Spyke

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Meta can rage farm Mastodon without controlling it

So many knee-jerk reactions.

This is an open protocol with complete freedom to create apps and scripts. If this becomes an issue users could block certain interactions in a granular manner, for example block replies from certain instances.

XMPP being thrown around as an example makes me think people who do it weren't there to witness it. XMPP by itself wasn't really used by many but there were also many more popular messaging platforms at the time. XMPP wasn't killed because it wasn't ever alive other than short golden era when it was mostly a way to open itself to third party clients (Gaim, Trillian, Adium etc) which was very nice.

Next year EU is going to make all tech giants open in this way again. Mastodon can EEE Threads too by being a better implementation. It has no commercial pressure and Activity Pub and formatting tweets is not as complex as a web browser engine or a word processor document format which are way better examples of successful EEE.

If you defederate you'll end up exactly where XMPP is.

europe

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*Permanently Deleted*

I wouldn't reinvent the wheel and borrow r/Europe rules as a starting point.

Maybe do a little bit more proactive moderation to that community. r/Europe threads could sometimes go off the rails and had cleanup many hours later - I think it's OK to lock down before that happens (is locking posts a thing on Lemmy?).

Another approach is to keep rules simple and do a complete philosophy and rule walkthrough separately. I penned this monstrosity for polish subreddit back in the day (linking to archived version since I left since then and it got some meh updates in the meantime).

Yet another approach is to have a philosophy page like Tildes does. It's clear enough that you disallow assholery and bigotry but community like this definitely needs submission rules on top anyway.

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Meta can rage farm Mastodon without controlling it

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Embrace, extend, extinguish.

Embrace an open standard by using it yourself, start extending it at a pace competitors can't (preferably obfuscating how it works), leave everyone behind.

A good example is Microsoft Internet Explorer back in the day. Web technologies like HTML and CSS are open standards and at the time fairly straightforward. Once Microsoft hit critical mass by bundling IE with Windows they took leadership from Netscape and started adding more and more proprietary crap like ActiveX which some sites opted to use because everyone was using IE anyway and people using other browsers were forced to use IE. This was also a major issue for Linux users at the time.

It took years of regulatory / antitrust pressure, tremendous effort from Mozilla and their browsers, as well as big players like Google and Apple embracing KHTML (later forked into WebKit and then Blink engines) to unscrew humanity from that depressing era of internet history.

Web browsers working slightly differently is still an issue without anyone breaking compatibility on purpose. It was just so much worse when someone did it maliciously.

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[Facebook federation megathread] Downvote this post if you want lemm.ee to federate with Threads. (Updated)

I'm for federating with any instance that doesn't exist explicitly to break this community rules. I turned blind eye to not defederating Exploding Heads because Lemm.ee is a small server that doesn't host any big communities they could interfere with. I thought it was an indication that it's an instance that would allow me to curate my experience.

This is a European server, it's fair to assume most of the users here are protected by GDPR. The talk of scraping data seems like a nonsense, Meta can do it without federating. And as Elon learned, closing your APIs means other entities will do web scraping which puts more stress on your infrastructure.

I don't understand how most people here are for open standards, interoperability and the moment their protocol of choice gets traction they drop everything and opt to create their walled garden, except with 5 dozens of people. This is it, you've literally won. I guess some people will keep fighting big corporations for any reason on principle. That's ok but not something most people are interested in.

There's a lot of talk about how XMPP was killed by Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. I'm convinced 99% people posting that same blog post that sells opinions as facts, haven't actually lived through it. XMPP was embraced, then Google and Facebook got bored, dropped it and moved on. They did not poison the protocol in any way.

If Meta tries to extend Activity Pub in a malicious way then that's the point you defederate. If they get bored of Activity Pub and move on you have lost nothing, you probably gained more users than you would if you didn't federate. I don't believe it will come to this, EU Digital Markets Act means more platforms will have to open up, other commercial platforms will join in to capitalize on that and we'll end up with consortiums coming up with reasonable changes to standards. If not they'll get bonked by EU regulators with even more laws.

Finally, it's a shame that we've done this vote via Lemmy post. It has hit "All" view for a lot of people who are not part of this instance and probably irreversibly poisoned this discussion.

europe

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Austrian leader proposes enshrining the use of cash in his country’s constitution

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This is all technically true but cash is not the answer.

Right now there are so many easily accessible ways for governments to spy on people (cell phone geolocation, call metadata monitoring) that I'm not sure that for the purposes you think of you aren't screwed already anyway. From this perspective fight for cash use becomes a bit theoretical.

The only people that I know of personally that are strongly for cash are either people that frequently skirt around taxes ("minor" stuff like car repair shops) and unfortunately conspiracy nuts. Genuine privacy oriented people exist but realistically the majority will be there for selfish reasons.

The societal cost of tax evasion, money laundering and financing organisations that legally require transparency (political orgs, NGOs etc) are massive and immediate.

What we really need is strong oversight of institutions, government transparency, rule of law and healthy democracy. Those are the things you want to enshrine in your constitution.

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Meta can rage farm Mastodon without controlling it

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https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/digital-markets-act-ensuring-fair-and-open-digital-markets_en

Examples of the “do’s” - Gatekeeper platforms will have to:

  • allow third parties to inter-operate with the gatekeeper’s own services in certain specific situations

Example of the “don'ts” - Gatekeeper platforms may no longer:

  • treat services and products offered by the gatekeeper itself more favourably in ranking than similar services or products offered by third parties on the gatekeeper's platform
  • prevent consumers from linking up to businesses outside their platforms
  • track end users outside of the gatekeepers' core platform service for the purpose of targeted advertising, without effective consent having been granted

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How many people here have actually used XMPP?

Back in the day, like many people then, I had a couple of different accounts across multiple messaging platforms. 2 domestic ones, couple of international ones. It was a fun mess but people were tired of running multiple apps and so loads of multi-protocol apps were developed.

Usually messaging protocols were simply reverse engineered and some apps also used plug-ins so that niche protocols could be added by community. Some also did gateways that translated proprietary protocols to XMPP.

By the end of that era many platforms opened themselves up with XMPP. It was nice because most of those multi-protocol apps didn't have to support as many different platforms explicitly.

But that's about it. I had a Google Talk account too and found it cute that I can use it to add my friends on other platforms. I was a nerdbut barely knew any other people that were utilizing it. Realistically it didn't make any difference because you still had to use multi-protocol app for the ones that didn't open.

Soon platforms that were never on or barely on XMPP started to take over. Messenger was the biggest in my country and it was always a PITA on third party apps.

Google Talk doing a rug pull on XMPP didn't to anything meaningful to XMPP itself. It was never that big and simply remains a niche to this day.

I too get an impression that a single article on XMPP Gtalk drama made round on Fediverse that many made their opinion solely on it.