• Emi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    I think among other issues would be the Gmail-ification and iMessage-ification of the fediverse. What I mean by that is open standards like email are dominated today by many people using Gmail accounts as it is popular, “free”, and comes with a ton of features. Then google started “walling off their garden” by adding features that only work between gmail accounts. Similarly, apple also took the open standard SMS and started adding on features only available between other iPhones.

    What we might see is some of the coolest features the fediverse has ever seen, but it will come at the cost of most users ignoring or dealing less with “irrelevant” things not on meta ran instances.

    Hope we can resist such a change, but that is what I am concerned about.

      • Helix@beehaw.orgOP
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        1 year ago

        We have the power over ActivityPub

        Who is ‘we’? And who doesn’t say that there’s something on top of activitypub?

        Plus, if they do create cool features, why would we not also add them?

        Because we don’t have multiple thousands of paid developers.

        • Scott@lem.free.as
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          1 year ago

          One of the “powers” of OSS is that the license usually required changes to be fed back upstream.

          If Meta were not to do that the authors of Lemmy could ask someone like EFF to take legal proceeding against them.

          • Helix@beehaw.orgOP
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            1 year ago

            Facebook can easily circumvent most requirements like that if the license isn’t invasivively copyleft. Usually web standards have permissive licenses.

          • adderaline@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            i’m not sure if ActivityPub is copyleft or not. meta might be able to build proprietary features on top of it if the license isn’t viral.

        • sznio@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          Because we don’t have multiple thousands of paid developers.

          Having worked at a company with thousands of developers, that’s a significant advantage for us.

      • Emi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        Well think of the iMessage example for a second, other phone manufactures wanted to extend upon SMS with RCS to enable cross-platform read-receipts, better image quality on messages, and more… and you can use RCS between various android phones, but apple has not yet adopted RCS. Then because of the pre-existing market share of iPhones being so high, if you want read-receipts, high quality image messages, and more you with most of your contacts will either have to convince all of your friends and loved ones to use a third party app or cave and get an iPhone.

        The features don’t have to be revolutionary, they just have to find ways to flex their market share with their features. And their market share is almost destine to be huge if they put any meaningful effort or money behind it.

        • indun@feddit.uk
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          1 year ago

          That’s an interesting example, but note that in Europe, at least, WhatsApp is king. I only mention it because the walled-garden approach Apple favours isn’t necessarily a guaranteed outcome, and third-party apps can happily become the norm among non-tech people.

          • Emi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            1 year ago

            This is true, and line is king in Japan and yet I believe the most common third party messenger app in the US is Facebook messenger despite its obvious flaws. Why, because it has more features than sms, and most people already have an account.

            No matter which way you slice it, companies that can profit off communication will try to wall off their market share. Which is one of the things the fediverse aims to cure.

          • vacuumflower@vlemmy.net
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            1 year ago

            Just a different walled garden.

            My Russian friends are all in VK, my Russian relatives are all in Telegram, my Armenian relatives are all in Facebook Messenger, and my American relatives are all in WhatsApp and Skype.

            I’m so tired of this shit TBF. Is it so hard to just install Conversations once for Android and whatever for iOS?

        • Fell@ma.fellr.net
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          1 year ago

          @emi @shipp I think an open standard converted to a walled garden is still better than a garden walled from the beginning.

          I can still send emails to GMail accounts.
          I can still send SMS to my friend’s iPhone.

          I wish everything was fully open, but at least I get to chose my email provider or my SMS app. (Although SMS is completely irrelevant in Europe these days, due to providers still charging money per message.)

          • Emi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            1 year ago

            True, if they integrate with federation in good faith it won’t matter that much for those not using them. But until we see what they do I won’t hold my breath on Facebook doing something in good faith.

      • chrisn@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        If there are some big players (like in email), i think the biggest risk is that the big players would end up only talking to each other.

        Similar to email, where a random host is likely to be spamming, that might happen here too. (Although I’m not that familiar with the protocols here)

        • Sojourn 🐢@mastodon.coffee
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          1 year ago

          @CanadaPlus this is referring to far in the future. In the long scale of things, developer time is not so limited. Fedi doesn’t necessarily have a time limit after all, it’s just going to go stronger over time. I don’t see a stopping point.

          • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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            1 year ago

            Ah. Yes, in the asymptotic future limit everything can be implemented twice as long as there’s social opportunity to do so. I wonder if that applies back to Gmail as well, will we see an open-source federated G-suite?

            • Sojourn 🐢@mastodon.coffee
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              1 year ago

              @CanadaPlus so are you expecting there to just be zero progress in the future? What do you think the fedi will look like in 10 years? And yes, there are foss tools to replicate all of gsuite. What a pessimistic view not even based in reality.

              • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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                1 year ago

                so are you expecting there to just be zero progress in the future?

                … You’re OP. You said you were referring to the far future. I was literally just agreeing with you.

                And yes, there are foss tools to replicate all of gsuite.

                Individually. Nothing that’s all integrated, though. Like, I can use Proton for certain things, but only with other Proton users, and it’s not seamless and feature-rich the way G-suite is (again, yet, maybe that will change).

    • GoodKingElliot@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      Even though email is supposedly “open”, and federated, is no longer is really the case. Big services like Gmail are suspicious of non-big-name servers, and often flag email coming from them as spam.

      About a year ago I came across an article from a guy who’d been running his own email server since the 90s, and finally gave up. I couldn’t find that article in my quick search, but I did find this:

      https://twitter.com/greg_1_anderson/status/1425113874722820100

      “I run my own email server. It’s no longer a good idea, because the anti-spam arms race makes delivery from small independent servers very difficult, even when you keep yourself off the block lists, so it’s a continuous struggle. Would switch, but I have too many domains/addresses”

      • Emi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        This is very true, I have hosted my own email before and if you are doing it yourself and not going through a big player like google to host it then your stuff sometimes gets treated as suspect by filters. Used to beg people with Gmail accounts to flag my emails as “not spam” whenever it showed up in the spam folder.