I’m kind of happy as long as big tech is not running it

Wait for it. It’s coming. That’s why Meta is doing this. We’re in the “embrace” phase of “embrace, extend, extinguish”.

I don’t see how to avoid it, unless the courts step in. The only reason why we’re using the World Wide Web instead of the Microsoft Wide Web is because the US sued Microsoft and won.

deleted by creator

If meta was to pull the plug on federation it wouldn’t kill ActivityPub, there would still be millions of us here.

It’s not about pulling the plug. It’s about introducing proprietary features that break communication, forcing people off of an independent server and onto Threads.

If most of your IRL friends are on Threads and your experience with them has gotten janky due to Meta fucking with the protocol, it’s going to be very difficult to not switch over to Threads.

Oh, and good luck trying to get your friends to switch over to some indie server they’ve never heard of. If you can do that, then you should run for president.

Both are open protocols for communication over the Internet. Both have been adopted by a large corporate interest.

Now, how are they different?

“The flood of crap” isn’t what people should be worried about. They should be worried about Meta embracing, extending, and extinguishing the Fediverse. There’s a good article about this here. People are worried about the wrong things and don’t realize what’s at stake.

Well, that really puts things in perspective.

At Microsoft, this strategy was called “embrace, extend, extinguish”, but it’s important to realize that it isn’t a practice that’s exclusive to Microsoft.

One pixel every 5 minutes? That sounds extremely tedious.

Normally, I’m against gatekeeping, but if it keeps out 4chan, then I’m all for it.

It isn’t a perfect analogy. I doubt that any analogy is. I regard defederation as an advanced topic, though, and it isn’t necessary to understand it to grasp the basics.

We could sit here and speculate about what makes sense to the average person all day, but at the end of the day it wouldn’t amount to anything without evidence to back it up…user studies or something like that.

What I’m asking is does it make sense to you?

I think the point is to have the freedom available. Most people are going to get their email from GMail, but you have the freedom to get it somewhere else if you want to, and you can still send to and receive email from people using GMail. You can even roll your own mail server.

You can’t post to Twitter from Facebook or vice versa, but if Facebook and Twitter were part of the Fediverse, then you could. Does that help?