This blog post by Ploum, who was part of the original XMPP efforts long ago, describes how Google killed one great federated service, which shows why the Fediverse must not give Meta the chance
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Basically the sequence of events as claimed by the author is that:
- XMPP, niche, small circles
- Google launches Talk that was XMPP compatible
- Millions joined Talk that could coop XMPP in theory
- The coop worked only sparingly and was unidirectional, i.e. Talk to XMPP ✅ but XMPP to Talk ❌
- Talk sucked up existing XMPP users as it was obviously a better option (bandwagon effect + unidirectional “compatibility” with XMPP)
- Talk defederated
This demonstrated exactly the importance of reciprocity. If they play dirty, kick them out asap.
Facebook messenger did the same . You used to be able to talk to fb users via google chat all from pidgin or another xmpp client. They are a hostile actor on the web who have already proven themselves untrustworthy. Let’s not forget the Snowden docs or Cambridge Analytica
Meanwhile, meta is about to join the fediverse and do it all again.
I’m sorry, but what do the Snowden docs have to do with anything? I’m out of the loop apparently there
Seems like just another reason why defederation should be completely removed from the protocol. It’s way too easy to abuse and force centralisation.
There are other far less destructive and abusable ways of dealing with spam and content moderation.
I maintain that it’s better to give the users the control, and allow them to decide which instances, communities, and users they want to be exposed to. Bottom up moderation, instead of top down.
For example, instances can provide suggested ‘block’ lists (much like how an ad blocker works) and users can decide whether or not to apply those lists at their own discretion.
By forcing federation, the network stays decentralized. Maintaining community blacklists that can be turned on or off by the individual user protects against heavy handed moderation and censorship, whilst also protecting users from being exposed to undesirable content.
The case with XMPP is that Google Talk introduced addons and intricacies that were unique to them. So they could federate with you in full with additional bells and whistles while you were stuck in an eternal catch-up. They presented a better alternative regardless of the eventual defederation. Even if we have some viral clauses as in GPL in open-source software that ensures protocol compatible software to be compliant, we can only do that to a certain extent plus enforcement is always an issue. Who are going to spend the vast sum of money in court to defend the “federation”?
This aside, enforcing federation alone does not ensure decentralization. These zero-marginal-cost fixed-cost-intensive businesses of the internet has a tendency to centralize as serving one more seat costs no penny plus one more seat diluates the fixed cost altogether.
Your points are valid, but that doesn’t mean we should do nothing. Enforcing federation and using copyleft licensing are both strong defenses against centralization and network dominance by a well funded third party.
As far as GPL goes, from what I’ve seen, big tech companies tend to take it pretty seriously. There is no reason we shouldn’t be using that, and other license protections if we have the option.
As for natural centralization over time, I think that is a far less urgent problem than the current risks we are facing, those being major network fragmentation due to the use of defederation, and the risk of centralization around a proprietary platform and/or instance.
Removal of defederation and strong copyleft licensing seem to be natural first steps in combatting that risk.
I may misunderstand how the fediverse and the software works but my understanding is content such as images gets copied over to federated servers and so it seems to me like the ability to defederate would be a requirement in order for servers to stay in compliance with the law and be able to limit various illegal and morally horrible materials from being copied onto their server and network.
Given that (unless I’m wrong about how this works or there’s another way around it I’m not thinking of), at the end of the day is it really possible to not have the ability to defederate? There will be times when it would be needed it seems to me. Or for malicious bot servers, nazis, etc. — lots of potential reasons a full defederation would be desired or required.
That’s actually not how it works. Images are hosted by the instance the community is on. Other instances embed those images as links in the page. The image is downloaded from the original instance by the browser.
The Beehaw devs are feeling the need to defederate right now due to that being the viable strategy for scaling their mod efforts. What would the solution be if they could not defederate?
the thing is that we know that they will play dirty; all corporations play dirty, that’s the only way they get that big
One key difference between link aggregators (kbin/lemmy/reddit/digg) and microblogs (twitter/mastodon) on the one hand, vs social networks (facebook/myspace/diaspora/friendica) and instant messengers (aim/icq/xmpp/signal) on the other, is that the latter is highly dependent on your real-life social network, while the former is not. People using instant messengers and people on facebook want to use them to interact with their friends and family, so they have to use the platforms that those friends and family are on. On the other hand, people are happy to use link aggregators and microblogs as long as there are interesting people and communities to follow, even if they consist entirely of strangers.
Back in the early days of XMPP, when it was still known as “Jabber”, I tried switching to it from AOL Instant Messenger. I told all of my contacts about it, and tried to get them to set up Jabber accounts. I was super excited that instant messaging was finally being standardized the way email was, and we wouldn’t have to deal with AIM vs MSN messenger vs Yahoo messenger vs etc. I think I was also still bitter about being forced to switch from ICQ to AIM because all my friends had switched. I don’t think I got a single person to start using Jabber, though. At one point I even declared that I was going to stop using AIM entirely, and that people would have to switch over so that we could keep talking to each other. Didn’t work, of course. I just ended up not being able to talk to anyone until I finally went back to AIM.
A bunch of my friends use reddit, but we don’t use the site to interact with each other in any meaningful way. This made switching to kbin really easy. Sure, I’ve told a few of them about it, but it doesn’t really matter to me if they switch or not. As far as I’m aware, XMPP never really became it’s own “thing” and experienced the kind of growth that the threadiverse has. Since we’ve passed the point of being self-sustaining, we can keep growing one user at a time, as individuals decide that they’re tired of reddit and make the jump.
Because of this difference in dynamic, we’re in a much better position against Meta than XMPP was against Google. The fact that we can even consider outright blocking Meta is a really good sign for us, regardless of whether we do so or not. Even if we do end up in a situation where 90% or even 99% of users are on Meta’s platform, we can still refuse to allow them to compromise the ActivityPub protocol. Attempts to “embrace, extend, extinguish” will likely just result in non-blockading instances joining the anti-Meta blockade. With the connection to Meta severed, we’ll just go back to enjoying the company of the 1 to 10% that remain, and that portion will likely be much larger than what we have now.
I’m not sure the distinction would make enough of a difference, and focusing only on XMPP might be doing yourself a disservice. There was nothing social about Office, but the OP points out how the same strategy worked there as well. Users, overall, tend to go where the other users are. Some people left Digg for Reddit because they were unhappy with Digg, but the vast majority simply followed because it was where the users (therefore activity) went. Reddit wasn’t even the best of the many options at that time; what was important was the inflow of users. Once that kicks off, others tend to flock like moths to flame.
As you point out, Reddit was not where you interacted socially, yet it became where you congregated because that was where everyone else was and therefore where the easiest access to content and engagement was. If a Meta product becomes the most popular way to consume ActivityPub content, and therefore becomes the primary Source for that content, independent servers will become barren with just a Meta Thanos-snap of disconnecting their API. They only need to implement Meta-only features that ActivityPub can’t interact or compete with, and the largest portion of users will be drawn away from public servers to the “better” experience with more direct activity. (And that’s without mentioning their ability to craft better messaging, build an easier on-boarding experience, and put their significant coffers to work on marketing.)
Sure, there will still be ActivityPub platforms in the aftermath. Openoffice/Libreoffice still exists, XMPP clients and servers still exist, there are still plenty of forums and even BBS systems. But, there is a reason why none of those things are the overwhelmingly “popular” option, and the strategy they will employ to make sure that happens is the focus of the article, not so much XMPP.
So just speaking from my personal experience, XMPP was absolutely useless for me, whereas OpenOffice wasn’t. Microsoft did succeed in preventing OO from eating significantly into its market share, but OO continued to exist and be useful. It eventually caught up on the ability to read and write MS Office XML files, and in the meantime I only had a few occasions where I had to tell people “I can’t read docx, send it to me as doc or rtf”. To be fair though, I’m not a super heavy user of Office software.
In contrast, XMPP was basically nothing without Google. I couldn’t use it before Google federated, and I couldn’t use it after Google defederated. ¯\(ツ)/¯
Kbin/lemmy/mastodon are in a far better bargaining position than XMPP was, and in a better position than OO as well. They’re perfectly usable without being connected to corporate platforms, and they don’t need to market to corporate customers either. To be clear, I’m not saying that they should or shouldn’t block the corporate platforms. I think it’s actually probably best if some of them do and some of them don’t.
Office might not be a social site, but most people still use .doc files, which insinuates either the use of or compatibility with, Office.
The bit with office is when you operating as a business you want ease of compatibility when communicating with other businesses and it is easy to write the cost of the software up as just the cost of doing business. Otherwise you just risk frustrating other parties.
As someone who is on just about every social media and aggregator site there is, I find myself gravitating toward sites that allow for as much interaction (or little) as I would like. My friends and I communicate through Facebook messenger, which obviously requires FB, but I use a browser/app called Ferdium, which lets me open messenger directly without the annoyance of opening the Facebook app itself. But each site has its own specialization that it does rather well. I mean, look at Discord’s little communities, which are really designed to support the gaming community, and say, Instagram, which does photos very well. I get that companies would like the One Site to Rule Them All, but I look at it like I would at McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts. McDonald’s caters to one of my tastes, and Dunks does the other. Like your example with AIM I’ve largely given up with trying to get my friends to sign up for services. I’m older, and remember AOL when it was just starting out and even remember Compuserve when it was little more than a list server.
Never heard of Ferdium before. Just grabbed the AppImage of it and seems like something i can use. Thanks!
I’m glad! It’s an incredibly useful tool… don’t know how I lived without it for so long!
You are spot on. The difference between the products/services/values offered by XMPP and AcitivtyPub based fediverse is a very crucial distinction.
XMPP’s value is derived from its connectivity. It is bandwagon effect at work. A single fax machine makes no sense but what about another one? Or another 100 ones? Now you have a positive network externality.
The bulk of the AcitivtyPub based fediverse works very differently. The value is from the content, be it people shitposting or memes or cats. As people who frequent online forums and communities can tell, the majority of members are mere readers. They are content consumers. Content producers are often the minority. The reason why soneone will stick to a particular platform is because of the content and the expectation that more is coming.
This is a really good call out. I’ve been thinking about this article since I read it earlier today, and I never thought about the distinction between user groups and how people used xmpp vs how people use a activitypub Lemmy/kbin.
I think you are spot on.
Which actually makes me think that mastodon might have a little to worry about since its less anonymous and who you follow actually matters. And there is more interaction between (not anonymous) people.
My friends are like your friends in that we all use reddit, but never even share our usernames with each other.
Which actually makes me think that mastodon might have a little to worry about since its less anonymous and who you follow actually matters. And there is more interaction between (not anonymous) people.
Yeah, I guess there’s more of a focus on individual personalities. Still, mastodon has its core of users that choose to use it despite the fact that it doesn’t have the celebrities or the millions of people that twitter has. They don’t need any of the corporate platforms to federate with them, whereas XMPP did. That puts them in a much better negotiating position as far as protocol changes go.
I’m sorry I accidentally down voted your post
I’m on a new app and don’t know how to fix it.
My apologies
An excellent read. My synopsis is that if any big corporations joined the Fediverse they would fracture it, and that no matter what Meta, Reddit, Google, etc. would never want to see a decentralized platform succeed.
Pretty much the Fediverse needs to never let a big company tie into it. Our group needs to work at growing but at a sustainable rate.
We can’t effectively block corporate injections, unfortunately. The admins of large hub instances are just of the opinion that bigger is better, and that more is more. They’ve been excited by the prospect of, I don’t know, legitimacy or something, for a while now.
The result is going to be the network… not fracturing, per-se, but significantly restructuring itself. Big instances will get sucked into Big Social’s halo, and be like the suburbs to Meta’s or Tumblr’s metropolitan centres. Smaller instances will end up as the exurbs. Content will flow quickly between metro and suburban spaces, and trickle across suburban spaces between the metro and exurban spaces. And which Fedivesre site you choose to use will end up mattering even more than it does now.
Right now, there’s speculative reason to believe that Meta’s offering up incentives to big instance admins. Those incentives will ultimately result in Meta owning them by proxy. They’ll be client kingdoms, to mix metaphors, working on Meta’s behalf, but getting relatively little in return for it.
I think Reddit moderators probably have a good idea about how they’ll ultimately end up feeling.
Exactly right. Human greed doesn’t only come from money.
- “It will be free advertisement and will help the project grow!”
- “Look how many people are using my server. MY server. I’m popular now!”
- And the more obvious, “If I make my server big enough, maybe I can cash out by being bought by this big company!”
In the end and from whatever the source, that bus always ends up in the same place once they convince themselves to get on it.
They come with the gift of millions of new users, and all you have to give them is ownership of 95% of your users, forever.
The thing is that Meta and Reddit are masters of social manipulation through their algorithms. They know what low common denominators get the most engagement. I blame FB for a big number of echo Chambers and that just fed people their own negativity right back, made them spiral into a bad place mentally.
If they have any ability to post to the Fediverse or to track things they’ll do it all over again.
It’s the halcyon days of the Fediverse. Negativity on my feed is nonexistent. There’s discussion. There’s respect for differences. I know things will change with time but it’s important that the big instances never work as proxies for big tech. It’s important that big tech doesn’t get a seat at the table. Voices should remain individual and not some mouthpiece to an industry that wants centralized control.
“Negativity on my feed is nonexistent.”
Absolute first thing I noticed when I came in to test this as a Reddit alternative. It’s so refreshing, and the discourse is so civil.
If there’s a way we can keep this quality, it’d be amazing. I often wondered when I’m on Reddit or twitter how much of the awful negativity is really people’s or bots/algos prodding them into acting this way.
If the current big players best bets are to weasel in on the large instances, are there any simple changes that could be done to prevent their take over or influence? Things that aren’t too heavy handed?
Wdym there is so much negativity on Lemmy. It is everywhere i lok. Especially towards billionaire submarines, CEOs and corporations
I guess I’ve been lucky enough not to be firehosed with it immediately. Guess I’ll come across it more as I subscribe to more communities.
That’s not negativity that’s self defence
Wouldn’t the only reason for them to even want to be a part of this would be to monitize? If they can’t post advertisements what would they do here?
If they have any ability to post to the Fediverse or to track things they’ll do it all over again.
They have that ability, and always will have. They can create as many accounts as they like on as many instances as they like, or run as many instances as they like themselves, use incentivized individuals, or employees, or bots, or any combination of all of the above. No one can stop them, maybe even no one can spot them.
The only thing which is holding them back right now is lemmy/kbin still being too insignificant. If the network continues to grow, more and more big corps will see it as a market and an opportunity, and they will have plenty of ways to interact with it.
Fuck, that’s how it’s gonna go, and i hate it
@Kichae
You should read this ⬇️
https://alaskan.social/@seachanger/110594353082289234
I don’t think Google cares if the Fediverse succeeds or not. All they care about is that it can be indexed and people will be able to show Google ads on their instances.
Google doesn’t have a Reddit equivalent or even any other social network competitor (anymore; they killed them all). They explicitly chose to exit that entire concept of products.
The only reason XMPP mattered to Google at the time was they were trying to compete with Apple for messaging on mobile devices. XMPP meant that Android devices using Google Hangouts/Chat/Gmail could chat with users on other platforms/services while Apple’s chat app could only do SMS.
I guess what I’m saying is that Google is mostly irrelevant from the perspective of the Fediverse other than the fact that it can index and maybe give priority to discussions of certain products/topics like it does with Reddit currently.
The threat right now is from Meta, that is eyeing the fediverse, not Google.
For anyone paying attention, I’m going to sound like a broken record here, but it bears repeating: business models that treat the user as the product–to be sold, not catered to–is a cancer on the internet.
This ought to be a wakeup call in 2023. If you aren’t the paying customer/supporter, you are less than dirt on the underside of the boot of the big tech firms. You are cattle, in a factory farm, to be treated like shit, only to be slaughtered for profit at the next opportunity.
Attitude’s like “I don’t care about ads” and “my data is worthless to me, so why not trade it in” all mask the more fundamental problem that is that you are being held in a cage full of shit, when in reality you could be roaming free in a pasture.
Given growth, it’s pretty much inevitable that certain instances will need funding to survive.
Besides donation drives like Wikipedia, I can definitely see a world where small governments get involved.
Places like Estonia, Israel and Iceland that want to cheaply promote their tech industries and cultural content. Things these countries are doing in centralized spaces like Facebook - but now with more control.
My synopsis is that if any big corporations joined the Fediverse they would fracture it.
I’m not so sure. Facebook has an onion version that runs on the tor network. Big tech dominates the clear web but there’s plenty of room for everyone else.
Ultimately you have user types. In a few more months, LemmyVerse could have a couple of million active users.
I’d bet the vast majority would scoff at a fediverse version of Facebook. It’s just a different crowd - not unlike the tor network where Facebook (probably, maybe?) exists in nmae only.
I’m gonna throw this out there:
If Meta is going to join the fediverse (or implement something with activitypub) there is absolutely nothing we can do to stop them.
It’s an open protocol. They can use it.
The only thing we can do is force them to follow the AGPL and/or fork the code if they get crazy with change requests.
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In short: Embrace, start pushing the service, driving users to it. Expand: add non standard extentions, locking users onto your quasi-compatable version. Extingish: break compatibility entirely, preventing users from swiching to the fully open version.
Excellent article and it’s of course a very serious concern regarding Meta’s Project 92.
I want to use this thread to share one other concern that I’ve seen coming up constantly on Mastodon: overzealous instance admins that take things personally.
“You said X about me, I’ll block your whole instance”.
“I don’t like a particular nuanced view that instance staff holds, #Fediblock now”.
“Users of X instance reported me. I’ll block the whole instance”.
A few of these things happened in the last couple of days. We can’t have instance admins defederating because of trivial petty stuff. The only thing this does is drive users to larger instances, among which there might be corporate interests.
It’s premeditated, the “Drama” is used as a scapegoat & a precursor (Divide & disintegrate).
Typical tactics with conservative & neoliberal thrive on Repression/Regression/Chaos/Disorder (We’re dealing with corrupt institutions & industry.).
Okay, this is a good article. I was on the fence about Meta, wondering how they’d cause any damage, and this article cleared that up for me.
Same. I was familiar with “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” but somehow still didn’t get it until Ploum explained it to me slowly.
Yeah, I had never understood why people were so upset about Meta joining the fediverse but after reading that I do agree that there is a lot of damage it could cause.
this is why the powers that be must never be allowed to join the fediverse: they’ll destroy it
great article, if you’re here scrolling through the comments I urge you to stop and actually read the article, it’s worth your time I promise
Your comment made me read it. You’re right. I remeber the XMPP gchat days but I was too young to understand or care what XMPP was. I just remember the slick we ui being mind blowing.
the powers that be must never be allowed to join the fediverse
How are they not allowed? How is it checked, how prevented?
As I see it, they can freely use the code, freely set up instances, freely create user accounts on their own or other instances, with ‘independent’ users, employees or bots.
The only thing stopping them is the current fediverse’s insignificance. We’re just not tasty enough, yet. But if we become, how could we disallow them from joining?
how could we disallow them from joining?
easy, identify them, never allow them to federate, block them in your firewall. Their instances won’t be anonymous
Ok, but you can only do that if they already joined the fediverse. I replied to “the powers that be must never be allowed to join the fediverse”. It’s also questionable if everyone will block them.
you know what I meant. Block them with extreme prejudice when they’re identified
as for your second point, I assume there will be considerable pressure on all instances to follow suit or be defederated themselves. Don’t let their taint spread
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
I hope people, especially instance owners and devs, listen to this warning.
Unfortunately, the fact that lemmy isnt in the pact to not federate with meta means history will repeat itself
Even then, i doubt theres enough strong willed people to actually resist big payouts in exchange for access to the federation. Its truly pathetic how people are easily convinced
There’s nothing “pathetic” about it. You’d have to be stupid not to take a good deal. That’s like not scoring a goal while the goalie isn’t paying attention, because you think it’d be unfair.
Solving this problem isn’t the responsibility of individuals and their “willpower”, it’s the responsibility of governments. It’s their job to regulate markets and ensure fair competition. Getting mad at some sysadmin who accepts money from Meta might make you feel better inside, but it’s not going to change anything. Do your research, write to your representatives, threaten to vote them out, and then actually show up on voting days.
Wow yeah the government, judging by your writing style even the US one, which side are they again on? Corporations or people (if they even distinguish)?
Let‘s check: https://www.vox.com/2014/4/18/5624310/martin-gilens-testing-theories-of-american-politics-explainedOr as they put it, “economic elites and organized interest groups play a substantial part in affecting public policy, but the general public has little or no independent influence.”
The only reason they‘d have the fediverse on their radar is banning it in favour for some platform that lobbied them, like say Meta.
Anyway, luckily this is a global and decentralised thing and I for one like not waiting around for a government to think, decide and do anything and everything ever for me. I‘d rather find an instance admin who doesn‘t sell out at the first sign of a dollar.
If that takes me spinning up my own instances to contribute to that and have at least one place which doesn‘t sell out, I guess I will.
Aye great read and very illuminating. We gotta protect the fediverse from corporate insidious destruction. This quote stood out to me:
And because there were far more Google talk users than “true XMPP” users, there was little room for “not caring about Google talk users”. Newcomers discovering XMPP and not being Google talk users themselves had very frustrating experience because most of their contact were Google Talk users. They thought they could communicate easily with them but it was basically a degraded version of what they had while using Google talk itself. A typical XMPP roster was mainly composed of Google Talk users with a few geeks.
In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they were not 100% in control. So they pulled the plug and announced they would not be federated anymore. And started a long quest to create a messenger, starting with Hangout (which was followed by Allo, Duo. I lost count after that).
The whole article is good. I was about to quote this part.
What Google did to XMPP was not new. In fact, in 1998, Microsoft engineer Vinod Vallopllil explicitly wrote a text titled “Blunting OSS attacks” where he suggested to “de-commoditize protocols & applications […]. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS project’s entry into the market.”
Microsoft put that theory in practice with the release of Windows 2000 which offered support for the Kerberos security protocol. But that protocol was extended. The specifications of those extensions could be freely downloaded but required to accept a license which forbid you to implement those extensions. As soon as you clicked “OK”, you could not work on any open source version of Kerberos. The goal was explicitly to kill any competing networking project such as Samba.
We will need to be very vigilent with how things proceed here.
Absolutely, very vigilant. I want nothing from the bad corps. and especially just here. Though I use some things from some of them, try to keep it minimal.
But XMPP users were presumably still around and outlasted Google and their apps. We’ll be the same even if Facebook churns the protocol, because the whole point of being on Mastodon or KBin is to not be on Facebook.
you missed the point where the open source devs were in a constant race to adapt to all the google-“innovations” and actually troubleshoot on them which ends up demotivating
did Google force them to do that, or did the open source devs just make a mistake?
So how do you know who to trust?
Agreed but they will bleed off users more than likely with their shenanigans. The Fediverse is at a tipping point. It will either develop to be robust and fun/informational, or it will remain the playground for a few. Societies only become better when more people are actively involved. We need the involvement now more than ever to guard against fracturing.
Yeah, but if they flood the fediverse with their P92 Twitter killer they’ll try to own the whole space, overwhelm it and warp it to their own ends.
One thing we can do is encourage the Instagram users in our lives to open a fediverse account and use Instagram from the other side.
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BBS were so much fun back then. We had a local one in South Florida where we would all get on and we would have meet ups on weekends so we could talk in person and hang out. I used to log on with a 2400 baud modem which I upgraded to a 14k myself. It felt so fast at the time. I also would get on the telnet talkers and Irc to meet folks. I was a shy awkward teenager back then so meeting people on those services was great.
Back when AOL started getting popular my friends and I would hoard those installation disks so we could make new accounts when we needed to. Back then they would actually charge per hour to be online. We would use credit card generator programs to get online for free until they caught us and we had to make new accounts. Once AOL went unlimited it was a game changer. The bad part was it was hard getting on due to everyone jumping on.
Is there some way to work a limitation into a licence? Something around only being able to present federated content with included algorithms. That would instantly make it unattractive to all the big players who profit off their specific ad driven algorithmic feeds.
Perhaps the various concensus theories and mechanisms that came out of crypto could somehow give inspiration on ideas to protect this service from the shitty financial actors that come in and ruin all of the good services.
I’m not saying actually using crypto, just maybe some of their concensus mechanisms/ideas for preventing bad actors could be put in place.
Great read, warnings like this should be added to the conversation as long as federation with Meta is brought up. Especially for non-technical users or new users who haven’t seen embrace, extend, extinguish before we will need some way to let them know what is on the other end of federating with large companies.
Sadly that’s exactly who Meta wants, is people who don’t care about the underlying system and they I’m sure will spend much more convincing those users that federation with Meta is a good thing.
