this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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To be honest, not a great argument, considering that the hidden magic that Google and a handful of big players do, specifically in relation to spam, is what made emails substantially an oligopoly. Today if you want to run an email server, you need to jump 20 hoops to hope your email will ever reach the mailbox of someone on Gmail. Emails were supposed to be a distributed protocol too...
How does defederating prevent that from happening anyway?
No really relevant for my point, but I assume that preventing them to be effectively part of the fediverse, can reduce the blast radius of their changes, since they will be (more) isolated.
If they are on the other hand fully part of the fediverse (I.e. nobody defederates them) many people may be incentivised to move to "that instance" because it will realistically have better availability and in the future might have more "features", which is exactly the kind of extensions to the protocol that other won't be able to keep up with.
I personally used to care more in the past, I don't now that much, but I can definitely see the potential danger.
The whole argument is that Meta will do whatever they want with their implementation of Activity Pub and lacks any further details. Blast radius of what? How does that affect existing Mastodon instances? Do they lose anything compared to what they have now?
Threads doesn't need Mastodon users because it has orders of magnitude more already. Mastodon has unique competitive advantage, for example no ads, that could compel Threads users to switch with little friction. It might turn out that Threads will offer things Mastodon won't on principle (follower and notification management for huge accounts) which might actually make whole ecosystem more healthy and diverse.
Really, it's best to see what's going to happen. I'm optimistic because I think open alternatives are generally better and will win long term.
I don't know what is going to happen, and as I said, I don't even care that much to be honest.
It does if this happens gradually, when instances bleed users to Threads because it has "more features"/works better/etc.
Good for you, I am not sure what this optimism is grounded on, but I lost it completely. I think the battle is already lost, and open solution can -at best- represent a niche corner of the internet. People are used to things that are addictive and create expectations that are unrealistic for services run with budget at 4 digits top. There is no going back, in my opinion. Either way, this is very much besides the point of my argument, which was that email is exactly an example of how big companies can take over "open" protocols with them being left "open" but effectively having 99% of users on 2/3 providers, and a very high entry barrier which renders the "open" nature of the protocol just a formality.
I'm getting an impression you're not using Mastodon. Vast majority of Mastodon users are there for a very specific reason, to decouple from corporate social networks, and won't switch, period.
My optimism is grounded on having reasons to believe Meta is implementing Activity Pub so that EU regulators will allow them to operate here depending on whether Meta plays nice.