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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Embrace, extend, extinguish. Only proven way to destroy decentralized, free, open source solutions.
First stage embrace might not even be malicious, but with corporations it will eventually lead to someone thinking: how can we monetize our position. It is just nature how business works.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
It looks like articles today are saying that Meta is delaying integrating ActivityPub at launch.
That said, I'm not seeing how we get to the last E, extinguish. By its very nature, ActivityPub is decentralized to avoid total control. So even if Meta embraces the technology and wants to monetize it (because capitalism, of course), extending ActivityPub would (hypothetically) be open source - or they would fork it, diverging and making their version closed, and otherwise not function in full with other ActivityPub instances (like with kbin, Lemmy, and Mastodon). Without buying the platform from the developers in full, I don't see how ActivityPub or the greater Fediverse dies. And I could just be missing something obvious, so if you can explain how we get there, I would really like to hear and understand.
I guess the only way I could see it is if Threads got so popular that people literally stopped using the other apps - but I also don't see that happening, because anyone already using stuff like Mastodon are using it because Twitter, Facebook, etc, suck ass and they've moved away from sites like that.
EDIT: Thanks to the one person that actually replied, I saw I was on the right track at the end, but failed to see the obvious (as I assumed).
It’s hard to predict but the extinguish part would come from bigger non-Threads instances implementing compatibility with Thread-only extensions (in the interest of their users, or for money) and fragmenting the community. Threads then becomes the defacto ActivityPub standard. Maybe some instances stay true to the standard but with extremely reduced communities because now they can’t see what other instances are publishing. So now you have to decide between your ideals and your social network. At best, you’re back to square 0.
It happens in the extend part.
Large corporation will have much more resources, they will implement features and refactoring, which small open source teams do not have capability to implement. They will start pulling users because they support features that other do not.
This also means that they will start getting control.
And then finally they just cut the communication, and split the community. All the way they can claim to be working "for the community"
This is it right here.
If you need a real-world example look at the original web browsers:
NCSA Mosaic (the very first web browser) fully supported what would be later known as HTTP verison .9 . There was universal compatibility because there was only one browser supporting HTTP. Later Netscape Navigator would come on the scene and add functionality that was not supported in Mosaic (like the tag for example), but nothing hugely breaking page views between the two browsers.
Fast forward to Internet Explorer v3, v4 and v5 where MS would not only show all the pages that the prior browsers would, but they EXTENDED by letting HTML still work without following all the same standards. It was easier to write pages for IE than it was to the specification. Then EXTENDED again by MS added ActiveX to web sites meaning now ONLY MS IE could display these pages, and for a time that meant only Windows computers could. This is the Extinguish part.
The "Extend" step gets adopted because its attractive to users.
Here's a non-computer analogy:
Lets say your current car get 25MPG. Now lets says that Shell come out with a gasoline that would let your same car go 40MPG with zero changes. Just buy Shell gas now at nearly the same price as anyone else's and you get significantly more range. Most people would do it. Moreover, Shell buys Honda and starts manufacturing cars designed to work on that same new Shell gas could go 60mpg with even more power! So when you go to buy your next car 5 years later after using the gas, you don't want to turn down 60MPG with more power. That Shell/Honda looks very attractive! All this time all the other gas stations have been going out of business because few people want to pay nearly the same amount for gasoline that only gets a fraction of the range. In the end, ONLY Shell gasoline is being sold, and nearly everyone drives a Shell/Honda to get the most benefit. This is Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
Took us a while to shake off IE monopoly, only to squander it and now we have chromium (and to lesser extend, WebKit) monopoly. It's not as horrible as the IE monopoly yet, but we're currently in the "extend" stage here with Google forcing standard that benefits them and inconveniences their competitors.
A tiny bit, but I don't think its the same thing. First, the web runs fine without Chrome. Firefox is proof of that. Second, the source code is Open Source for at least a version of Chrome, so if Google does silly stuff like trying to Extend, we can (and have) make our own version cutting that garbage out and compiling our own.
Yes, but it doesn't solve browser monoculture issue where webdevs only target chromium/webkit when building their apps, which slowly kill firefox and make it much harder for a new browser engine tech to compete. When other browser engines are dead, the web "standard" will be fully controlled by google. No amount of forking will help because the web consortium is controlled by the big browser makers, and when firefox dies (and mozilla dies), it will be fully controlled by corporation (google), with microsoft and apple playing some minor roles without mozilla because mozilla actually has quite a big influence in the consortium despite its smaller userbase.
I actually witnessed IE's rise, leaving netscape navigator and opera in dust, and then open source phoenix (later firefox) rising from ashes, steadily taking back user share. Google chrome took a good chunk too and by that time IE was done and desperate enough to give in and use chromium framework.
There was a point in time I thought it's impossible, the close source monstrosity with neverending standards incompatibilities will stay on quick launchers forever but it did not. What a journey.
Anyone here remembered that Internet Explorer is Evil! site? The person who made that website complained about those tactics such as the ActiveX stuff and also made fun of Microsoft for doing it.
It doesn't seem at all plausible to me that meta threads will pull users away from mastodon/pleroma/misskey/etc. though. If they "extend" the federation protocol to the point they become incompatible with the rest of these implementations, they will just go away and we're back to where we were before they started federating.
They don’t pull users away from the competition, they grow their own user base much faster than the competition, the result being that most of the popular content is on their platform. If you want to follow that celebrity/ influencer / news organization/ sports reporter/ politician, you need to join threads.
But that's already true for Twitter.
And if people weren't looking for a reason to leave Twitter, we wouldn't be having this conversation. The point is that this is how decentralized / open standards have been broken and made proprietary in the past.
If you think the aforementioned celebrities/influencers/news orgs/etc. are going to choose the fediverse instead of Threads or (I think more likely) BlueSky, that might make sense. I don't see that happening though. What might instead happen is something like this:
Potential fediverse user: "I heard that Facebook's new twitter competitor can work with these existing sites. So I can make an account on one of those and follow Celebrity X and Politician Y without making a Meta account."
Potential fediverse admin: "Well yeah, but you can't follow them from my instance. Or any of these other instances. You see, back in the 90s there was this concept called embrace, extend extinguish..."
No longer a potential fediverse user: "Oh, I guess I'll just make a Meta/Bluesky account instead then."
Dosen't need to actively "stole" users from the other communities, but if new users have to choose between the independent supported and development instances and the corporate supported with marketing and flashy UI they are going to choose the corporate one. Eventually the great majority of users are under meta's control and the content is generated there, and you better start complying or get defederated by meta.
Some users will be used to their content by then and may be tempted to move to their platform.
There's also the tons of news users interested in the Fediverse who get sucked into the marketing of "big tech + Fediverse" and basically just getting slurped up into some inevitable twitter sequel. So it's existing users and potential new users.
Exactly it’s like selling junk food marketed as health food, you can say it doesn’t stop anyone from eating healthy food but if the junk food is marketed as healthy food (looking at you sugary cereals) than it can steal positive energy from the healthy food movement, gain a false sense of healthiness via associating itself with legitimately healthy food, and distract or disillusion vast swathes of people from actually trying healthy food in the first place.
Techbros being like “we should let tech companies try again (?!?) to make a non-toxic thing out of our idea” is just another case of relatively smart people being dumb af about their privilege because let’s face it, a lot of this is just resume building or a DIY hobby for these folks. They don’t have the same things to lose that trans, black, queer or any other harassed/targeted minority has in coming here. They don’t have a horse in the game whether legitimate communities win or awful corporations do, they still win in the end because both use social media software though the latter pays much better….
i.e.: The IE approach. Take an open standard (HTML), then fill in the gaps it's missing with proprietary components (ActiveX), wait until your solutions become entrenched, then start doing evil stuff (implementing HTML slightly wrong so that developers have to do extra work to support compliant browsers).
Right, and that's exactly how IE/Edge is the one globally dominant browser it is today. Oh no, wait, that's the very standards compliant Chrome
Wow, you really got me there. I had no idea that IE was no longer the dominant browser by usershare. That 13-year stretch of singular dominance may as well have never happened at all since it didn't literally last forever 🙄
And... yes, Chrome is very standards compliant, isn't it? Isn't it great how they publish excellent standards like FLoC & Manifest V3 without any regard for pushback from external vendors & web engineers? It's a very not evil thing that they're doing with their very not entrenched product.
Yes, google, the beacon of privacy, has decided to cancel FLoC. See? Google is actually listening to the web community's plea. What's that in the latest version of Chrome just released globally a few weeks ago? Ad Topics? No, it's totally unrelated to FLoC, no need to worry about that, for realsies!
The internet is saved thanks to Google's commitment to pushing forward with new standards
I was struggling to get all the way there initially, but that makes sense. Thanks for actually taking the time to respond!