this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
143 points (99.3% liked)
Shower Thoughts
51 readers
1 users here now
A community for sharing those miniature epiphanies you have that highlight the oddities within the familiar.
founded 2 years ago
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The classic tactic is known as EEE (Embrace / Extend / Extinguish).
It's not impossible to imagine a scenario where in the future, if the Fediverse is thriving, a seemingly good-intentioned corporation chooses to Federate its own instance on its own hardware. This opens up the capacity of the network even more and makes it more accessible and less intimidating to a broader audience. This is the Embrace phase.
Then comes the Extend phase, where they dedicate a lot of resources to improving their technology and platform and capabilities. They may add some functionality that is not defined in the ActivityPub standard, but it seems really cool or useful, and so a lot of people switch to it, and it becomes the de facto standard place to go on the Fediverse. Everywhere else is a ghetto that doesn't have Feature X.
Eventually, the corporate site, now the de facto, wants to continue to build on its capabilities, and adhering to an open standard is only a liability, especially given that the only people left on the Fediverse are unmonetizable weirdos. So they announce that they're going closed. The majority of people on the platform don't care because it's where most everyone already is. This, of course, is the Extinguish phase.
So yeah, it's certainly a possibility that could come to fruition. The kind of scary part is that to begin with, everyone could have the best intentions. But corporations are amoral and driven by profit incentive, and historically, that need to drive growth and profit has led to staggeringly similar decision-making (see Twitter and Reddit as examples of that). And so even if a company comes in with seemingly truly noble intentions, eventually the need to turn a profit has a high likelihood of leading to the fate described above.
Isn't this kind of sort of what is happening with Reddit right now? Reddit The Company has dramatically tightened its grip, driving a not insignificant portion of its userbase away. A big destination for those disenfranchised users appears to be fediverse, whether that's through Lemmy or kbin or something else.
If ( and that's still a big "if") fediverse becomes the "new thing," and some company or companies attempt to EEE fediverse, it becomes far simpler for the users disenfranchised from that final "extinguish" phase to find a new home. Because fediverse and ActivityPub will continue to exist, the amount of change users would need to absorb would be far smaller.
I'm also thinking of it in terms of AOL back in the day. AOL, at the time, was its own little walled garden of content, and everyone used it. But the general internet caught up and caught on, and here we are. It's one thing for a corporate interest like Facebook or Reddit or Twitter to make its own little semi-walled garden from the getgo (but we're already seeing backlash against all three, Twitter in particular as it closes viewing without logging in, and rate limits people depending on how much they've paid). It's a wholly other thing for a company to try to take a landscape that is already decentralized and then centralize it.
Facebook, through Snap, can acquire Gfycat and shut it down. Who can "buy" ActivityPub? Who can "buy" SMTP or HTTPS?
What happened with reddit is that they've decided to go IPO and it's a different thing when you are a publicly traded company - that's usually when they go down the road of evil. Everything is about investor value - adn a lot of those investors are other large corporations or very rich individuals and they are as far as I'm concerned sociopathic.