• 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.

          • lloram239@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            ActivityPub itself is just a protocol, everybody can reimplement it. Lemmy and Mastodon are AGPL3 and thus copyleft along with “you must release source code for your server”.

            Though if Meta does anything, I’d expect it to be written from scratch and MIT licensed. Companies don’t like to get near anything GPL as long as they can avoid it.

      • 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?

          • indun@feddit.uk
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            1 year ago

            I’m hoping RCS’ burgeoning ubiquity on Android breaks some of the walls down in Europe, at least.

              • indun@feddit.uk
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                1 year ago

                We have firmly reached the limits of my very limited understanding of the technologies available, now! But we agree, at least, that something not tied into a walled garden is preferable.

                I have a little hope with the recent time in the sun the fediverse is having.

      • Felix Urbasik@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)

    • lloram239@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      In the Fediverse you are still 100% under the control of whoever runs the server. Your user accounts can’t move between servers. There is no easy way to export communities and import them on other hosts. On top of that, all the federated features are completely optional and can be switched off.

      Fediverse really doesn’t offer any securities beyond what a plain old Web forum does, all the federation aspects depend on everybody playing nice with each other.

      At the moment even basic GDPR conformity isn’t given, as there is no way to export all your data from an instance, a deletion request for your data also doesn’t seem to be guaranteed to make it to other instances.

      If Facebook builds something with ActivityPub and it gets popular they can play the whole embrace, extend, and extinguish game from start to finish.

      • 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 (probably not exactly). 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).