John Gruber Doesn't Know What He's Talking About
John Gruber Doesn't Know What He's Talking About
A legendary blogger weighs in on reactions from a user-run social network towards a big corporation diving into the space.
A response to Daring Fireball's recent thinkpieces about Fediverse admins wanting to block Meta's new ActivityPub platform.
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The self delusion and confusion demonstrated in this so-called response piece is so insurmountable that I truly feel pity for you. Mixing a bunch of related yet independent concepts and ideas does not help make a strong argument. You may gather more support if you just outright admit you are being anti-corporate. Btw in case you are unaware ActivityPub is a standard from W3C of which Meta is a member lol
This entire comment made me laugh out loud, thank you. You have a beautiful way with words.
Look, I've been on this network pretty much since it began 15 years ago. I did community management for Diaspora back in the day, regularly kept in contact with many people who ended up starting their own platforms, and have had a pretty good finger on the pulse of the network's discourse during all that time.
The general attitude of people who have come here has largely been one of these:
- Hey neat, an open source thing I can tinker with! And it federates!
- Fuck the place I'm coming from, I never want to have to deal with it ever again.
There are a myriad of motivations behind how and why different parts of this space was built. For a lot of people, it's a place to build their own communities, hang out with a bunch of people into niche stuff, and generally just chill out and have fun. For others, it's a lifeline for their own marginalized groups, a way to find kindred spirits and support each other.
But, I guarantee that it sure as hell wasn't to build pipelines back to centralized corporate silos run by people trying to maximize profits.
Blocking at the instance level at least lets communities keep that crap out of our streams, and that's a feature of the network. Meta can implement AP all they want, and they'll probably connect to a decent amount of servers - but a lot of people can say "Fuck this." and choose never to connect to them in the first place.
They can go right on doing what they're doing, and their experience will be exactly like it was before Meta showed up. Being able to see and interact with who you want to, and filter out who you want to, is a fundamental feature of the network.
Indeed as you said defederating is a built-in feature of most if not all fediverse networks. I have no opinion against that. Your server your rule. You can do whatever you want with it. Just like what Reddit does to it's APIs.
But I suppose you are supporting a manifesto, aren't you? I believe you want to be heard and to persuade others to follow suit. If that is really the case, you and your comrades are doing a real poor job.
The Thread thing is not out yet and we don't know whether it will really be out or not. There is literally zero detail to discuss. And your arguments revolving Facebook aka Meta's "bloody" history have demonstrated exactly that.
This is not just people going "Meta bad! Blocked!" as you seem to be arguing, this is the only possible reaction if we want to keep what has been build alive and not be razed to the ground, many of us saw this with our own eyes, me included, either we stop Meta at the door or the Fediverse is going to die, they have zero intentions or incentive to play the good guests here.
I think the story he's telling is mostly coherent.
The whole point is that Facebook's business model is fundamentally incompatible with the current vision for the Fediverse, it's like Steam announcing they will be seeding torrents from now on. They have an ulterior motive, and a track record including enabling genocide for example, so they are not to be trusted, they are doing it so that they can take value away from the Fediverse, not to add to it.
I see it the other way. These giants joining and thus enabling the mess joining alone is value added to the fediverse already. We have to admit most people do not give a shit to the fediverse, selfhosting, open source, bla bla bla. For them they just want it to work despite the latent costs. That's why selfhosted blogs gave way to blogspot.com and eventually Facebook and friends.
I think that you have a point, however both the author and I disagree. The goal is not to have the entire Facebook (or Twitter, or whatever) population come on the Fediverse. From my point of view, a federated system which is still central, not FOSS and that monetizes the users is already in clear violation of basically everything I want to fediverse to be. What would be gaining from this? Just a raw number of users? I don't think it is a worthy tradeoff.
Okay, but are those people really joining the Fediverse, or do they just continue to be Facebook/Instagram/Whatever users while having access to the value the Fediverse creates?
The counterargument seems to be that if the Fediverse's learning curve is too high, then it might wither and die. It's growing now, but good question about the future.
So here's an idea, why doesn't someone get in front of Meta on this one, and implement the SSO service they use (it has a public API for all the "log in w/ Facebook" stuff) into a few Lemmy or Kbin instances? The purported value of it being easier to join for Meta users is still there then, right?
While Meta's platform is having access to the value created in the fediverse, aren't we also getting access to the value created on their platforms too (of course unless you deny there is any value there)? Recipiocity is the true differentiator here in my opinion.
For software, I think we need a more complete package than that to truly unlease the fediverse. Maybe an easy-to-use application (a la an email client or a bittorrent client) that allows prospective users to spin up an instance and feel the magic themselves. Otherwise people are just crowding into a few major instances and eventually the scaling problem will show up again. If we are going down that route, we should also consider incentive model(s) that makes thing sustainable. Lemmy is an open source software but that also means the developers are unpaid. But surely I applaud any idea that attempts to reduce the barrier of entry to the fediverse.
aren’t we also getting access to the value created on their platforms too
I guess we are, just as we had access to Reddit's value. That's the fear I guess, this is just part of the business cycle.
First, they are going to provide value, be real nice until they are latched on, embrace the platform. Then they are going to start providing value to the instance owners by developing mod tools, better ways to more easily connect instances, maybe even some AI powered spam filter to block malicious instances, extending the.
Finally we'll realize they own the thing as they extinguish competitors by removing compatibility to "unverified" stuff in the name of security and we realized Meta has succeeded in extinguishing the free Fediverse.
It might not be like that, but it has been so many times.
Enshittifocation commences.
I don't mind chocolate in my peanut butter. But I don't want Meta in my Fediverse.
I wholeheartedly share the worry of rug pulling but we have to dance with the devils aka evil corps one way or another as we have no mean to eradicate them. As long as the goals aligned to a large enough extent, the alliance should still be accepted despite the unholiness.
Meta's platform(s) supporting ActivityPub can potentially give us a leverage. If they do honour how the system works and be reciprocal, it means they no longer monopolize the content (from which most values to us are derived) on its platforms. So if another Reddit madness happens again, valuable contents created would have been (or could be made) distributed across the fediverse already. That would make migration much easier. Just a change of URL and business as usual for most people. Of course you may say I am being overly optimistic here but there is no point in being pessimistic either. The whole Thread thing is still a rumour after all. Maybe it will never see the light of sun after all.
But that's the thing. For a lot of people here, the goals are fundamentally misaligned. Much of this space was made by, and is populated by, people who explicitly and specifically walked away from corporate social media.
We're here exactly because we don't want them.
Obviously, that's not everybody, but so many of us have actually learned the lessons of the last 15 months.
As the author Sean said in a response to my comment, defederating is always an option in the fediverse. It is a built-in feature. I am not against it. If some communities have enough spite to anything corporate social network, they can defederate as they please. Just bear in mind the spite is for everything corporate social network, the people and the content included. And there is no need to indulge in a grandiose manifesto. Just say "I hate Meta and anything associated with it" is more than enough.
@qazwsxedcrfv000 @Kichae could it even be narrower than 'corporate social media'? Ie maybe you run a tiny business and don't have a problem with companies just because they're companies. But you know monopolies are usually bad, so monopolies over the world's public digital squares & discourse must be really bad.
And so you ended up here, on Activity Pub, not completely convinced that an 8-million-monthly-active-user fediverse will survive federating with a 3-billion-daily-active-user monopoly.
could it even be narrower than 'corporate social media'?
Yes and no. Yes, in that for many people it's "Fuck Facebook in particular" because of just how absolutely invasive Meta has been, and how it has specifically turned brainwashing users into a business model.
No in the sense that corporate social media will all inevitably try to do the same thing, sooner or later, because social media that's actually usable for users' interests just isn't profitable. The enshitification process demands that we be manipulated into being more reactive, more hostile, and more open to the influence and exploitation.
I think the issue here is that I don't think you can assume that "the fediverse" is an entity with a "current vision" in fact it is specifically architected to have a plurality of visions