Threads’ Fediverse bridge is in maintenance mode. Almost nobody used it. What the failed threat teaches us about owning your online identity.
I wonder to what degree the “panic” brought awareness to people who otherwise would have just gone along with it because they weren’t educated on the risks. Impossible to measure to be sure but I imagine it had some positive impact.
I mean, the threat was, but the fediverse reacted and most instances (that I know of) just defederated preemptively.
This blog post seems to point and laugh that “see, we hadn’t needed to put out that fire, it’s fully extinguished now”. Well, yes. Because we put it out.
But there is also the point that Meta users and Fedizens didn’t really have any interest in federating with each other. In that respect, the outcome was fully foreseeable, and Meta’s attempt pure signal value for the corporation.
Strange blog. Kind of ironic allowing only paid users to comment on a blog talking about the Fediverse.
I understand that commercial interests can be intertwined with federation and open source, there’s nothing wrong with that (in principle). Asking for payment just to be able to comment is something else though. Donate now to discuss the future of open web standards!
Kind of ironic allowing only paid users to comment on a blog talking about the Fediverse.
It is a great way to avoid spam bots.
“The threat that wasn’t” … my opinion on this differs from the article. I responded to the author in this post:
I only partially understand the fear of EEE. Sure the Fediverse may be easy to enter for any megacorps but that doesn’t mean they get a say in how the protocols work. The people working on those are (mostly?) idealists, I’d assume. They aren’t easily persuaded by a panel of megacorp suits demanding the protocol to change and would just give them the finger. Entering the Fediverse is not the “embrace” step that buying a company would normally be. Applying EEE to the Fediverse sounds like fud to be perfectly frank.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding what EEE would entail in the context of the Fediverse. I haven’t seen anyone talk about how it would work in these two posts. This topic is new to me.
The ActivityPub protocol and related specifications, documentation and guidance is far from complete. And it is all dispersed and fragmented. It is a hard ecosystem for newcomers to get onboarded to, and accepted work methods are likely to make things worse, not better. Only a small handful of people are proactively involved in improving the overall ecosystem, mostly all volunteers.
Any large corporation that steps in, and throws enough money and resources into it, can easily become the beacon that guides newcomers, steers the overall direction things go, take control of technological evolution. For starters by launching a kick-ass developer portal that brings everything together in one point (in Meta’s case think of GraphQL and ReactJS).
A corporation may not be able to extinguish the current fine fedi culture, but it may very well sideline it, so it stays niche and becomes irrelevant to the overall fediverse evolution (think niche similar to ‘bulletin boards’, NNTP, etc).
What does EEE mean in this context?
Probably embrace, extend, extinguish.
