Omg that thread was illuminating.
Key points are:
- xmpp was systematically killed by Google by “embrace, enhance, extinguish” where they federated, added bells and whistles, then de-federated after having essentially all users.
- meta systematically removes competition. It is naive to assume anything otherwise, and both meta and the fediverse is international, so governments have less ability to enforce (and enforcement via govs are mostly via the elite and interest groups)
- control over the fediverse can be lost to big tech via updates to protocol that can’t be bug fixed fast enough, a fork being run on big instances via a compromised sysadmin selling out for cash or other benefits
- link sharing is about interesting content (not social inertia like messenger apps and social apps like Facebook) so it is not a perfect analogy.
- there is no negativity on the fediverse yet
- once users become the product (even partially), the fediverse will be driven to enshittification via the same pressures of big tech
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As a beehaw user, they also have rude users too. You can read my post about “debates”
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Or talking in threads like these, having the terrible opinion that talking isn’t terrible, even when talking to Meta.
I wouldn’t call the discussions in this thread toxic, though. There are simply different viewpoints, some people are rather strict in their rejection of Meta’s advances, and others (such as you) call for more open-mindedness.
There’s simply no comparison to the name calling and other bs frequently found on Facebook, Reddit etc. Of course the Fediverse isn’t immune to that, but I think we’re doing rather well atm.
Ugh. This crap makes me want to become a Luddite. I wonder if I can move into the Unabomber’s old cabin in the woods. (I promise I won’t make any bombs!)
friendly reminder that Luddites weren’t opposed to technology, just wary of its misuse and how it was going to benefit the people higher up rather than the workers.
Weird, that sounds exactly like my current problem
Wonder why being called a Luddite is nowadays an insult
there is no negativity on the fediverse yet
Hard disagree there. I’ve seen plenty of negativity on Mastodon.
Reading this article I was constantly reminded of how Apple has designed iMessage in order to create an “us versus them” mentality. The amount of vitriol that some Apple users will direct at SMS texting is saddening.
More worrying than that, when directly asked about this by the “Mastodon Migration” user, Rochko’s answer was not “I did not sign any NDA”, no “I have not met with them”, no “I have not heard any proposal from FB”, no “I haven’t signed any documents”, and sure as fuck no “I’m not considering selling out and betraying you all”, no, he said just “I am not aware of any secret deals with Meta”.
That’s a textbook application of the Suspiciously Specific Denial trope.
We have to assume he met with them, signed the NDA and is seriously considering whatever they’re proposing, and there’s rumors that they’re gonna pay money to any participant servers, that would make them effectively vassals of Meta.
This, tbh
“Benefit of the doubt” shenanigans is corporate bullshit 101
@jherazob “I didn’t see any invisible killer hide an as-yet-undiscovered corpse”, how very reassuring.
Could mean nothing but it’s a bad look to be having talks under NDA. We’ll see how it turns out but I’m glad I never got invested in using Mastodon.
Companies like Meta don’t do anything without an NDA. They probably reached out to Eugen and said “hey, we want to talk but first you need to sign this NDA.” They could be asking for his grandmother’s sugar cookie recipe.
Sure, there are plenty of reasons to loft an eyebrow at Eugen. Signing an NDA isn’t one of them.
There’s always the “I’m not signing any NDA, fuck you” answer. The fact that he went along with their NDA says something. He could have said no. Open source thrives on openness, and NDAs are the complete and polar opposite of openness.
Make them play on your own field. If they’re the ones coming to you, it’s because they see value in what you offer so you have leverage. The fact that they have money is irrelevant.
I mean, the real answer is that most open source developers aren’t here for freedom at any cost. They’re here like a startup… Waiting to be acquired for big bucks. Open source doesn’t pay bills, and if a megacorp pulls up in a Brinks truck full of cash, I wouldn’t be surprised if 80% of open source projects sell
This is why I trust GPL licenses over things like MIT. Fully permissive licenses are ripe for developers to sell out. GPL licenses ensure the code remains open and limits even what the original developer can do (so long as they merge a sufficient number of third party changes to make relicensing impossible). Permissive licenses allow developers to close off future updates should they desire. I haven’t looked at the license of Mastodon’s code to be fair, I’m just speaking in general.
Mastodon is AGPL 3, so no problem there, the problem lies not in the code but somewhere else. Even if Mastodon was closed source, we have other code basis like pleroma, etc. but if the main guys start marching into the wrong direction then this is the beginning of the end.
They can fork the project files and have a community edition
Came here to say this. Open source isn’t a noble crusade, and developers are not monks with vows of poverty.
Until we get unlimited gay space communism, people will always take the money and avoiding that truth and acting shocked when they do at least listen to the people with unlimited money will always lead to disappointment.
as true as this is, it means the developers are the ones with more power to stop things being taken over, and clearly as you said, they won’t.
truth is it means you can’t trust open source devs who touch with for-profit money at all, they’re all as corpo and crooked and are willing to sell everyone out for themselves.
I was trying to be a little kinder, but yeah, that’s my general opinion.
It’s one reason I like code that’s actually owned by a foundation/organization that has all that pesky oversight and meetings and politicking because it makes things MUCH harder to be unilaterally sold out from under their users: it DOES happen, but it’s not just writing a check to one guy and hey presto next week your shit is broken/infested with malware/vanishes without a trace.
They have their own problems and require funding to actually operate as intended, but it’s at least a layer between the ‘I made this’ meme and the users of the software.
There’s no harm in going to the meeting to just listen to what they have to say. Why should he deprive himself of that knowledge? That would be dumb. Information is power. Just because he can’t run out and say “here’s all the things they talked about” doesn’t mean he can’t use what he heard to his and the FOSS community’s advantage. Maybe they disclose that they’re working on some $thing, and now he can start development of a feature that might somehow protect against that $thing.
I love FOSS and the community, but far too often their zealous nature cause them to make poor decisions. The world isn’t black and white. Stop treating it like it is. NDAs happen in business all the time for anything and everything. A lot of companies won’t even have a meeting with you/another company AT ALL unless an NDA is in place. It’s standard.
Not going to at least hear what they had to say was stupid.
That he signed the NDA at all means he’s been bought, or is planning to be.
Everyone in open source knows those are tools to shut down prominent voices from being able to call out abuse and rally support. They just make sure to hit every needed talking point in the meeting, and now he legally can’t condemn anything meta does because it is “covered by NDA”
It’s just one of many shitty ways corporations try and exert coercive control over OSS
That’s bullshit.
Especially without knowing the terms of the NDA. It could just be that they can’t talk about Metas App Specifics, and/or that the NDA is limited in duration, so they may be able to talk about everything once the App is out.
Yes, it could be what you are talking about, a complete gag order, but “NDA” as a term is way to broad to say that for sure.It just says that he currently values knowing more about Metas plans higher than being able to tell us about Metas plans.
I mean, depending on the timeline, one could check if there’s any interesting PRs by him, that may infer something about Metas plans.Hope for the best, plan for the worst
Yea the NDA could be benign. Too bad the whole thing is fucking designed to look that way when it’s not.
I’m planning for him to release the next mastodon release under a different license, one far more favorable to Shitbook
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Why the hell do you think this? Or push it?
you seem to know nothing about what you’re talking about
Have you even committed code to an open source project? Maintainers do not automatically get a say, I can’t submit a PR and block this, and code has Owners as well, who can override the maintainers at any time
Corporations count on as much when they get the owner to sell out, and force the maintainers to setup a fork and lose a fuckton of momentum
@RandoCalrandian l@Spellbind0127 because thats the law you can’t just change the license of code that other have contributed to just because you own the repository doesn’t make it so you own the legal rights to all the code. (Your an idiot if you say otherwise. )
lol, you clearly don’t know law
They can release the next version under whatever license they want, because they own the code
Happens all the time
Oh bravo, you miserable dingus.
What does this mean for the fediverse? I presume because it’s split up into a million loosely connected pieces, we should be largely insulated from corporate invasion and interference. You can’t get us ALL, motherfuckers!
Meta joins, and makes it super easy to onramp from instabook
Meta slowly starts not following the protocol, forcing the protocol to adapt since they have 90%+ of the users
Eventually, Meta decides to abandon the protocol, and from the perspective of their users, we just went offline
Same playbook Google used (XMPP).Us going offline as in we cant view meta and they cant view us? That seems like a fine outcome
The problem is human nature. Content, activity and funding for development will drop off very hard and it’ll likely become like XMPP is today, aka bloated, a mess of standards and basically forgotten about.
Meta just want to suck all they can out of a promising technology and it isn’t their first trip at the rodeo. See Occulus as well. People are right to want to keep Meta at arms length.
Don’t spread FUD about XMPP, please 🙂. It works wonder, it’s in fact everything I’ve ever wanted for personal/family chats and large IRC chatrooms alike. It also happens to be one of the easiest things I ever had to self-host thanks to how wonderful and batteries included ejabberd is. I have developed several clients and bots/integrations in several languages thanks to how versatile it is.
Fun fact, it has a PubSub component which is (IMO) technically superior to the fediverse more lightweight and more flexible.
If one thing, the great XMPP rediscovery is overdue if you ask me 😉
It’s a wonder it works you mean.
I’m not trying to shit on XMPP, but there is no denying the countless issues third parties like Google and Meta have caused as well as the human factor and disagreements that have derailed its progress over its lifespan. It went from promising new communications tech that everyone* was going to use to something fairly niche now.
If anything gets “discovered” along these lines I hope it’s Matrix and co now instead of what XMPP has become.
I’m not trying to shit on XMPP, but there is no denying the countless issues
There’s a lot of subjectivity and emotions there. So, let’s look at the facts instead: XMPP is a very simple protocol at its core. You can literally implement RFC6120 in an afternoon. But you have no reason to, because of the many existing mature implementations, which takes us to the second important aspect (IMO): “liveliness”. XMPP has many well maintained client AND server implementations and a rich and dynamic ecosystem. Unlike Matrix, Zulip, RocketChat, Mattermost, … it’s not pushed forward by a single entity, which severely reduces the probability and effects a bad actor might introduce. XMPP is extensible in ways that makes it more future-proof and resilient than most alternatives.
If anything gets “discovered” along these lines I hope it’s Matrix and co now instead of what XMPP has become.
Those not learning from history are doomed to repeat it, and if you ask me, Matrix is doing everything that XMPP did, but worse :) I only arrived to XMPP after fighting for the Matrix cause and deeming it a lost one. No time to elaborate, but the protocol itself is insane and its creators are experts in deception and empty promises.
Edit: more about Matrix https://programming.dev/comment/66569
I ask, please expand or provide some entry points for the XMPP for a complete newbie on the subject if you’d be so kind, please and thank you
No problem, what do you want to know? If you are here, it means that you already understand how federation works, i.e. you need to find a service provider/server on which to create your account, there are several sites to help you with that:
then you’ll end-up with a username like nick@server.tld and the password of your chosing, just like email, just like mastodon/lemmy. You will then log into using a client of your choice, and here as well you have plenty of choice: https://xmpp.org/getting-started/
If you are more of a power-user, I recommend Gajim, if you are on Android, Conversations/Cheogram are safe choices, if you are on i/macOS, siskin/beagleIM are decent, etc
thanks, I’ll def check it out, sounds different
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Google didn’t add any proprietary extensions to XMPP, they just never updated their server software, while the ecosystem kept improving. For example, they stuck to SSL2 while nearly all nodes required TLS1.2 for federation.
I presume because it’s split up into a million loosely connected pieces, we should be largely insulated from corporate invasion and interference.
My guess is, that Meta will try to control the public image of the name Mastodon. Yeah the Software itself is OpenSource and protected under AGPL-3, but they still can buy Mastodon GmbH and use that to tie their name to Mastodon for the broad public.
Well shit. I thought this might happen. I mean it‘s only a talk for now, but I suspect further that there will be some sort of money offer in an effort to start the “embrace” part of embrace, extend, extinguish and with the NDA we won‘t know if he took the money or not.
So for those who care about not embracing Meta, it‘s the canary in the coal mine. I‘ll switch to one of my safer Lemmy instances now I suppose before I get too attached to this one, see y‘all around under my new identity.
Eugen isn’t the Fediverse. At least for the Twitter Exodus most Masto instances used a fork that allowed for longer posts than Eugen liked. There’s 0 reason to care about what he’s doing, he can’t control the network.
Then apply that logic to Facebook and relax.
Everyone is losing their minds over this.
I’m genuinely confused why so many people are reacting so quickly to this news like it’s the end of Mastodon. We can’t conclude anything just by virtue of the fact that he signed an NDA. We don’t know the terms of the NDA. It could simply be that he can’t talk about Meta’s specific plans.
More to the point, as the originator of the network and the one in charge of the source code, I feel like it’s his responsibility to be informed of what companies like Meta are planning to do. If an NDA is the price of admission to that knowledge, and provided that the terms aren’t egregious, he should go.
The thing people don’t seem to understand is that you’re always going to have to sign an NDA when talking to a company about unreleased products or features, regardless of which company it is. It’s standard operating procedure. I’ve been avoiding Mastodon for the past week since there’s so many bad takes that have started trending.
Yep, agreed. I’ve signed multiple NDAs at my company recently just to evaluate some tools that have been on the market for years. It’s not what people seem to think it is.
Or it’s not what you think it is, and that corporate koolaid is really sweet
From his own comment, he’s signing the NDA because it’s the only way to find out what Meta want, and he figures knowing is better than not knowing. At no point has he indicated that he’s going to work with them at all, and an NDA doesn’t give them control or any guarantee of cooperation.
£5 says he comes back and says “I can’t discuss details because of the NDA, but… no” and it goes no further.
It was not the only way, he could have said no
There is always a choice, and you won’t understand why making the right one is important until the court cases start
If you don’t hear what they want to say, then you find out what they’re planning when they start doing it to you. Signing the NDA imposes no obligation to agree or cooperate. There’s nothing to stop you from signing, listening, saying no, and walking away. I don’t know for sure that’s what’s happening, but we also don’t know that it’s not what’s happening.
Refusing to even talk to them does send a message, I agree, and listening gives them a chance to convince you. Still, I can understand that some would rather take the risk in exchange for a little advance warning of whatever it is.
Listening also gives them a chance to lie, which he then can’t call them out on because the lie happened during an NDA’d meeting
Great, just what we needed. Looks like he ignored the risks of facebook (or meta, i still prefer to call with the already stained name) killing the fediverse. Hopefully nothing comes out of this discussion.
I doubt he’s ignoring anything. And I know nothing but I think it’s a little unfair to bash him for this.
Meta does not need the Fediverse to create a ready-populated instance all of its own. It doesn’t need to federate with anyone, it can probably kill Twitter and Reddit with a single stone (if it pours enough resource into moderating and siloing). Just stick a fediwidget in every logged in account page with some thoughtful seeding of content and it’s done.
The danger of federating with Meta is much the same as not federating. It has such a massive userbase it will suck the lifeblood out of everywhere else whether or not it can see us.
The possible silver lining is that there are other very large corporates which can do the same (some of which have said they plan to). We could all end up with multiple logins on corporate instances simply because we have accounts with them for other reasons. And that means a lot of very large instances with name recognition, and easy access, making it much harder for any of them to stop federation and keep their users to themselves.
Being federated with one or more behemoths might well be hell. Some instances won’t do it. Moderation standards will be key for those that do. But multiple federated behemoths can hold each other hostage because their users can all jump ship to the competition so easily.
This is much, much more complicated than just boycott or not. They cannot be trusted one tiny fraction of an inch but this is coming whether we like it or not. We need to work out how to protect ourselves and I’m starting to think that encouraging every site with a user login to make the fediverse a widget on their account pages might be the very best way to do it.
I think it’s a little unfair to bash him for this.
I don’t. He would not have agreed to Facebook’s NDA unless he was planning to sell the Fediverse out.
there’s an argument that it’s better to know rather than not know. i understand the ideological stand against Meta and everything it stands for, but it’s easy to judge from the outside looking in. we don’t know what he knows
Knowing is useless if you’re contractually obligated not to act on that knowledge. When the devil offers you a deal, the wise say no, because nothing good can come of it.
Suposing multiple big platforms join the fediverse and play nice, what stops them from feeding ads to other instances?
So what if he doesn’t talk to them? The protocols and code are available for anyone, and instances are open for federation. Facebook could, without any sort of consultation, deploy their own instance of Mastodon with their own fork of the code and keep all their changes to themself. If they’re going to do it anyways, it’d be better to work with them on it.
The know large instances might defederate from them, that’s why the NDAs.
Eventually, Meta will do to the fediverse what Google did to XMPP. I hope I’m proven wrong.
Wouldn’t the NDA’s just make it even more likely taht people will defederate?
People tend to forget things quickly, especially if they can communicate with their friends and family from Lemmy. Sooner or later, everyone will give in and just federate with Meta.
That will eventually lead to code changes to cater to Meta’s needs, those changes might not be made public (Mastodon is LGPL 3.0, if you don’t release the binaries, you don’t have to release the source), and those changes will eventually lead to telemetry gatering, incompatibility issues, etc., and that will eventually lead to people steering away from Mastodon… Lemmy and KBin might be soon to follow.
I’m skeptical that Facebook would want to openly federate with externally controlled services because it’s kind of wild out here by design. However, if they did there would also be upsides. Those people who refuse to use anything but Facebook could be reachable without the rest of us having to go to Facebook, and people who only use Facebook because that’s where everyone else is could migrate away. Platforms opening up is a good thing.
I doubt Facebook would run Mastodon if they wanted to federate. They have an existing system with existing data and they have plenty of development resources to bridge that to ActivityPub. If Facebook did want to run Mastodon for some reason, even if they did open source their changes, which they probably would since they have a history of working with open source, the big changes would likely be unusable for most servers because Facebook scale is completely different from the typical Mastodon server. It doesn’t make any sense for a free Mastodon server with less than a million users to deploy the same kind of infrastructure that Facebook runs for 3 their billion monthly active users all over the world.
kind of wild out here by design
Exactly. Volunteer moderation in the Fediverse can’t really compete with paid moderation at companies like Meta, which have to moderate significantly more posts. I’d guess that FB and Instagram get more posts in one month than the entire Fediverse has ever gotten.
Please look into the history of XMPP and how Google essentially killed it.
I was there for that and you’re misremembering. Before Google, hardly anybody used XMPP or knew what it was. Google came, and then you could talk to Google users on XMPP but still regular users didn’t know what XMPP was, and could sometimes be confused why your e-mail was different. Google left, taking their XMPP users with them. XMPP is still XMPP to this day. Every instant messaging service from that era, including Google Talk, has pretty much died out. XMPP might actually be an exception because there were few users before and the relative decrease in users is probably much less than platforms with more memorable names and better advertising.
I used to use XMPP before Google “killed it”, and my story is that before Google had XMPP, I used XMPP gateways to talk to people on other platforms. Google integrated and I started using Google’s XMPP client on my phone because it was much better than any other XMPP client available at the time. Google discontinued XMPP support and I didn’t move back to another server, but it wasn’t because Google had killed XMPP. I don’t know if I ever had any native XMPP contacts, and I didn’t talk to anybody on AIM, MSN, etc anymore, and I still didn’t talk to anybody on native XMPP, so had no reason to use XMPP. I talked to a few people on Google Talk, people who had never used any other XMPP service, and then Google discontinued Google Talk because that era of instant messengers had apparently ended.
This plan to prevent the same thing from happening is really misguided. You can have few users now, few users later, and few users further in the future, or you can have few users now, many users later, and maybe few users again further in the future. People who are on non-Facebook platforms now are very unlikely to decide they like Facebook better and leave later if Facebook federates and then defederates.
The idea of everyone getting together to preemptively defederate Facebook is also very hypocritical. We have a decentralized, open system where anybody can start an instance and we tell people to find an instance with rules and content they like. Then the possibility of Facebook federation starts being talked about and suddenly we don’t want the same rules to apply to Facebook. People want Facebook globally blocked before they get a chance to federate, and primarily out of fear of Facebook the company or prejudice against Facebook users, not because of the technical concerns around scaling. If the rules only apply to small instances with small budgets, what happens if one of the instances starts to get too successful?
That sounds very pessimistic, I hope that won’t be the case, at least it seems like the mastodon instance I’m on will block it from the start, so that’s at least something.
It’s not about getting the code. They have the code, have for years, and hate it because it forces an open system.
This is about forcing people in “positions of power and authority” over mastodon/lemmy/kbin servers to conform to facebook’s wishes so that they can destroy a competing platform.
Google XMPP or Microsoft Word Document style.
It’s been done before, the only reason for people to cave now is they’re getting paid.
Oh man, I can’t wait until Eugen also turns into a corporate cocksucker and back-knifer.
Mastodon is AGPLv3. That means if you allow someone to communicate with a server, you must offer them the modified source code. Not just when you distribute the modified code like in the GPLv3. So even if they forked Mastodon their code modifications would need to be made available.
However iirc ActivityPub itself is under a more permissive scheme (I think it’s predecessor was using the MIT license?) so Meta could use the protocol itself.
is AGPLv3
Hey, you’re right!
To get around that they’d have to do something drastic, like getting the owner of the code to change the license in next release, and keep him in an NDA while doing so in order to position themselves when the change happens.
Good thing we’re not seeing that
getting the owner of the code to change the license in next release
AFAIK, all contributors need to agree in order to change the license of a codebase. If a contributor disagrees, their part of the code has to be rewritten in order to comply.
This just got really, really ugly.
Eugen is proof that the fediverse requires distributed (not just decentralized) ownership.
Meta could be doing the same thing Truth Social did: set up a giant Mastodon instance and leave it at that.
They don’t need an NDA for that, and he certainly knows better than to sign one.
This is fishy to the extreme
Not really. Most big corporations require a NDA to use their toilets. Slight exaggeration but not by much.
Wait and see.
The blanket use of them isn’t better
We know it’s to hide the abuses
It’s because they’re publicly traded.
Information about their plans being in the wild but not formally announced adds all kinds of possibility for SEC involvement. You have to be very careful with how information is publicized to avoid insider trading or the appearance of it.
NDAs contribute to insider trading, not mitigate it.
It means the people who know they are doing shitty things can’t warn everyone else
No, they don’t. If you can’t track where information is, the ability of people to act on a tip massively increases, and the enforcement is much more difficult.
They are effectively legally required to use NDAs when discussing future directions of their business. There may not be an explicit regulation you can point to, but when information is spread around without tight control and someone acts on it, the SEC can and very willingly does get involved. There’s a reason it’s effectively universal for any publicly traded company with meaningful legal representation, and it’s because it’s a ridiculous level of negligence to have those conversations without them.
Seriously doubt that.
Me too, unfortunately.
We hope so.
Wouldn’t it be better if they federated so it doesn’t become a walled garden in there? It means we can stay on our own instances but aren’t cut off from their large userbase.
They’ll likely federate with those who worked with them and signed NDA. They are probably going to allowlist federate … My guess
You’re probably correct :(
(E: For perspective,) Truth Social was just a mouthy startup for spreading hate, not a nearly trillion dollar company with a lengthy history of anti-competitive activity.
Related: https://beehaw.org/post/715934
Aral Balkan has been posting about surveillance capitalism/centralised networks and corpotate landgrabs for years and said this the other day
