I’ve seen a lot of comments suggesting Threads should be pre-emptively defederated by Lemmy/kbin instances if it tries to join us. I’m a bit confused what the problem would be. When Meta does its usual corporate bullshit over at Threads, how would that hurt a user or community based on Lemmy.world? If anything, wouldn’t it give the fediverse a boost if Threads users start discovering communities outside of Meta’s control?
I presume I’m missing something, as you can probably tell I don’t fully understand how Lemmy, Threads or federation all work.
There is a known strategy called EEE (Embrace, extend, and extinguish).
First, they embrace the open web. Millions of people who never would’ve joined the Fediverse (and, probably, don’t even know what the Fediverse is) flock to Threads and start to interact with us.
Then, they extend the open web, adding features to Threads that aren’t compatible with our servers. People on Threads don’t understand what’s wrong with our server (even though it’s Threads that’s the source of incompatibility).
Finally, they decide they’re “having trouble maintaining compatibility with third party servers” and start to break off from us, leaving us with no way to interact with our new friends. Unless, of course, we make a free Threads account…
Google Talk is perhaps the most relevant example of this. Here’s more details.
Great article. It’s pretty obvious to me now that the Fediverse should have room to grow on it’s own naturally. It’s probably in the best interest to block any massive corporate entity from joining in and swallowing it whole.
It’s interesting seeing how fast it’s already growing due to mega corporate incompetence, and I think the sheer desire to escape that landscape is driving growth now and we should nurture that as long as possible.
The XMPP stories/comparisons are such bullshit, imho.
Sure, both Google and Facebook both used XMPP for a while (even at the same time, so you could message someone from Google on Facebook), but XMPP was an unpopular niche protocol before that and it’s still the same today. I used to be an uber (foss) nerd at the time but even for me the appeal was close to zero - although I’ve tried it several times.
I’ve also literally never heard of anyone signing up for Google or Facebook due to their alleged XMPP 3E strategy. Google Mail was already the most popular and most hyped mail provider and Facebook was at its height as the defacto quasi-monopolist social network as well - everyone who was willing to sign up with them had already long done so.
(Funnily enough, the Cisco in-house messaging and video calling solution we use at my work, through which we also receive landline calls, is still running on XMPP to this day, so I sorta became a XMPP user after all…except I haven’t started this software in 10 months because fuck landline calls and we have better alternatives for chatting.)
You are absolutely right. Really getting tired of that one post about how to destroy the Fediverse. XMPP and lemmy/kbin comparison are not equivalent. XMPP didn’t have enough users to sustain themselves in the first place. Also google tried the same with AMP and failed.
That’s a great article, thanks for sharing
Anything from meta or threads or instagram needs to be permabanned from our network. ban them NOW.
Wow, this is crucial reading. Previously I was basing my dislike for Threads federation because Meta but this has refined my overall stand greatly. Thanks for this.
This part:
From the EEE wikipedia page has given me PTSD.
I was required to implement this (IMAP with OAuth2) “simple change” but for a server backend service that checked an inbox to perform certain actions. That was certainly fun. In the end the solution wasn’t that difficult, but finding it and working it into legacy code…
XMPP wouldn’t be around even if Google never interacted with it. It died because that category of product died.
Sound to me like the worst case scenario is that some of the users gained in the debacle is also lost afterwards. Why would the users that joined the fediverse with a purpose leave for threads in the breakup?
The EEE strategy would lead to the big corporate entity being the way most people interact. New users would go there instead of other platforms to engage. In time, a lot of the users and content would be on the corporate platform because it’s the one that has the most reach, marketing, etc. so defederation would be a big hit.
And you don’t need to look too far to see it now. The majority of people posting on the threadiverse come from lemmy. world and kbin.social. Why? Because they were already the established “big instances” and they went there.
The average user will just go to wherever is the biggest and that will be threads. And when they have the majority of new take up and most people on the other side have the majority of their contacts inside the threads world, then they don’t need us any more.
This is just the way a corporation operates. Source: I work at a multinational corporation.
leaving us with no way to interact with our new friends.