How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) écrit par Ploum, Lionel Dricot, ingénieur, écrivain de science-fiction, développeur de logiciels libres.

This blog post by Ploum, who was part of the original XMPP efforts long ago, describes how Google killed one great federated service, which shows why the Fediverse must not give Meta the chance

  •  jherazob   ( @jherazob@beehaw.org ) OPEnglish
    18•1 year ago

    At this point it wouldn’t matter, all they need to do is to mess with the protocol and it’d achieve the same thing, Meta and everything in it’s sphere would “work well”, but connecting with true ActivityPub servers would work just glitchy enough to annoy their users and point the fingers towards our side, just like it happened with XMPP

            •  casey is remote   ( @realcaseyrollins@social.freetalklive.com ) 
              2•1 year ago

              @jherazob I care more about the effects than intent in this case.

              #Meta’s #Threads / #Barcelona / #Project92 doesn’t have the ability to do anything actually negative to the #Fediverse except potentially overload small instances with a flood of traffic.

              I don’t get the fearmongering; lots of talk about “breaking the #Fediverse” coming from people who aren’t really doing a good job of articulating how exactly a new #Fediverse software–because that’s all this is at the end of the day–will break an entire network of software that already works with each other.

              •  Hexorg   ( @Hexorg@beehaw.org ) 
                7•1 year ago

                Example: Meta federates with lemmy. Lemmy is small so it gets more feature requests than it can code up. Meta comes in and looks at the most requested feature that’s been put on lemmy’s backlog. Let’s say it’s some mod tool. Maybe even AI mod tool that sorts comments based on sentiment analysis. And they only implement that feature for Meta clients - not for lemmy. Suddenly mods have a choice - use lemmy and face flood of trolls in their communities or move to Meta and be able to properly moderate those troll waves. Some will stay, some will move. Another new cool feature for Meta, some will stay, some will move. Eventually most users will be on Meta client because it has all these useful features. OP’s article describes the rest.

                •  casey is remote   ( @realcaseyrollins@social.freetalklive.com ) 
                  2•1 year ago

                  @Hexorg

                  > Lemmy is small so it gets more feature requests than it can code up.

                  Why? From who? Are a lot of #Meta users who are on #Project92 / #Barcelona / #Threads *really* going to be submitting feature requests for a software that they don’t use?

                  > Meta comes in and looks at the most requested feature that’s been put on lemmy’s backlog. Let’s say it’s some mod tool. Maybe even AI mod tool that sorts comments based on sentiment analysis.

                  What are the chances that this is something so significant that people would be willing to switch software over it?

                  > use lemmy and face flood of trolls in their communities

                  Where are these users coming from? This is already a problem on the #Fediverse, and we already know how to deal with it.

                  This scenario you’re pitching seems wildly implausible.

                  •  Hexorg   ( @Hexorg@beehaw.org ) 
                    5•1 year ago

                    Why? From Who?

                    From everyone like right now where there’s a bunch of bugs and wants to have certain tools for moderation. Just look at how many issues have been added to lemmy in the past 3 weeks. And that’s just a fraction of Reddit users joining. Having millions of Facebook users being able to interact with lemmy will likely expose many more bugs and show the need for more moderation.

                    Same applies to your question about the troll wave - they are currently coming from Reddit. And once Meta joins - more fediverse exposure will let more people know of fediverse, and those new people will have trolls among them.

                    What are the chances that this is something so significant that people would be willing to switch software over it?

                    Meta has been in the market of attracting people for a long time. Don’t underestimate their R&D . People on Reddit used to join subs just for having certain bots. Meta can easily bring a ChatGPT bot to lemmy for example. Again this might not attract you but you have to think about the average person.

                    I think your one good argument against my scenario is defederation. Unlike XMPP the fediverse is already gaining critical mass where defederation can be a viable option. But again I’m sure Meta R&D can “help” with it