How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)
How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)
How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) écrit par Ploum, Lionel Dricot, ingénieur, écrivain de science-fiction, développeur de logiciels libres.
With Meta starting to actually implement ActivityPub, I think it would be a good idea to remind everyone of what they are most likely going to do.
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fwiw, XMPP/Slack/Discord/etc basically solve the same problem that IRC already solved. Software Engineers just reinvent the wheel again and again as everyone loves a green field.
That said, Meta cannot be trusted. They're going to do a year or two of embrace and extend, pretending to be good citizens. Then they will invent some crisis that causes them to want to de-federate, likely that content on other servers is not moderated to their standards or that convoluted features of their extended protocol are not being met. This take seems pretty spot on to me.
Then they will invent some crisis that causes them to want to de-federate
Easy to predict.
Zucc-bot saw titties on Lemmy, something something think about the children outrage. "Better follow our advertisers happy friendship rules or we defederate and all your users will miss there normie friends. Not our rules, bro."
Wouldn't that just isolate their instance much like heaxbear? Or are you saying that the threads instance will be larger than Lemmy.world, or kbin?
Meta out scales the entire project. Google says 141 million users. Its the scale of pissing into the ocean.
Not too familiar with the back end stuff, but would federation data from Meta just DDOS a server not worth millions?
Meta does, but I'm not sure threads does.
I know people on facebook, but I don't know anyone on threads, even if it is owned by meta.
I expect activitypub to be relatively scalable. As long as meta isn't doing something stupid like trying to federate everything to everyone, the traffic should be limited to the users that have connected to each other. There are already absolutely gargantuan instances out there with millions of users that federate just fine with tiny instances.
I mean, that would be the initial fear, but I'm not sure how that would matter. Threads can defederate from Lemmy.nsfw but lemmy.world can still federate both.
Maybe I dont understand something
I don't see this as a genuine, good faith move from Meta. We're potential future competition to them. They can't buy us so I think there going to try to shit up the pace over years and hope we come groveling back. It's a make or break moment for the protocol against a titan.
They absolutely CAN buy you though, they can buy individual instance owners. Maybe not the Lynch pins like .World but many others and cheaply.
It'll quickly turn into shit storm, and the average casual use will give up and go back to Reddit or move to Threads, which is what they want
I don't think they fear the two hundred thousand people using fediverse compared to their hundreds of millions to billions of users.
We're as much competition to them as a food truck is a threat to taco bell.
force them to defederate as fast as possible
Software Engineers just reinvent the wheel again and again as everyone loves a green field.
While somewhat true, this is also a dumb take. Not everyone working at Slack/Discord/etc can work on IRC. They're making competing businesses, not just wanting to re-solve the same problem but wanting to do it with a new code base.
I suppose that applies more to XMPP, but not everything has to be a business, and you don't have to be an ass about it.
You're the one being an ass about it, saying developers always want a greenfield project. Tons of people contribute where they can, but we still need a job. So if somebody wants to make a business making a new chat client so they can make enough money to feed their family, well, that's the capitalistic hellhole we've found ourselves in.
And those developers get told what to do. The wheel also gets reinvented by PMs and entrepreneurs who think they can do it better. Sounds like someone is salty about their software maintenance job.
I'm talking about the new company phase, not the established phase with management. Every company starts somewhere.
I don't even know what you're on about, I don't know how you could see that as salty about anything with my job lol
No.
- I want to send messages to people who are not currently online (having a server stay online for you is a desparate hack and not a solution)
- I want to send media other than text
- I want my messages to be e2ee
- I want presence - e.g. know if someone is available, busy, away
- I want voice/video calls
and many more...
None of these were solved by IRC but by the others you mentioned.
Sure, but all of those things could have been done by extending the existing protocol.
Also, fwiw, it has had media sends, presence and support for encryption for a very long time. The rest could be added. All of those things could have very well been an IRC client with a couple of extra features and a server upgrade to queue messages.