The fediverse is a strange place to be sometimes. It's an open network where progress happens in fits and starts in random, often hidden, pockets. And the rest don't often hear what's really going on. In the 6 years I've built on #ActivityPub, we've all had to fight for some kind of coordination.
Especially re: the new #SocialWebFoundation (which I've backed as an outside supporter via my tiny company @write_as), you can see something new is happening.
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E.g. the days of every fedi platform needing to be open source (as you'd get dogpiled for back in 2018) are gone. Proprietary platforms and major corps like Meta are joining, and they're collaborating with other major fedi platforms behind the scenes to take this all mainstream.
But that's what's happening right now, just so everyone knows.
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And there should probably be some more transparency. And it can absolutely be alienating, especially to long-time fedizens.
But it doesn't exclude similar efforts from everyone building this space. It doesn't crush those fighting for what has made this place great in the first place.
The fediverse is everyone's, and we should all recognize that. Don't lose hope. Keep on building the web we all want to see.
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n.b. this was a "dispelling the illusions" post, not a "welcoming our new Meta overlords" post, btw
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@matt I really hope your optimism is not naïveté. Meta and their billionaire friends are craving for new source of revenue and attention devouring and they'll do whatever they can do to expand.... or crush any possible escape pod people try to leave their walled garden with. Google has proven time and time again that strategy was an efficient one. Future will tell. In the meantime... let's build robust webs. 🕸
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@Julianoe @matt
I wrote, in Dec 2023:
Meta is here against their own will (and that’s a good thing). I very much doubt they expect to get much out of this two million (?) active user fringe phenomenon. The reason for their presence is to satisfy regulators (DMA) so they can run Threads in Europe. I suspect they’ll do their best to make the integration as crap as possible. Right now it looks like it will be an opt-in “feature” for Threads users, which probably means barely anyone will enable it.
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@matt very well said. This thing is bigger than all of us, including meta.
I was once a lone engineer building software in the world of the walled gardens of AOL and Microsoft and it sucked. It was a super constrained world where success meant having to convince a few people at Egghead to distribute your software or you were relegated to oblivion.
Then the web happened. AOL tried to bring the web into their walled garden and died. Microsoft fully embraced the web and thrived. But the web was an unstoppable force and even with the big players fighting for position, legions of independent developers built and shipped great things reaching hundreds of millions of people.
For too long, building anything that connects people in new and interesting ways has seemed futile because of the dominance of today’s walled gardens. That is all changing before our eyes because of the creativity, labor and persistence of lone engineers like you and Evan and Eugen and Dan.
Human connection is finally becoming an integral part of the open web during a time when those connections are more important than ever. This is bigger than all of us, including meta, and the future is bright for the developers building here.
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@mike absolutely.
And there are so many unnamed moderators, community builders, devs, tinkerers, policy experts, etc. around the world that have helped the fediverse get to where it is today.
I think so far it's built a strong foundation to sustain past any large player entering the space, just like the web itself. And that's no reason to despair.
Obviously there's always more work to do, but we're not playing a zero-sum game, like the walled gardens of the web have been.
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@matt @mike It is fascinating to live through the start of the social web. I remember when email broke out of the walled gardens and, at the time (1980s), it was similarly unclear to most users what was actually going on until we could reflect on it years later.
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@underlap I joined the Internet well after that, just before Google existed. I'd love to hear more about the uncertainty of email from that time.
@matt @mike
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@wordsmith @matt @mike This is a pretty good summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email
My own experience at the time was that it was exciting to be able to email anyone with an email address, but I knew hardly anyone with an email address (outside my employer's, IBM's, network). So similar to the social web today - building up your network takes a while.
This may also interest you: https://underlap.org/early-internet-access
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@mike @matt "Human connection" brings to mind some rather distinct concepts. I've been working on networking stuff since about 1971. And I can assure you that in those 50+ years that I have observed (and experienced) a lot of "human connection" among developers and users. In the 1980's a number of companies came to be - from SCO to FTP - in which human connections, in their most intimate physical form, were an essential element of their formation and operation. And the Interop shows were hardly a world of Puritan morality.
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@matt "It doesn't crush those fighting for what has made this place great in the first place." Diversity (tech and social) is what's made the Fediverse great for me. The "Social Web" Foundation wants to define the Fediverse as ActivityPub-only and they have the resources (money and a $1.4 trillion corporation) to potentially do it. That is an attempt to crush the tech diversity that's made the Fedi great.
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@steve agreed diversity is one of the best things about the fediverse. And I see where they say ActivityPub / the fediverse is a part of the social web, but not where it's exclusively the social web. What is that in reference to?
Also, I don't see where Meta owns them. From what I know, they're an outside supporter, like the other orgs listed on their launch.
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@matt SWF says: "The “social web”, also called the “Fediverse”, is a network of independent social platforms connected with the open standard protocol ActivityPub." (not connected with a protocol such as ActivityPub). Combine that with Evan's frequent posts about the desire for a one protocol Fediverse and the meaning is clear.
I didn't say Meta owned the Foundation.
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@matt as far as transparency, we're launching early as we start doing this work. It's great having supporters who can keep us pointed in the right direction.
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@matt because it's everyone's, it cannot be a corporation's, not even a tiny bit. A corporation isn't anyone and cannot help but consume the commons.
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@fschaap agreed in spirit, but I don't see how this makes the fediverse any specific corporation's, any more than email is Google's or ActivityPub is Mastodon's.
Yes corps consuming the commons is frequent, but it's not predestined.
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@matt Maybe I am too cynical and it is good you are positive about this, but I'm afraid that's where we disagree.
Read the stories of people trying to run their own completely DKIMmed, SPFed, DANEd mailserver and still getting ghosted by corporations. Mail effectively is an oligopoly now.
A corporation will use standards as long as they benefit them or when they are legally bound to and will (ab)use every opportunity to tweak/break the rules and embrace/extend/extinguish a standard.
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@fschaap of course. That concentration of power is a real thing. It's why many people are here.
I just think it's a separate issue from the SWF. And I think it's early enough for us all to design against it (as countless admins, devs, etc. already try to do).
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@matt Well, let's see and hope I get proven wrong.
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@fschaap @matt This is not entirely true. Email is actually still (or even more so) a competitive landscape, with lots of smaller providers in addition to the largest ones. Also, I haven't had issues with sending mail to large providers from my own mail server so far.
Is it a perfect protocol? Absolutely not. But was anyone successful in owning or controlling the protocol? Not really.
I'm less concerned with someone EEE-ing AP than I am with the foundation equating The Social Web with AP only.
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@raucao @fschaap I'm genuinely trying to understand that criticism, because to me it just seems like semantics. I think the social web includes AP, and frankly we can call whatever we want the "social web."
What is it excluding? Other protocols / forms of socializing on the web?
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@matt Yes, it very much seemed like they were trying to claim the term for AP exclusively. The launch post e.g. says this:
The “social web”, also called the “Fediverse”
Add to that the posts documented in https://deadsuperhero.com/2024/09/swf-icky-feeling/ like e.g. this one:
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@matt Also, the founding members obviously only include fediverse organizations, and not anyone else whatsoever. The message is rather clear.
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@matt Here's what's especially ignorant about that post:
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@raucao So because it's excluding Nostr?
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@matt No, because it's excluding everything that isn't AP. And likely even FEPs that aren't to the liking of the foundation members.
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@matt E.g. their data portability project seems to completely ignore what I would regard as the most essential quality, i.e. giving full sovereignty over their data to the user, instead of relying on servers only. The FEPs for that would be https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/ae97/fep-ae97.md and https://codeberg.org//fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/ef61/fep-ef61.md for example. Again, I hope I'll be proven wrong, but it doesn't look or feel good to me right now.
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@matt ... not to claim that these FEPs are the only solution, or the best solution. The point there is that this is something we can learn from other protocols like e.g. Nostr, where hashing and signing content is already making all data completely portable. There simply is no server dependency issue on Nostr whatsoever. But this could be mostly true for the fediverse as well.
But do we all think Meta wants that to be the case?
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@raucao Yeah, I would never look to Meta to solve our pressing fedi issues lol. But fundamentally, I think we can take what we get and all keep working together as we always have. No single org is going to do it for us.
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@raucao Yeah, I agree that's pretty important. But it's also the fediverse, and everything moves slow -- we've been talking about better identity handling for at least as long as I've been here.
If the foundation doesn't address it, hopefully the rest of the vast community can make things happen.
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@raucao Okay true, they're trying to make them synonymous. Agreed that it could've been worded the other way around.
But personally, I'm not that offended. The fediverse is having its moment, and right now, provides a concrete experience of what the "social web" (broadly, not just AP) could be.
The term is introducing people to the very concept of it, when all they've had is walled gardens ("social media"). I think that's useful, and ultimately benefits everyone, in the fediverse and beyond.
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@matt Fair enough. They've only just started, and the criticism has been voiced and heard already, so I'm hopeful they correct course somewhat. We can feel different about how serious their animosity towards other protocols is.
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@raucao Totally. Seems like they're listening, and I'm sure we'll see with the rest.
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@matt I'm oddly glad that there is nothing anyone can do to stop any person, organisation or company being part of the Fediverse, despite the fact that I deeply despise facebook et al, and everything they stand for.
I think that as long as any entity can join and participate in it, it will continue to be implacable in its neutrality as a medium, the fabric upon which space is woven.
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@wordsmith My thoughts exactly (including my disdain for Meta).
The fediverse has always been about open collaboration, not competition. I don't think this kind of gatekeeping and NIMBY-ism helps the community at all, and I think it's wasted energy to fight against ourselves like this.
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@matt I hope the fediverse has a plan in case some major tech corporation really does end up pulling an EEE.
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@matt one of the major reasons the #Fediverse exists at all, & why it needed to be created in the first place, is a direct result of all of the major corps like #Meta pushing their #proprietary software walled gardens.
I don't see why any of us should support any efforts by the same #BigTech companies who are out to destroy the internet and shape it as they see fit.
[#]Google did a great job of "destroying" #XMPP, #email, and #usenet, so why should we let Meta work on "destroying" the Fediverse?
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@Killab33z_OG @matt Did Google really achieve such an effect ("destroy") with Usenet? While it may have contributed a huge blow against XMPP, I'd not be surprised if with Usenet it mostly caused an uptick in killfile rules for "Message-Id: .*@googlegroups.com$".
[#]Usenet
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@njsg @Killab33z_OG @matt
The mistake people make is using the products and services of these huge goliaths in the first place. When Google came out with it's first Android phone (The G1) I didn't jump on board despite everyone around me doing so. It was locked down and I didn't like that. They tried to force you to login to an account and activate cellular service with T-Mobile. I did eventually end up with a G1 through the happenstance of winning a raffle or something that someone else entered me into at a conference, but I jumped through hoops to avoid ID’ing myself before ever using it. The point being is more people need to put up even just a tad bit of resistance. No one individual can stand up and win against any of these major companies or governments.
I’m not expecting everyone to be perfect or have the energy to fight every battle. Maybe you’ll subscribe to cable TV, but refuse to use Google search and Microsoft Windows. More people doing even a little goes a long ways.
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@Killab33z_OG That's why it's great that we can defederate from them! And we can keep building the fediverse as we want to -- no one company can take that away.
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@Killab33z_OG @matt Google did not destroy XMPP. XMPP doing pretty well.
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