Eugen is proof that the fediverse requires distributed (not just decentralized) ownership.
I’m genuinely confused why so many people are reacting so quickly to this news like it’s the end of Mastodon. We can’t conclude anything just by virtue of the fact that he signed an NDA. We don’t know the terms of the NDA. It could simply be that he can’t talk about Meta’s specific plans.
More to the point, as the originator of the network and the one in charge of the source code, I feel like it’s his responsibility to be informed of what companies like Meta are planning to do. If an NDA is the price of admission to that knowledge, and provided that the terms aren’t egregious, he should go.
The thing people don’t seem to understand is that you’re always going to have to sign an NDA when talking to a company about unreleased products or features, regardless of which company it is. It’s standard operating procedure. I’ve been avoiding Mastodon for the past week since there’s so many bad takes that have started trending.
Yep, agreed. I’ve signed multiple NDAs at my company recently just to evaluate some tools that have been on the market for years. It’s not what people seem to think it is.
Or it’s not what you think it is, and that corporate koolaid is really sweet
If Meta is interested in joining an open platform based on open-source API standards then why not open meetings Does anyone wonder if Rochko would sell the Mastodon Foundation to Meta
From his own comment, he’s signing the NDA because it’s the only way to find out what Meta want, and he figures knowing is better than not knowing. At no point has he indicated that he’s going to work with them at all, and an NDA doesn’t give them control or any guarantee of cooperation.
£5 says he comes back and says “I can’t discuss details because of the NDA, but… no” and it goes no further.
It was not the only way, he could have said no
There is always a choice, and you won’t understand why making the right one is important until the court cases start
Eugen isn’t the Fediverse. At least for the Twitter Exodus most Masto instances used a fork that allowed for longer posts than Eugen liked. There’s 0 reason to care about what he’s doing, he can’t control the network.
Reading this article I was constantly reminded of how Apple has designed iMessage in order to create an “us versus them” mentality. The amount of vitriol that some Apple users will direct at SMS texting is saddening.
Omg that thread was illuminating.
Key points are:
- xmpp was systematically killed by Google by “embrace, enhance, extinguish” where they federated, added bells and whistles, then de-federated after having essentially all users.
- meta systematically removes competition. It is naive to assume anything otherwise, and both meta and the fediverse is international, so governments have less ability to enforce (and enforcement via govs are mostly via the elite and interest groups)
- control over the fediverse can be lost to big tech via updates to protocol that can’t be bug fixed fast enough, a fork being run on big instances via a compromised sysadmin selling out for cash or other benefits
- link sharing is about interesting content (not social inertia like messenger apps and social apps like Facebook) so it is not a perfect analogy.
- there is no negativity on the fediverse yet
- once users become the product (even partially), the fediverse will be driven to enshittification via the same pressures of big tech
Ugh. This crap makes me want to become a Luddite. I wonder if I can move into the Unabomber’s old cabin in the woods. (I promise I won’t make any bombs!)
friendly reminder that Luddites weren’t opposed to technology, just wary of its misuse and how it was going to benefit the people higher up rather than the workers.
Weird, that sounds exactly like my current problem
Wonder why being called a Luddite is nowadays an insult
Also wonder why skinning a babies genitals is considered not child sexual abuse
And why diamonds are considered rare when millions of them sit in warehouses to artificially keep prices up
The answer is always someone profited by making it so, and that should concern you
This just got really, really ugly.
Again, another thread where two billion people joining our network and meeting us where we are … is somehow bad. If embrace extend extinguish is really the worry, then we have a bad protocol that needs extension to be usable by those 2B people, and we should fix that.
If embrace extend extinguish is really the worry, then…
What follows is a non sequitur.
Extension implies that the protocol is missing some capability, otherwise it wouldn’t need to be extended. So we need to make the protocol better so they have nothing to add. If we don’t add those capabilities, ever, then the protocol is doomed to eventual irrelevance and wasn’t worth fighting over anyway.
Word is literally extended with intentional bugs, extensions will be arbitrary.
We can’t add those capabilities, because they will also be proprietary and under copyright or patent. If you try, Meta will just sue you for the lolz.
EEE is not about outcompeting someone.
You’re assuming some kind of objective point of view, but there are competing interests involved here. Those “capabilities” need not be things that are in the interest of the end users. For example, DRM, micropayments to unlock content, region coding, state censorship, etc etc etc. Bullshit that capital uses to exploit humans.
The protocol might well be complete and need no “extension” (as you mean the word) for us, and yet Meta might have many things they want to extend it to do. The whole point of this is, we have conflicting interests. Meta can push things that are not in their users interests because they have leverage. They hold our friends and their content hostage. And they lie and manipulate their users, who simply don’t care about things like this. Your idea that we are talking about our protocol vs their extensions competing on merits that appeal to users is just totally missunderstanding the objections.
I think you are getting too hung up on the term EEE. You think you know what the individual words mean, so you know what it’s all about. But a name is not the thing it represents. It’s just a name for a complex strategy that has been used successfully against us many times in the past. Rather than quibbling with the definition, you should probably spend some time reading the history.
There is an ultimate objective point of view: adoption. Network effects matter for social software. Even if you don’t like things like DRM, micropayments, region locking or whatever, if you don’t build in to the protocol ways to do those things, people and corporations will find ways to do them around the protocol - and that’s where abuse of power and EEE risk happens. Adapt or die. I’ve been around long enough to see this happen many times and know what I’m talking about, so attempting to belittle me by telling me to go read history is kind of pointless. Also Facebook destroyed my startup, literally, so it’s not like I’m some big fan. I just know a positive-sum development when I see one.
Facebook destroyed my startup
I know a positive-sum development when I see one
Yeah, sorry you don’t mind if I take it with a couple grains of salt please? Those two lines look like they could be in conflict with each other without more information.
I developed an early VR game called Soundboxing. It was a VR beat game before Beat Saber. It was doing hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales on Steam, but Facebook repeatedly denied us access to their store with no explanation, bought Beat Saber, basically took over the industry and shut us out. They even sent us early Quest devkits that we spent 6 months porting to, only to be denied again. I’m super salty about it all tbh. But yeah, this is not that, this I see as an absolute win.
Ah yes of course, a few people living off donations are supposed to outperform a multi billion dollar corporation in amount of features and polish within features.
The protocol doesn’t matter. Look at lemmy vs kbin. Kbin has “extended” features like microblogs & different UI. There’s plenty of people that like those features and thus are using kbin over Lemmy.
Just imagine kbin were much more attractive than Lemmy. More people would start signing up there. More people start “microblogging”. Maybe there’ll be other features introduced, and Lemmy can’t keep up with the nice things being added.
One day kbin decides not to federate with Lemmy at all anymore. Most people are on kbin at this point, Lemmy doesn’t have the same quality/amount of features. Now the average user has a choice: do they care about kbin being asses and leave kbin? No, of course not, not if the features really are nicer.
Now replace kbin with Facebook. Or Google, that’s exactly what they did with XMPP.
The only thing that is able to save from the triple E attack is the users actually caring enough about open platforms and deciding to not use the non-open ones. Or actually having more resources than Facebook, good luck with that.
In your scenario, Lemmy was worse than Kbin and didn’t suit users needs as well, and didn’t evolve the protocol fast enough to keep up. Kbin deserved to win in that case.
The problem with that argument is that there’s value in something being not Facebook/Meta (or Twitter, or another corporate owned and run mega service), but that value isn’t as easy to demonstrate as “here’s a bunch of shiny features”, and once people are locked in, the focus shifts from improving the service to monetizing the service, making it rapidly worse for everyone.
People largely don’t think about how the services they use are structured, until any inherent structural issues come back to bite them. Twitter’s an obvious example, with people who were dependent on it for their livelihood from a networking/advertisement perspective ending up in trouble when the service went south. Reddit’s another example, although how that ends up is still TBD.
EEE does not work by outperforming the OSS alternative. The extensions will be proprietary, and won’t be able to be ported to Lemmy.
Kbin deserved to win in that case.
Nobody is saying it doesn’t “deserve” to win, whatever that means in a federated non-profit social network. The issue is that kbin probably wouldn’t be an asshole that intentionally created compatibility issues with lemmy just because they are in a superior position on the market in order to kill its ‘competition’. Meta absolutely will without a second thought.
You pretty much confirmed his point. His entire idea is that it doesn’t have to be Kbin that makes better features, Kbin was simply an example. It could be Meta that makes better features. Open source developers will never be able to compete feature-wise with a corporation that will deliberately pour money into making more features than the open source developers, and Meta definitely won’t make them open source. Hence, as per your wording “Meta deserved to win in that case”, which is exactly what we’d want to avoid.
Your point is the worse product should win? Open source can totally compete on features: we have way more developers than them. With Linux I can have basically any feature I want if I tinker enough. It’s about: what’s the best software for people?
More worrying than that, when directly asked about this by the “Mastodon Migration” user, Rochko’s answer was not “I did not sign any NDA”, no “I have not met with them”, no “I have not heard any proposal from FB”, no “I haven’t signed any documents”, and sure as fuck no “I’m not considering selling out and betraying you all”, no, he said just “I am not aware of any secret deals with Meta”.
That’s a textbook application of the Suspiciously Specific Denial trope.
We have to assume he met with them, signed the NDA and is seriously considering whatever they’re proposing, and there’s rumors that they’re gonna pay money to any participant servers, that would make them effectively vassals of Meta.
This, tbh
“Benefit of the doubt” shenanigans is corporate bullshit 101
Could mean nothing but it’s a bad look to be having talks under NDA. We’ll see how it turns out but I’m glad I never got invested in using Mastodon.
That he signed the NDA at all means he’s been bought, or is planning to be.
Everyone in open source knows those are tools to shut down prominent voices from being able to call out abuse and rally support. They just make sure to hit every needed talking point in the meeting, and now he legally can’t condemn anything meta does because it is “covered by NDA”
It’s just one of many shitty ways corporations try and exert coercive control over OSS
That’s bullshit.
Especially without knowing the terms of the NDA. It could just be that they can’t talk about Metas App Specifics, and/or that the NDA is limited in duration, so they may be able to talk about everything once the App is out.
Yes, it could be what you are talking about, a complete gag order, but “NDA” as a term is way to broad to say that for sure.It just says that he currently values knowing more about Metas plans higher than being able to tell us about Metas plans.
I mean, depending on the timeline, one could check if there’s any interesting PRs by him, that may infer something about Metas plans.Hope for the best, plan for the worst
Yea the NDA could be benign. Too bad the whole thing is fucking designed to look that way when it’s not.
I’m planning for him to release the next mastodon release under a different license, one far more favorable to Shitbook
deleted by creator
Why the hell do you think this? Or push it?
you seem to know nothing about what you’re talking about
Have you even committed code to an open source project? Maintainers do not automatically get a say, I can’t submit a PR and block this, and code has Owners as well, who can override the maintainers at any time
Corporations count on as much when they get the owner to sell out, and force the maintainers to setup a fork and lose a fuckton of momentum
@RandoCalrandian l@Spellbind0127 because thats the law you can’t just change the license of code that other have contributed to just because you own the repository doesn’t make it so you own the legal rights to all the code. (Your an idiot if you say otherwise. )
lol, you clearly don’t know law
They can release the next version under whatever license they want, because they own the code
Happens all the time
