Programming.dev Meta

We can defederate at any point

Could we re-federate at any point as well? Perhaps after ActivityPup establishes some form of protocol ossification, like email or sms, curbing the potential for it to be effectively owned by a majority platform? Would that take too long, and thus dissuade corporate adoption?

If we held off on supporting Facebook first, and federated with smaller governmental agencies, news outlets, academic institutions, encouraging them to host their own ActivityPup servers instead of solely relying on Twitter or Facebook for public communication, just as they already do for website and email domains, could that help speed up the ossification process?

By essentially giving FOSS platforms and protocols a longer runway before federating with Facebook, it could give ActivityPup greater time to cement more diverse stakeholders, calming the Fediverse's historic fears of repeated "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" antics, particularly when dealing with the largest FANG conglomerates on earth.

So what's the tipping point?

Not during "Embrace", obviously. This is the phase where their sheep's clothing is pretty intact, they're adding code and investment to the public repos and keeping theirs "mostly" in sync with some minor interop problems but "only because Lemmy isn't Meta and those issues aren't important".

Not during the first part of "Extend", either. "These are features that only Meta users could use anyway".

The second phase of Extend is a lot more insidious. The stitching between the fleece parts is starting to wear. The minor incompatibilities are starting to look a bit less minor. "You wouldn't defederate for those would you? Look at all this other amazing stuff we've given you. We totally promise pinky swear no our fingers aren't crossed behind our backs to fix them" and yet despite their vast dev resources they never somehow quite manage to resolve them "satisfactorily" and "we're still working on them".

Then while we're still being all hopeful and reassured it's all OK, the third E switch is thrown. The fleeces drop off revealing the slavering wolf. The ads now clutter Lemmy and overwhelm the content like they do on Facebook. The previously optional subscriptions now paywall off everything but the most basic features. Zuck phones Slarti and buys a new planet. Now do we defederate? Oh we can't. Everything breaks. Dammit we should have listened to VaxHacker and given them the boot at the start.

The reason we give them the boot now is because we know their plan. Zuck is here because he wants money. He's not interested in fede-wotsit. Lemmy? Isn't he that Motorhead guy? EEE has begun. The sooner we kill it the easier it'll be. "We can give it up at any time" - yeah, like those druggies and alcoholics that somehow never quite manage to. The best way to get off drugs is to not get on them in the first place.