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Block Meta/Facebook from Mastodon - Lemmy
lemmy.ml(This is an extended version of one of the most widely re-shared post I have
ever written on Mastodon [https://emacs.ch/@ramin_hal9001/111579818136072605].)
The new “Threads” app by Meta (Facebook) is just the old 4-E strategy strategy
to destroy Mastodon: 1. Embrace: (what they are doing now) launch a competing
but compatible service with that of Mastodon. The vast majority of users, most
of whom don’t care about the privacy and intimacy of the Mastodon network, will
go with the brand with the most name recognition. The number of users already
signed up for Threads shows this to be true. 2. Extend: make their service
appear to be better with features like search, which they have the resources to
do, but the rest of the Mastodon network does not. Also include features for
tracking and advertising, sell this as a good thing, “a better place to grow
your personal brand, your business.” When people think about joining either
Facebook Threads or some other Mastodon instance, which will they choose? “Oh,
Threads users can also talk with Mastodon users so they are basically the same?
Well, why not just use Threads then?” The one with the most name recognition
will always win. Then comes the blogs and YouTube videos about, “I tried
Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, Pixelfed, each for 1 month, here is what I learned”
type videos in which the author decides Threads or Bluesky is best because they
have better features and you don’t have to decide which instance to join. 3.
Extinguish: after attracting a critical mass of users large enough to decimate
the user base of the competing Mastodon network, and temporarily making appear
to have better features like search, quietly remove compatibility with the
Mastodon network. This might effect only 10% of Mastodon users because the other
90% will be on Threads. Then people will think, “who cares if we lose contact
with that tiny minority of old Mastodon users, they should have just joined
Threads by now anyways, they still can. It has search, and more people voted for
it with their patronage. And you don’t have to think about what instance to
join, its easier!” At this point, people begin to wonder what the point of
Mastodon even is. 4. Enshittification: without any real competition to keep
people from leaving for an alternative, start exploiting users for more and more
content for ad revenue, while also exploiting advertisers with ever-increasing
costs of ad revenue, while also cutting costs on the quality of their service
until it becomes unusable. But at this point it is too late for Mastodon, the
momentum it once had is now long gone and no longer a threat to the Meta
corporation. Their investment paid off. Meta is one of the worlds largest
corporations that has made most of its money not just through advertising but
from gathering and selling people’s personal information. They are scared to
death about losing control over the Internet that they had gained over the past
15 years or so, and they are fighting to take that control back for themselves.
We built this, but now a corporation like Meta/Facebook feels they have the
right to exploit it for all its riches until it is destroyed. Don’t let it
happen. Join the Fediblock cause, it is the only way to protect our home-grown
community from corporate take-over. ### Eugene Rochko thinks Threads is good, he
is wrong Eugene Rochko [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Rochko] who
developed Mastodon as a Twitter-like app based on the ActivityPub protocol
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub], has a blog post
[https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/] explaining
why he thinks federating with Threads is good for Mastodon. > We have been
advocating for interoperability between platforms for years. The biggest hurdle
to users switching platforms when those platforms become exploitative is the
lock-in of the social graph, the fact that switching platforms means abandoning
everyone you know and who knows you. The fact that large platforms are adopting
ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social
media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to
better providers. Which in turn, puts pressure on such platforms to provide
better, less exploitative services. This is a clear victory for our cause,
hopefully one of many to come. Eugen Rochko: qif you've got questions about what
interoperability with Threads means, we wrote this up back in July, and you can
still refer to it. Make no mistake, this is huge for Mastodon. Currently people
have to choose between X, Mastodon, and Threads, and network effects play a
dominant role in that choice. IF we can say, you can access all the folks that
went to Threads from a Mastodon account, that makes it a far more attractive
option given all of its other perks :winkingface:
[./media/eugene-rochcko_facebook-threads-is-huge.webp] No, Threads will get
people to leave Mastodon in droves. Really all Facebook is doing here is
leaching users away from Mastodon. The average user doesn’t know or care about
the “perks” of non-Facebook Mastodon instances that Eugene is talking about.
They will go with the service with the most name recognition every time, rather
than trust an independent, small-time instance operator. Threads is just
Facebook with ActivityPub compatibility and extended Facebook’s ads and
tracking. The goal is to pull people away from decentralized networks and back
to being under their control. Then the network effects Eugene is talking about
will kick in, but moving people away from Mastodon and toward Threads. ###
History repeats itself again We have seen all this before. Google did something
similar when they first embraced support for the open and federated XMPP
protocol in their Google Talk (GChat) app, and exactly the situation I described
above happened. Eventually Google shut it down,
[https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/04/reminder-third-party-google-voice-apps-shut-down-in-20-days/]
and started calling the original XMPP apps “unauthorized third-party apps,”
although in fact Google was itself originally a third-party to the existing XMPP
services that existed before GChat was invented. People can and do still use
XMPP [https://providers.xmpp.net/], and I would encourage you to use it as well
for video/voice/text chat. But all that momentum and popularity was
extinguished, and was never really regained, at least not in the 9 years since
Google extinguished it. So Google was successful in destroying a community of
federated services using a popular communication protocol that made it difficult
for Google to track and control people on the Internet. We know for sure what
Facebooks goal is not: they do not want to do something good for the various
communities of people that have organically sprung-up around Mastodon and the
other ActivityPub-based federated social networks. Mastodon does not need to
make this mistake with Facebook Thraeds. ### Mastodon and ActivityPub are
important Mastodon became most popular in the wake of Elon Musk buying out the
Twitter corporation. Calling himself a “free speech aboslutist
[https://theconversation.com/twitter-and-elon-musk-why-free-speech-absolutism-threatens-human-rights-193877],”
which sounds as though he believes everyone should have a voice online no matter
how unsavory that voice might be, quickly proved to be anything but a proponent
of free speech, quietly censoring his critics and the political groups he hated,
while giving a voice to everyone else, including (seemingly enthusiastically)
giving a voice to racists and hate speech. This happens every so often, although
not always with the amount of drama churning around a single central figure such
as Elon Musk. People see how dangerous it is that the communities we form over
the Internet can only actually exist at the whims of an impersonal corporation
that might at any point go insane and destroy their communities. When an Elon
Musk event happens, then the problem becomes clear to everyone: they had been
putting their faith into a monarch and/or despot like Twitter, and now it has
turned against them. The solution to this is, and always has been, the
democratic approach, which in this case is Mastodon. Do not allow any one
authority to have aboslute control over the plane of existence. Allow people to
opt-in, and give them a say in how their community is run. Trust that people are
smart enough to understand what is in their own best interest, and allow them to
make their own decisions and cast their own votes. This is how ActivityPub and
Mastodon work. But if a democracy is not careful, it can easily be overwhelmed
and elimitated by the well-equipped armies competing for their resources.
Achei essa postagem interessante explicando sobre o conceito do Embrace/Enhance/Extinguish usado inicialmente pela Microsoft (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish). Ele detalha como a Meta faria para tornar o fediverso irrelevante, fazer as pessoas não se importarem mais com ele e criar novamente um monopólio para extrair o máximo de lucro.
Infelizmente não posso traduzí-lo agora
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