For example, I spent years on Reddit happily arguing with wrong people, deriving my “value” from just having fun interacting with folks about stuff. The server resources that Reddit expended supporting that were fairly trivial in dollar terms. […] Instead Reddit hired 2000 staff for some reason

They hired 2000 staff because they were running one of the most highly-trafficked websites on the Internet, with hundreds of millions of users, something which unsurprisingly takes quite a lot of people to administer and maintain. Were Reddit to not invest in people and resources to keep the website running at that scale, you would not be able to use it in the way you enjoy and it would have nowhere near as much utility to you.

This is the entire point of the article that you missed - there are a shit-ton of costs in running a massive community that have to come from somewhere. Your approach is “well I don’t think those costs are necessary”. But they are.

You really couldn’t be more wrong.

You don’t have to be a Randroid or a libertarian, or even right wing, to understand that a discourse predicated on everyone getting everything for free with no real trade-off doesn’t really make sense in the real world.

For context, Instagram has two BILLION users. Facebook has just shy of three billion.

Mastodon has a total of ten million.

You’ve literally quoted two industry bodies who have a vested interest in keeping aspartame on the market.

Should have thought about that before you started treating them like serfs.

I’ve always been underwhelmed with DuckDuckGo as a search engine, and for context on that remark I use Bing as my main search engine.

Same here.

I find that Bing is about on par with Google now, with the added side benefit that Microsoft pay me to use it.

That article has been posted several times and does not explain how Google “destroyed” XMPP - it assumes that XMPP was some hot shit everyone was using before Google and Facebook picked it up, when in reality it was used by next to nobody, most people who used it with Google or Facebook were just using it to talk to other Google or Facebook users, XMPP doesn’t support a lot of features that consumers now expect in messaging, and since Google and Facebook dropped it it has returned to being a niche FOSS thing - only now its advocates blame Google and Facebook for its failure rather than the fact it’s not a very good protocol and nobody uses it.

Not stellar? We’re having this conversation, aren’t we?

The fact that I (nerd that knows all sorts of shit about fedi and is interested in tech topics) am able to use Kbin/fedi to converse with other nerds that know about fedi and are interested in tech does not mean that the fediverse is a storming success.

I can have a conversation with one other person using tin cans and string. This does not mean that tin cans and string are the future of telecommunications.

In reality the people who I have tried to get on here who do not fall in that category were either disinterested from the start, were turned off by the complexity of how it works or stopped coming on it when it turned out there was nothing for them here.

I have read that and been linked that multiple times.

I responded to it here: https://finecity.social/notes/9gcoisoofl

tl;dr: Facebook and Google didn’t “destroy” XMPP. XMPP was used by basically nobody before Facebook and Google picked it up, and after they dropped it again XMPP is still used by basically nobody. Its spec also doesn’t include support for features that consumers expect to have in messaging software, which is part of why nobody uses it.

Facebook didn’t “destroy” XMPP. XMPP was a tiny messaging protocol nobody used, Facebook picked it up for a bit, stopped using it after a while, and then XMPP returned to being a tiny messaging protocol nobody used.

People are acting like Jabber was hot shit when Facebook picked it up, and its present state of irrelevance is because of big bad Zuck. No, no fucker used Jabber and it saw basically no mainstream adoption until Facebook and Google got involved, and as soon as Facebook and Google weren’t involved (as it turns out that XMPP actually kind of sucks and its unique features are things end users don’t care about) it returned to being a complete irrelevance. A well-intentioned irrelevance, to be sure, but an irrelevance.

Fediverse is the same, mutans mutandis. We’re tiny. I know it’s nice for us to psyche ourselves up and say that we’re going to destroy the big bad corporate media! but in reality we are a niche constellation of social networks that has literally 0.1% of Facebook’s user base and whose adoption has been, shall we say, not stellar.

the masses pick their form of fediverse rather than the one not controlled by big tech.

You say this as if the masses are currently interested in fediverse in general, and give a shit about whether it’s controlled by big tech or not.

Fact is most people don’t know about fedi and a great deal of those who do don’t care, and the only chance you’ll get them anywhere near a fediverse service if someone (be that Meta, or anyone else) wraps it up in a little bow for them and delivers it to them.

My view is if they did do that last thing, we’d be in exactly the same place as we were when we started - with “fediverse” as a tiny niche social network mainly populated by nerds, off to the side of all the others.

I think people have kind of failed to keep a sense of scale here - fedi has something like 2million active users, Facebook has a thousand times as many. We are quite literally a rounding error.

Most people who use social media disagree, and unfortunately for you, it’s their opinions that matter most as to whether they use a given social media platform.

I don’t really care to follow celebrities and athletes either, but I recognise at least that I am in a minority.

That statement is refreshingly sane. Really sick of the amount of heat over this situation and the lack of light.

Yeah, I’m “defending” Facebook by pointing out that people keep letting 2 + 2 = 57845789478945 and that many of the “risks” being talked about are simply imaginary, technically impossible and/or do not require Meta to start an instance to materialise.

The technical details rather matter when people are coming up with random nonsense and/or don’t actually seem to understand the nature of the platform they’re coming to the defence of.

I don’t trust Meta. I don’t like Meta. That doesn’t mean I need to also accept as true random confabulations about people being paid off and data being scraped for ends that don’t make any sense. There’s been a whole heap of heat around this subject and basically no light.

Wow so in your view anyone who just says “I think this isn’t a big deal and it’ll be fine” has been paid off?

Regardless of the fact that’s something with absolutely no evidence?

And you’re supposed to be the rational one here?

Some people on this thread have lost their damn minds.

OK, I’ve read that link and it still doesn’t really explain how exactly Meta intends to monetise other peoples’ posts - “collect data from and monetise”, how exactly are they going to monetise other peoples’ posts on other instances, when they have no ability to e.g. serve ads to those people?

I mean, it is just one bad actor.

If you look at it in these terms, you understand that Facebook has an interest in making sure that ActivityPub doesn’t too large without Facebook having a say in it.

I don’t think that ActivityPub is having any present difficulty keeping itself niche without Facebook’s help - fedi has a total active user base of something like 2million, it’s very literally a rounding error on Meta’s user numbers. If there’s a battle here, Facebook is already winning.

But that wasn’t my point. It’s not that I think that Facebook or Google cannot scrape Fediverse platforms/instances, it’s that even if they do, they cannot serve targeted ads based on our activity here.

This is another one of those things where Meta’s claimed motivations for this don’t seem to stack up.

How exactly are Meta supposed to serve “targeted ads” to me, @bloonface, if I am on finecity.social and not [whatever Meta’s instance is]?

If I don’t have an account on their service, and never visit their website, they have no opportunity to put a tracking cookie on my computer, no opportunity to serve an ad to me (other than directly messaging me, behaviour which would absolutely get them defedded instantly by anyone who is even close to being on the fence about their presence), no link between my finecity.social account and any Meta accounts I may have… what benefit do they obtain from this?

Bluntly - how is this dastardly plan of theirs actually physically supposed to work?

A lot of people seem to have ascribed omnipotent powers to Meta far beyond what they are actually technically capable of. They can’t deliver you a tracking cookie or make your instance display a banner ad to you through ActivityPub, ffs.