To riff on this a little bit further: its also visible in how little attention in the gazillion conversations about Threads is paid to the fact that the entirety of the EU cannot even access it yet due to the new DMA and DSA.
Or one of the articles I wrote that got relatively low traction, that was specificially about how all of the Nordic countries got an official recommendation to use ActivityPub for their governmental communications. I dont mind that some articles get less traction than others, but it does stand out when you consider how impactful such things are for the long term structure of the fediverse. Lots of EU governments are now talking about needing sovereign public digital spaces, and are actively looking how ActivityPub can help with that. And that matters way more than whatever Elons latest shenanigans are.
In a way, this gives me hope that the fediverse might actually survive in a way bigger capacity than XMPP did even if Threads/Meta manages to EEE a large part of the fediverse.
Yeah, I think theres quite a few reasons to be hopeful. Also why I personally am not very interested in comparisons to XMPP and EEE. To me, that refers to a different time on the internet, where corporations where way more interested in fighting an opensource threat. But times have changed, and for Big Tech, it seems to me they are way more worried about regulations than about opensource competitors.
Not to say that this automatically means that the fediverse will be a success, not at all, this shit is hard. But to properly judge what challenges await the fediverse, I think its more fruitful to look at what Big Tech is concerned by, and what governments are thinking about. And I see very little talk about EEE from those actors. Instead, its mainly focused on regulations, privacy, and sovereign power.
Oh don't get me wrong, I fully expect Meta to go EEE. That they're not talking about it in those terms makes sense, given that the Embrace part has barely started. Don't want to spook the part of the prey that still feels safe.
I just have a bit of hope that the fediverse might survive it better.
and thanks for the shoutout! I do need to update my bio and get proper accounts. For now just testing out the water a little bit, havent really fully decided on which server I want to pick. reason Im replying with 2 accounts is that federation between kbin.social and lemmy.ml specifically is still broken, couldnt even see your reply. Not sure how to approach that yet
Curiously enough I've been ranting in some replies about how "The Protocol" maybe requires too much coordination at a software level for its promises of a distributed social network to be taken at face value.
This issue incidentally seems like a prime issue. Like, just looking at it naively, would it not be reasonable that at some level the protocol has some checks built into it such that an instance either is or is not federating with another instance and determining whether that is the case or not is straight-forward?
The arbitrariness of a service called kbinbot being a whole instance's federation request service and the ability to block that by accident without any more declarative data structures verifying or identifying whether federation is successful ... that all smells like a bad system.
I'm starting to wonder if there's something to my "concern" compared to other protocols (wish I knew enough to seriously examine it).
I'll stop ranting now ... glad lemmy.ml and kbin are connected again.