Hey mate. The way you explain things is very clear and especially helpful if like me you’re missing the broader strokes context of a lot of Lemmy based discussion. It’s very off topic, but I wonder if you could explain to me the drama around meta wading in to the fediverse space and also specifically people getting angry about secret meetings and NDAs? I got wind of this on posts on my local instance but they’re all discussing the issue assuming an audience that’s already ten steps deep and understands the technical basis behind everything so I was pretty lost.
Specifically, people were afraid what Meta’s entry in to this space could mean for privacy in the fediverse but I don’t really understand why it would make a difference unless you basically joined whatever this new thing Meta has brewing is. If they enter this space, do they somehow pose a privacy threat to users of instances that federate with them? I worry about that because as far as I know you can’t personally as a user defederate, as in block anything from a particular instance, you just have to hope your specific local instance does that.
Sure! I will try to keep it simple and not too long so I’ll cover some of the main stuff without too much detail.
Open: the Fediverse is open, it’s software is open source (the code is available for anyone to copy and improve on, or contribute changes back to the main software code), and any Meta platform will be proprietary (closed source). We don’t know what the code is behind Facebook and they don’t want us to know. The openness of the Fediverse is probably the core reason people are angry about NDAs and such.
Privacy: there are certainly privacy issues, but as an individual user this should be pretty much a non-issue if you don’t follow any Meta communities and don’t use a Meta account. Remember that for almost all Fediverse platforms, posts are public anyway.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish: this phrase was coined during an anti-trust case with Microsoft in the 90s, there’s a wikipedia page about it. The important bit is this:
The strategy’s three phases are:
Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.
Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the “simple” standard.
Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.
In our context, Meta is working on step 1, developing a platform compatible with the fediverse. People worry that steps 2 and 3 will come next, basically killing the Fediverse.
Hey mate. The way you explain things is very clear and especially helpful if like me you’re missing the broader strokes context of a lot of Lemmy based discussion. It’s very off topic, but I wonder if you could explain to me the drama around meta wading in to the fediverse space and also specifically people getting angry about secret meetings and NDAs? I got wind of this on posts on my local instance but they’re all discussing the issue assuming an audience that’s already ten steps deep and understands the technical basis behind everything so I was pretty lost.
Specifically, people were afraid what Meta’s entry in to this space could mean for privacy in the fediverse but I don’t really understand why it would make a difference unless you basically joined whatever this new thing Meta has brewing is. If they enter this space, do they somehow pose a privacy threat to users of instances that federate with them? I worry about that because as far as I know you can’t personally as a user defederate, as in block anything from a particular instance, you just have to hope your specific local instance does that.
Sure! I will try to keep it simple and not too long so I’ll cover some of the main stuff without too much detail.
Open: the Fediverse is open, it’s software is open source (the code is available for anyone to copy and improve on, or contribute changes back to the main software code), and any Meta platform will be proprietary (closed source). We don’t know what the code is behind Facebook and they don’t want us to know. The openness of the Fediverse is probably the core reason people are angry about NDAs and such.
Privacy: there are certainly privacy issues, but as an individual user this should be pretty much a non-issue if you don’t follow any Meta communities and don’t use a Meta account. Remember that for almost all Fediverse platforms, posts are public anyway.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish: this phrase was coined during an anti-trust case with Microsoft in the 90s, there’s a wikipedia page about it. The important bit is this:
In our context, Meta is working on step 1, developing a platform compatible with the fediverse. People worry that steps 2 and 3 will come next, basically killing the Fediverse.
Happy to answer further questions!