I think if we are going to support the idea of an open web, we need to be consistent about it. Federation should be possible with threads and blusky. One of the main advantages of federation is that it is interoperable.
But we have to be careful. When you have an agent as powerful as Facebook/Meta at the table, it only takes a few missteps for the fediverse to crumble. I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg has had a sudden change of heart, the success of the fediverse is not his goal.
There need to be clear requirements for a platform to be allowed to federate. Basic rules like not manipulating engagement metrics and respecting the protocol. But we need to think as a community about where we draw the line.
Personally, I think user mentions from thread users opening the threads application is a huge violation. This behavior is not expected, and is only meant to suck people into their ecosystem. It shouldn’t be accepted.
It’ll be a long road fam, but I think it’s worth it for a better Web.
The other edge of the sword: it’s now virtually impossible to run your own mail server. POP3, IMAP etc are all open protocols used as the base for email (a common analogy for the fediverse as it too is federated). Then Big Tech came up with DKIM, DMARC, SPF, etc to save us from spam1 when in fact it’s just a fancy form of embrace-extend-extinguish.
The same can happen to the fediverse.
1 if it was weakening of cryptografy it’d be think of the children
I think if we are going to support the idea of an open web, we need to be consistent about it. Federation should be possible with threads and blusky. One of the main advantages of federation is that it is interoperable.
But we have to be careful. When you have an agent as powerful as Facebook/Meta at the table, it only takes a few missteps for the fediverse to crumble. I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg has had a sudden change of heart, the success of the fediverse is not his goal.
There need to be clear requirements for a platform to be allowed to federate. Basic rules like not manipulating engagement metrics and respecting the protocol. But we need to think as a community about where we draw the line.
Personally, I think user mentions from thread users opening the threads application is a huge violation. This behavior is not expected, and is only meant to suck people into their ecosystem. It shouldn’t be accepted.
It’ll be a long road fam, but I think it’s worth it for a better Web.
The other edge of the sword: it’s now virtually impossible to run your own mail server. POP3, IMAP etc are all open protocols used as the base for email (a common analogy for the fediverse as it too is federated). Then Big Tech came up with DKIM, DMARC, SPF, etc to save us from spam1 when in fact it’s just a fancy form of embrace-extend-extinguish.
The same can happen to the fediverse.
1 if it was weakening of cryptografy it’d be think of the children
Agree, it won’t be easy…
Another sad example is Google’s influence on RSS: https://openrss.org/blog/how-google-helped-destroy-adoption-of-rss-feeds
Not convinced. This feels like the paradox of tolerance in slightly different shape.