this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Found this post super informative as it relates to Mastodon, and thought Lemmy might also benefit from this perspective. I'm not sure I share his optimism, but his points seem sound to dampen some of the alarm bells over Meta joining the Fediverse.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (13 children)

I think the people that value being on a decentralized service will stay on a decentralized server. The people that would abandon one platform to follow their favorite "high follower" poster are normies that never cared about what service they were using to begin with. Meta may absolutely take a large share of users to their platform in the future if they shut off federation and our favorite celebrities and shitposters are no longer visible. But I don't really see how that is any different than Twitter currently having all the celebrities and high volume shitposters. We already can't see them. The EEE argument just strikes me as sour grapes that "their" users are going somewhere else. And I'm on the fediverse (both Mastodon and kbin) so I see the value here. But I'm not going to get angry that normies don't want to put the effort into learning this ecosystem when they have their own lives and struggles and a limited number of social causes to care about.

Now what does bother me is Meta having an outsized influence on the development of the protocol of ActivityPub. We've seen something similar to this with Google using Chrome to push some additions to how browsers handle HTML standards/elements, like supporting DRM.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (8 children)

All I can say is that, I started using Jabber before GTalk federation, but ultimately Google made me leave Jabber.

What actually happened is that some friends who originally were on Jabber switched to GTalk, because later Google added it to Gmail, making it more convenient.

So essentially when they defederated, my network was pretty empty.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Why didn't your friends return to Jabber once GTalk locked them out?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Because GTalk integrated with Gmail and with ability to still having access to other friends was much more convenient and they didn't care about who owns their favorite instant messaging network. And majority of their friends were also on Google.

The truth is that only purists will stay, and most people (even tech people) don't give damn about being locked out.

Google also broke things in a subtle way. You could see the person is online, if they messaged you you would get their message, if you messaged them, your message would show as delivered, but never get to them.

So first thing you thought that maybe they are just busy. When you started suspecting something is not right then it made you think that maybe there's an issue with Jabber etc

I don't think the defederation was ever announced, it was more like a bug that was never fixed.

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