this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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Extension implies that the protocol is missing some capability, otherwise it wouldn't need to be extended. So we need to make the protocol better so they have nothing to add. If we don't add those capabilities, ever, then the protocol is doomed to eventual irrelevance and wasn't worth fighting over anyway.
You're assuming some kind of objective point of view, but there are competing interests involved here. Those "capabilities" need not be things that are in the interest of the end users. For example, DRM, micropayments to unlock content, region coding, state censorship, etc etc etc. Bullshit that capital uses to exploit humans.
The protocol might well be complete and need no "extension" (as you mean the word) for us, and yet Meta might have many things they want to extend it to do. The whole point of this is, we have conflicting interests. Meta can push things that are not in their users interests because they have leverage. They hold our friends and their content hostage. And they lie and manipulate their users, who simply don't care about things like this. Your idea that we are talking about our protocol vs their extensions competing on merits that appeal to users is just totally missunderstanding the objections.
I think you are getting too hung up on the term EEE. You think you know what the individual words mean, so you know what it's all about. But a name is not the thing it represents. It's just a name for a complex strategy that has been used successfully against us many times in the past. Rather than quibbling with the definition, you should probably spend some time reading the history.
There is an ultimate objective point of view: adoption. Network effects matter for social software. Even if you don't like things like DRM, micropayments, region locking or whatever, if you don't build in to the protocol ways to do those things, people and corporations will find ways to do them around the protocol - and that's where abuse of power and EEE risk happens. Adapt or die. I've been around long enough to see this happen many times and know what I'm talking about, so attempting to belittle me by telling me to go read history is kind of pointless. Also Facebook destroyed my startup, literally, so it's not like I'm some big fan. I just know a positive-sum development when I see one.
Yeah, sorry you don't mind if I take it with a couple grains of salt please? Those two lines look like they could be in conflict with each other without more information.
I developed an early VR game called Soundboxing. It was a VR beat game before Beat Saber. It was doing hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales on Steam, but Facebook repeatedly denied us access to their store with no explanation, bought Beat Saber, basically took over the industry and shut us out. They even sent us early Quest devkits that we spent 6 months porting to, only to be denied again. I'm super salty about it all tbh. But yeah, this is not that, this I see as an absolute win.
If this is not that, then what is it? Because I don't feel either direction which way it's going. Gut feelings aren't the greatest metric to go by anyway.
People have been burned by companies before, see Reddit, twitter, XMPP and a multitude of other situations. And people feel if we forget that and don't at least take precautions against it that it will happen again.
Also it's been the case where companies have had good intentions, only to backtrack 2, 3, 4, or 5+ years down the track, forgetting their original reasoning - while it might be an absolute win now, the future is hard to tell. And on the internet a lot can happen. In 5 years. Just look how quickly the fediverse became relevant. How quickly Linux became a viable option for gaming. Shit changes so fast that it's hard to predict what happens.
Word is literally extended with intentional bugs, extensions will be arbitrary.
We can't add those capabilities, because they will also be proprietary and under copyright or patent. If you try, Meta will just sue you for the lolz.
EEE is not about outcompeting someone.