this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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So hold on, is this an open source space, a protocol or "like email"? Which of the poor analogies people use to convey excitiement about AcitivityPub are supposed to apply here?
Because, you know, Google got into the Linux space, into email and into open source software and it seems those survived the experience.
Google is actually a great parallel here, because of what they did to XMPP (the federated chat protocol). They implemented it for hangouts/gchat. It was a good on-ramp that allowed people to talk across platforms. Then Google created a bunch of features that only worked internally and not with XMPP. Then they removed XMPP.
XMPP didn't work on mobile. You had to have the app running to receive messages, and the battery wasn't large enough to keep the CPU powered up all day.
Google was right to abandon XMPP and pretty much every other platform did it at the same time. It's a shame they all chose proprietary solutions but XMPP was never really an option once smartphones entered the picture.
Somebody not being able to message me while I'm offline is a fantastic feature that I wish we still had. I miss that.
IIRC Slack did something similar with IRC.
@abhibeckert @dark_stang where are you getting all of this from?! Apps run in the background all the time, and there were mobile XMPP clients around back in the day. Pretty sure even Skype did XMPP for a bit.
Not really. Google is responsible for the open source browser Chromium, which is the base for Google Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, etc. They dominate the browser market, and they use their position to implement features outside the web standard. Their competitors (mainly Firefox) are not able to implement the non-standard features, driving them out of the market. Classic Embrace-Extend-Extinguish.
Technically, both Android and Chromebok are Linux-based. But Google has done everything possible so that they aren't part of the "Linux space", to the point that Android uses a fork of version 3.x of the Linux kernel (regular Linux is now at version 6.x).
Pretty sure that was Apple, not Google. Google joined the WebKit party later. By the time Google forked WebKit the other rendering engines (used by the FireFox and old versions of IE) were pretty much gone.
Also, Now that Google has forked WebKit, we're back to two competing engines. And at least on the websites I run our traffic is about 45% each (and 10% other). That's actually more healthy than it used to be (95% IE).
Private companies embracing open source browsers fixed a broken platform, it didn't embrace/extend/extinguish.
Yes, FireFox is struggling for marketshare. Personally I think their biggest problem is they have a legacy code base that dates back to Netscape. It's got nothing to do with Google.
Right. But you do notice how any of those scenarios fail to "extinguish" anything, right? I'm typing this on Firefox, which is still going strong and has negligible incompatibilities. Chromium didn't eradicate the competition by embracing open source, it did so by succeeding with their commercial product. The ONE competitor it didn't outright replace with its open source alternative is Firefox, in fact.
And in the other scenario Android simply forks and separates. Linux is clearly not threatened by Android or ChromeOS, and all of those remain viable, healthy alternatives to closed, paid competitors from Microsoft and Apple.
Can't have your cake and eat it, too. Either the open source environment based on Firefox and Linux is thriving or it's been dismantled by malicious adoption from commercial enterprises. Which is it?
Android is moving towards upstream linux, and chromeos is moving towards using wayland + the linux version of chromium
Yeah but these examples are all bigger than Google. The fediverse irrelevant in comparison.
If the bar for the fediverse surviving is "nice business folks that try to do good in general" then we're already doomed.
Just like political systems, social networks that require goodwill from their participants just don't work, you need to build a platform resilient enough to survive bad faith engagement, hence the need for moderation, among other tools.
That sounds nice in theory. Going to be very interesting how it holds up in practice.
Wait, you think it sounds nice in theory?
Because from where I stand, in theory it sounds like an abyss of paranoia and despair where any peaceful, functional social construct is one misstep away from the chaos of humanity's unchecked incentives devolving into self-destructive imbalance, with only the faintest barrier of civility and social engineering keeping our collective shit together.
I think "we should only talk to nice people and let them into our internet club" sounds nice in theory. I think "we should make our club so resilient and well regulated that even the worst of the worst can't destroy it or we're already doomed" sounds depressing but accurate.
What I meant by that is that I doubt that you can make your club so resilient. We are talking about a lot of social dynamics here. This isn’t a technical problem in any way. And the past has shown that network effects are a real thing. So inevitably if you give someone with a thousand times the resources and likely than the rest of the community the opportunity they will take it. It will become known as the main instance and everyone will join there. Smaller instances will become more irrelevant as they are already and at some point bow to what the largest instance dictates.
Take Lemmy for example. You can already see some of that happening with instances like beehaw. Do what they say or you get defederated. Naturally smaller instances will fall in line. What do you imagine happens if an instance joins that is as thousand times the size of the current entire network?
At some point it will be „do as we say or loose all your content“. Which will then lead to users switching instances where they have the access they want.
This is not a technical problem. The protocols can be nice and open. But that doesn’t help you if the network itself is fragile due to human nature.
What I meant is: It sounds nice in theory that you can build a social network in a federated way that is resilient to our social nature. I just have my concerns and going to watch with interest how it unfolds. It will likely take some years. But we‘ll see.
It is absolutely a technical problem, and if it isn't then we should shut down all social media.
I mean, beyond the fact that network effects don't care about federation (if people are gonna migrate to their Twitter clone they'll do it regardless), if social media can't be sustainably deployed at scale without harming society then it should be banned altogether.
I'm not convinced that is the scenario, though. It's a bit like Americans and healtcare or gun control going "it's impossible, how could it ever work" despite most of the world having figured it out. You can absolutely have the right requirements for moderation. You can absolutely set the right guardrails to prevent hostile activity. You can absolutely prosecute and punish infractions, both through in-app tools and through legal tools.
But yeah, if you think you can't do those things, then you should be campaigning to shut down the fediverse altogether, along with all other social networks, not to defederate from any Meta apps that want to use ActivityPub.
Nah. Why should I be against it? That’s a rather weird stance. I don’t really tend do deal in auch absolutes. But seeing that it’s a technical problem for you I don’t think there is merit in talking further about it. I don’t see it that way. Technology is just an enabler. It doesn’t much matter in these things.
It's debatable whether email survived. But yes, I do believe this problem is being blown out of proportion, it was inevitable that large companies would get into ActivityPub.
Try to start up your own independent email server instead of going with one of the largest providers. You will never be able to message anyone on Gmail.
Very much not true. All I've really had to do was create an SPF entry in my DNS and setup DKIM. Once that was done, it was okay.
The guys I regularly exchange email with have had no issues getting mail from my server.
That's funny, I just emailed someone on gmail from my personal server.
This just isn't true. It's admittedly a bit of setup to get DKIM, SPF, and all the other fun stuff required to send email properly, but Google will accpet mail from my server with no issue.