. In the long scale of things, developer time is not so limited. Fedi doesn't necessarily have a time limit after all, it's just going to go stronger over time. I don't see a stopping point.
Ah. Yes, in the asymptotic future limit everything can be implemented twice as long as there's social opportunity to do so. I wonder if that applies back to Gmail as well, will we see an open-source federated G-suite?
@CanadaPlus so are you expecting there to just be zero progress in the future? What do you think the fedi will look like in 10 years? And yes, there are foss tools to replicate all of gsuite. What a pessimistic view not even based in reality.
... You're OP. You said you were referring to the far future. I was literally just agreeing with you.
Individually. Nothing that's all integrated, though. Like, I can use Proton for certain things, but only with other Proton users, and it's not seamless and feature-rich the way G-suite is (again, yet, maybe that will change).
Even though email is supposedly "open", and federated, is no longer is really the case. Big services like Gmail are suspicious of non-big-name servers, and often flag email coming from them as spam.
About a year ago I came across an article from a guy who'd been running his own email server since the 90s, and finally gave up. I couldn't find that article in my quick search, but I did find this:
https://twitter.com/greg_1_anderson/status/1425113874722820100
"I run my own email server. It's no longer a good idea, because the anti-spam arms race makes delivery from small independent servers very difficult, even when you keep yourself off the block lists, so it's a continuous struggle. Would switch, but I have too many domains/addresses"
This is very true, I have hosted my own email before and if you are doing it yourself and not going through a big player like google to host it then your stuff sometimes gets treated as suspect by filters. Used to beg people with Gmail accounts to flag my emails as "not spam" whenever it showed up in the spam folder.
That's still better than the unfederated status-quo, though.