Technology

One important key lesson that everyone misses is funding ... we have to normalize paying a bit of money through donations or subscriptions to those people that maintain instances and those people who maintain, update and build the software ... if we all just keep tell ourselves that we all just keep our heads down, lock the door and don't bother to pay anyone to keep the door locked ... the same problems of the past will always emerge .... Owners, developers, programmers, instance maintainers just running out of money and enthusiasm because they have the shoulder the financial costs while everyone ignores them and takes everything for granted.

If we all just keep expecting volunteers to keep everything running for us for free ... eventually we will run out of willing volunteers as the community grows and the costs add up over time as instances grow more popular

SUPPORT YOUR INSTANCE ... whatever platform it is and whatever amount of money you can give ... even if it means we just give a dollar a day, across hundreds or thousands of user, it will protect your instance owner, and ensure that the people running your instance never run into a situation where they have to decide on either ending their work ... or selling everything they have to make a bit of money back.

The microblogging corner of the fediverse definitely needs a bit of restructuring to make it robust against something like this. A lot of people are on larger servers that are openly inviting Meta, even excited about their arrival, and believe very strongly that the space should be completely open.

They actively speak of people not wanting to federate with everyone as trying to "destroy" the Fediverse by making people who are totally married to a non-distributed service model fear or detest the space. There are many people on their websites who think they want something like this to happen, so that "everyone" will be here, and it'll be just like on Twitter (or something). But I don't think they're actually going to like it once the space is flooded with people who are jacked up on psychological manipulation and who don't even know the rest of space exists.

The people who come to the Fediverse and stay all end up saying the same thing: "It feels like what X used to feel like". And X used to feel that way because corporate interests weren't pushing their anger and aggravation buttons every 15 seconds, nor that of everyone they interacted with. But the space will be dominated by people getting poked and prodded for profit, and things will turn sour.

And they might not even ever recognize why it happened, because they believe they want this.

The issue is that the fediverse is not going to present a unified front at this rate, it is already split over whether to defederate meta or not. We don't know whether the administrators of largest instances that joined the NDA talks with meta are going to defederate too.

I agree there's no reason to panic, but that doesn't mean that nothing should be done. The anti-meta-federation act or however it is called is a good step to get the community on board, as well as sharing articles like these and informing people about what is coming.

I doubt people who would use Meta's instance are the sort of interesting people I'm on Lemmy for.

And really it's nonsense. If we wanted to be on Facebook then we already would be. Meta coming in and telling everyone how to run their instances because a Facebook user might see their content, won't bode well.

I made an imgur dump just for you: https://imgur.com/gallery/00M5Kle

Voat died because it was landed with a big chunk of the toxicity ejected from reddit. This isn't the same thing at all.

The risk to the Fediverse from huge commercial players is described well here: How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)

In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they were not 100% in control. So they pulled the plug and announced they would not be federated anymore. And started a long quest to create a messenger, starting with Hangout (which was followed by Allo, Duo. I lost count after that).

As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all. But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them, we were simply offline. It was our fault.

And it's not an accident:

What Google did to XMPP was not new. In fact, in 1998, Microsoft engineer Vinod Vallopllil explicitly wrote a text titled "Blunting OSS attacks" where he suggested to "de-commoditize protocols & applications […]. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS project’s entry into the market."

Microsoft put that theory in practice with the release of Windows 2000 which offered support for the Kerberos security protocol. But that protocol was extended. The specifications of those extensions could be freely downloaded but required to accept a license which forbid you to implement those extensions. As soon as you clicked "OK", you could not work on any open source version of Kerberos. The goal was explicitly to kill any competing networking project such as Samba.

This anecdote was told Glyn Moody in his book "Rebel Code" and demonstrates that killing open source and decentralised projects are really conscious objectives. It never happens randomly and is never caused by bad luck.