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My friends refuse to use anything else for our group chats so I’m stuck with it if I want to keep in touch. I don’t use it much outside of that. 🤷
Every time a big company gets into an open source space, they try to take it over. Hopefully everybody in the fediverse recognizes that.
It kind of doesn’t matter whether everyone in the fediverse recognizes it or not. People around here often forget that they are in the vast minority when it comes to tech literacy in the world. Most people are not interested in the experience that lemmy currently offers, because it’s far too complicated and people asking simple questions are often met with scoff and scorn, because the question has been asked before and they should have just searched for an answer or because it’s so simple, obviously it’s just <insert complicated technical explanation here>.
The fact that none of this is approachable to a tech naive person is precisely why microsoft killed OSS in the late 90s, why google killed XMPP, and why it’s extremely likely a place like meta or another company might succeed in effectively killing off a platform like activitypub (altho I don’t think it’ll kill it entirely, I do suspect that they will slowly kill it by bleeding users over to their platforms). You see, what these large brands have is recognition - people who are not tech literate still know what google is, what facebook is (they may not know they’ve rebranded to meta), and what microsoft is. These companies have the resources to throw actual designers at this space and provide a front end interface that is friendly to just about anyone. Combine good UX design with a company that people recognize and a huge platform from which to advertise to users (imagine logging into facebook and being presented with all the cool new things you can do on the fediverse) and you’ll get normal people trickling into the platform.
Here’s where things succeed - these platforms will start as open, and so all the normal people will now be able to talk with their tech friends who are also in the fediverse, and slowly these platforms will become monoliths. They’ll start curating the experience more as user reports roll in, and as they tighten the reigns. Over time you’ll find that you can’t reach these users unless you’re also on their platform, and your non-tech literate friends will ask you to migrate to their platform so you can continue to interact through the same channels that they’ve been interacting with you. While you may be unwilling to migrate, some people will be, and slowly but surely the platforms will dominate the space. They might be sunset eventually as a way to kill off the protocol, or they might just simply turn into their own walled garden.
The only way forward I can see which is resistant to attacks of capital of this nature are when an open source protocol actually starts to center design during the development of the platform. You can’t just tack a user design expert onto a platform like lemmy and ask them to make things make sense, because federation itself needs a whole new set of terminology, designed by people who understand how non-tech literate people think, and a whole new backend to support a front end that’s truly user friendly. But user design is not friendly to github and most developers aren’t designers, so this isn’t something I see being accomplished anytime soon. The best that can happen right now is for better platforms to be designed for front-end and UX designers (something akin to github but useful to designers), to work on implementing these kinds of people from the beginning, and for open source projects to start reaching out more to designers, to start spending donated money on designers, and to center design as an important principle to OSS protocols.
A discussion around tech is a distraction, and it’s a fallacy to think people are too illiterate to understand the problem. The problem is one of incentives, politics, and economic policies. The problem is that people have forgotten that a free market only serves the interests of paying customers. But users of online platforms are not paying customers. They are slaves to a system that will treat them like dirt because they get addicted to it.
It’s going to take a cultural revolution for people to learn this, not so different than it took generations to learn about the dangers of mercury/asbestos/cigarettes/climate change/plastic pollution. You are right that the change doesn’t happen with discussions around FOSS/fediverse/UX. It starts with a realization of the dangers.
There’s nothing wrong with Lemmy’s user interface design.
It has bugs, for sure, but if you just go to an instance, sign up, and browser the fediverse within that instance it’s a great experience.
You may find nothing wrong with the user interface, but I’m not you and I see plenty wrong with it. I’m not the only one with this opinion, as evidenced by a number of github bug requests, a near constant stream of questions in support communities on these websites, all of the votes my comment is receiving, and well, just asking like 10 random people what they think. I would encourage you to try to put yourself in other people’s shoes - if you’re struggling with that, simply ask them how they feel and listen to what they have to say.
Oh it’s absolutely full of UX bugs, for sure. But those are all clearly just bugs, they’re not a design problem.
There’s nothing wrong with Lemmy’s user interface design.
as a not-tech-savvy (relative to other users here, anyways) person: i have absolutely no idea how you can say this with confidence. Lemmy’s UI and UX is probably still on the worse end of FOSS projects i’ve used and i’ve had a year and a half to get used to it. i still have to double back to find certain settings that i use literally every day in moderating the site! i hang with it because i know the developers are slammed, but this would not fly with even most of my friends, much less my mom or someone who has extremely low computer literacy and mostly learns by repetition.
Looks at article.
Yeah, I think they might realize it lol
Happy to see it though, I’ve been saying they should be defederated right out of the gate ever since I first saw these rumors.
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I don’t see what there is to gain from this, I don’t want mega-corporation in my social media anymore. especially not after what has been happening to their platforms. if their users want to join the fediverse, the account creation process is always open as long as they can follow the rules!
And of course there’s always the fact that their end goal will not be good for any of us, no matter what it is there is a 0% chance our interests align
Yes, please. We can’t expect anything good coming from them.
Last time we were burned (or at least I am aware of) was with Jabber and Google Talk.
It helped them bootstrap their instant messaging, and once everyone was using it they simply blocked access.
It is pretty much guaranteed that Facebook will do the same thing.
Good! Meta has proven time and time again that them and their services are not to be trusted. Deplatforming that trashfire before it even starts is a smart move.
Okay, someone explain to me cus i apparently don’t have the critical thinking skills to figure it out on my own.
What does Meta want from joining the fediverse? What is the draw for them???
There’s a business strategy called embrace, extend, extinguish that they’ll try to use to snuff out the fediverse.
They were bleeding users so they want some ways to tap into existing user pool and they think it is easy to get that by simply federating, but they are about to find out the hard way why it won’t go the way they want.
This was a very illuminating view from another post
Read this one earlier. Great article, wonderfully written.
How weird would it be if all those “I do not give Facebook permission to blah blah rights blah” posts/statements actually did have legal weight in the Fediverse?
I think the plan should be bracing for impact, and how to deal with the after-effect. Because let’s be honest, we are in a late stage capitalism, and Meta megacorp will get what it wants.
I don’t currently see it spilling it’s poison to Lemmy/kbin. I’m hopeful rather, but I may be misunderstanding how the fediverse works.
But for mastodon, I would say the outcome is a segregation, as it’s safe to assume that communities that integrate wirh Meta will be consumed. Unfortunately that likely means starting from scratch, with a even nichier community, as far as I can see. Not exactly from nothing, but content loss will be inevitable, which is the Fediverse greatest weakness imho.
Am I living in a different planet from the rest of the commenters here? We have much more to gain from this than they do.
Not really no.
The process of “embrace, extend and extinguish” has been used multiple times to destroy FLOSS projects from the inside.
Of the top of my head:
- Kerberos
- Office formats
- XMPP
I’ve just got back from a run so my brain is not fully connected, so others can give other examples.
Meta do not want to join the party for fun. They want to join because it is the only way they can smother it.
Can you elaborate on them? Stating just the names requires you to already be aware of how they were taken over.
I recommend checking this article out https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
@ericflo@lemmy.ml as well
I’ve been reading up on this very thing today. Let me put it to you in paraphrase as I heard it. What we have to lose is a truly federated network - it has happened before, and it can happen again. Facebook, when faced with an app that most users preferred, chose to buy it, and now Instagram is just as big a project concern as the rest of Meta.
You can’t buy a federated network, but you sure can improve on it, just as Google did with XMPP in days of yore. Once a federated chat protocol much as we’re on a federated social network, Google introduced Google Talk in 05, and federated it via XMPP in 06. They introduced a variety of features and QOL over the years, and being as big as they were, they held a vast majority of the users across all XMPP platforms.
Then, in 2013, they announced that Google Talk would be phased out and as a result, a huge chunk of the federated community would be walled. All of a sudden, a thriving federated community was mostly just Google.
People join just to talk to their friends, and to make friends; if most of those people went to Google for their features and most of their friends were there too, there was no big loss for them. It’d be like if Reddit used to be an instance all on its own and then suddenly decided to unfederate completely.
That’s not to say that all this will happen with Meta, but I guarantee that is their goal.
Look up what happened to XMPP (Jabber) when Google “integrated” with them.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Happy to report that XMPP is alive and kicking 🙂
(And thanks for sharing, I am with Ploum on that)
Also, fun fact, Facebook messenger was XMPP compatible at some point, and just like Google, they eventually shut down federation to the detriment of the XMPP users as soon as they became close enough to a monopoly
A naive planet. Google embrace, extend, extinguish. For profit companies do not want a free community taking away from their ad revenue and they see that the fediverse is something that could take users away from their platforms.
If you trust meta, I’m sorry but your an idiot.
What would we gain?
I thought Meta had said they weren’t intending to federate (at least at first)?
It’ll be interesting to see what happens with this in the long run. I think the fediverse see’s Meta’s EEE play coming from a mile away compared to previous examples of big corps killing a standard. If Meta really does fork ActivityPub, I could see two webs of federation existing side by side. Enough of the fediverse is against Meta’s integration that Meta breaking the ActivityPub standard won’t force everyone to follow along. If enough instances stick to spec, then there’s still a fediverse to interact with on spec. Some will if they think the large user base Meta brings is worth it, but not all.
That website’s background is giving me some 1980s Macintosh vibes. I like it!
Edit: I went ahead and made a Macintosh background image to use on my desktop. Only 87 bytes!
In a strange parallel to the current Russian political situation, can one at least hope that Meta drives a stake through the heart of the bird site before this effort implodes?
Probably not, I guess. If the Lizard King actually gets to the point that he poses a real threat, it is probably because he has eaten us first.
Lol I like that, “the bird site”
