this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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Again, another thread where two billion people joining our network and meeting us where we are ... is somehow bad. If embrace extend extinguish is really the worry, then we have a bad protocol that needs extension to be usable by those 2B people, and we should fix that.
Ah yes of course, a few people living off donations are supposed to outperform a multi billion dollar corporation in amount of features and polish within features.
The protocol doesn't matter. Look at lemmy vs kbin. Kbin has "extended" features like microblogs & different UI. There's plenty of people that like those features and thus are using kbin over Lemmy.
Just imagine kbin were much more attractive than Lemmy. More people would start signing up there. More people start "microblogging". Maybe there'll be other features introduced, and Lemmy can't keep up with the nice things being added.
One day kbin decides not to federate with Lemmy at all anymore. Most people are on kbin at this point, Lemmy doesn't have the same quality/amount of features. Now the average user has a choice: do they care about kbin being asses and leave kbin? No, of course not, not if the features really are nicer.
Now replace kbin with Facebook. Or Google, that's exactly what they did with XMPP.
The only thing that is able to save from the triple E attack is the users actually caring enough about open platforms and deciding to not use the non-open ones. Or actually having more resources than Facebook, good luck with that.
In your scenario, Lemmy was worse than Kbin and didn't suit users needs as well, and didn't evolve the protocol fast enough to keep up. Kbin deserved to win in that case.
The problem with that argument is that there's value in something being not Facebook/Meta (or Twitter, or another corporate owned and run mega service), but that value isn't as easy to demonstrate as "here's a bunch of shiny features", and once people are locked in, the focus shifts from improving the service to monetizing the service, making it rapidly worse for everyone.
People largely don't think about how the services they use are structured, until any inherent structural issues come back to bite them. Twitter's an obvious example, with people who were dependent on it for their livelihood from a networking/advertisement perspective ending up in trouble when the service went south. Reddit's another example, although how that ends up is still TBD.