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by luckystarr 1084 days ago
This will not benefit Mastodon/Fediverse, but it will benefit Meta because of the already available content. It's basically solving their chicken-or-egg problem for them.

I'm not at all sure this will be good for the Fediverse. I already see Meta "improving" upon ActivityPub in incompatible ways, urging people to just use their app (potential quote: "you can see all of the Fediverse anyways") and in the long run (when their own "instance" is big enough) will pull the plug again and be on its own.
1 comments
smoldesu 1084 days ago
Free Software isn't about picking and choosing who gets to run your program or interact with your protocol. Federation is, but the concept of Meta using ActivityPub has nothing inherently wrong with it.

If Meta has the gall to rug-pull the entire Fediverse, things will just return to the same status quo they are today. Multiple content silos with thousands of freely-federating alternative platforms. As a Mastodon user I can't say I'm very scared of it, such a decision would hurt Meta more than it helps them.

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luckystarr 1084 days ago
> Free Software isn't about picking and choosing who gets to run your program or interact with your protocol. Federation is, but the concept of Meta using ActivityPub has nothing inherently wrong with it.

Meta can ActivityPub themselves all day long, as far as I'm concerned. If I were a server operator, I wouldn't let them anywhere NEAR my users though, so no federation with them.

> If Meta has the gall to rug-pull the entire Fediverse, things will just return to the same status quo they are today.

This is very optimistic. EEE in the past didn't turn out that way. I can imagine the Fediverse being an empty husk with no (significant) life left, but that's just my fears.

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smoldesu 1084 days ago
Many people already imagine the Fediverse being an empty husk with no significant life left. I'm using the platform today, and I'm perfectly happy.

The EEE attempts on a major open platform haven't even reached step 3, arguably. ActiveX, XServe, Flash and Silverlight all failed spectacularly at their goal of co-opting and extinguishing the concept of the internet. Considering how Meta has no meaningful leverage over the Fediverse community, I think your fears are unwarranted. Best case scenario, Meta plays by the rules and federates well-regulated content into everyone's feeds like Twitter with less extremism. Worst-case scenario, Meta goes crazy and takes all the normies with them to their closed Threads landscape, returning things to how they are now (dense with nerds and misfits). I don't think Meta enthusiasts or current Fediverse denizens would care either way.

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Yoshino 1083 days ago
Off topic, but wasn’t Xserve just Apple’s rack mount system running Mac OS X Server? How was it trying to co-opt and extinguish the internet? (Not snarking, genuinely curious)
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jtode 1083 days ago
There is a pact to instantly defederate, many have already preemptively blocked their domains.

I deleted my account this morning, with a backup natch - nice thing about Mastodon, I can start up exactly where I left off, including whatever followers come over to the non-Meta side of the schism.

People act like the schism Fedi being small is a bad thing, I don't think we're supposed to interact with the entire planet as individuals. We apes do not have the capacity to handle it.

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luckystarr 1083 days ago
The limit of people we can effectively interact with in a group setting is around 150. This is a limit of our brain, probably the neocortex, because bigger neocortexes lead to bigger group sizes in primates.

This is called Dunbar's Number.

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jtode 1082 days ago
This sounds about right to my dilletante's cognition.
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