@Elizafox @garbados @MadestMadness Or for another example, look at Google Talk or Facebook Messenger.

Look at the benevolent tech companies and their embrace of the XMPP open standard, even to the point of (at least with Google) supporting S2S federati... oh. Now it's called Hangouts, and XMPP is a degraded experience, and S2S definitely does not exist any more. And, most people just used Google when thinking about XMPP, because "eh, they support S2S, and Google won't go down".

@Elizafox @MadestMadness @garbados Literally, one of the major corporate social networks could just add a ActivityPub bridge, and two huge things happen:

1. Everyone that cares about interacting with people who are only on Fedi now have no incentive to move to an indie instance
2. That corporate social network can pull a Fedichive and start doing *all* of their data collection that they do within their walled garden, but with the added bonus of contributing something that makes them effectively unblockable. Of course, the Fediverse is leaky as fuck as it is, but still.

It also sets up *exactly* the scenario that's causing Gmail to embrace/extend/extinguish e-mail. Fediverse spam protection is a fucking joke (that is, it's almost nonexistent), and corporate instances will be able to sell the same message Google did re: spam protection. (Large userbase means larger corpus and more accurate spam filtering, basically.) And then, they can start slowly distrusting remote messages, to the point that you have to be on the corporate instance to contact your friends on the corporate instance.

@bhtooefr @MadestMadness @Elizafox this is a valid threat model but also that we're assuming basically nothing happens to the fediverse, its tech, or its community between now and then. fedi is still in implementation hell, with multiple implementations still adding features and discovering what features people want. in its current state, a zaibatsu has no reason to federate. the fediverse is neither a threat nor an opportunity.

but if we get admin guilds who can train up new admins with battle-tested norms and practices, then it becomes harder for a zaibatsu not to "leak" users to a less-surveilled interface.

if we get better privacy tech, such as "neighborhoods" and associated privacy controls, it'll be harder to deploy hostile surveillance against fedi.

of course this rebuttal relies on things that don't exist yet, and because we live in hell we may never get those things because everyone is too busy with other things, like surviving hell.

@garbados @Elizafox @MadestMadness @bhtooefr Here's the thing, though: it's not going to be the top player who does it, because they have no incentive to do so, at least until the Fediverse becomes a serious threat to their dominance, at which point we can just tell them to fuck off. It'll be a runner-up who does it. And since it'll be a runner up, we will in fact be able to tell them to fuck off.

...

@bhtooefr @MadestMadness @Elizafox @garbados We should really focus on keeping our own house in order for now, though. In particular, aside from the instances that allow hate speech, we need to be putting pressure on open reg instances to stop subjecting us all to spam and reply guys.

@TheGibson @freakazoid @Elizafox @MadestMadness @bhtooefr why would you block all zaibatsu-based instances

maybe that's something else about the conversation i don't understand

@TheGibson @freakazoid @Elizafox @MadestMadness @bhtooefr zaibatsu just meaning "very large corporation" ex: facebook, google, etc. derived from the japanese term "zaibatsu" which refers to a specific cadre of very large corporations.

@TheGibson @freakazoid @Elizafox @MadestMadness @bhtooefr i can understand that. two things:

- blocking all zaibatsu instances requires tooling that doesn't exist, but there's no reason it can't exist. they probably give themselves away with headers, or with the particulars of an endpoint's responses; an instance could catch these details and act on them.
- improved privacy features / tooling would help keep your non-public content under tighter wraps, even shifting norms away from the present default of public posting.

fighting back will take hard work but i just don't think that hard work is beyond us.

or maybe it is! haha 🙃

@TheGibson @freakazoid @Elizafox @MadestMadness @bhtooefr agree 100%

i wish i could hack on AP tooling full time. then again i wish i could herd goats full time 🤷‍♀️

@garbados @MadestMadness @Elizafox @freakazoid @thegibson I'm still of the general stance that federation should generally be much more restricted than it is, and that was even without this being a concern.

(Spam instances and harassing instances were the threat model that made me think the correct model was default-silence (in the Mastodon sense of the word) federation with a bit more permeability than in Mastodon, as well as some degree of default-deny-fetch. But corporate social media instances are another threat model that that would be partially effective against, at least to an extent.)

@freakazoid @bhtooefr @MadestMadness @Elizafox @garbados
A small runner-up centralized social network can still be a lot larger than any single node ought to be, & in the past we've gotten lucky because they've all been internally ideologically consistent enough that for any given node, the decision to instance block is relatively easy. What if instead of Gab, Ello tried to federate?

@Elizafox @garbados @MadestMadness and if you’re ever in danger of the open source project reaching cross compatibility, throw more engineers at it, i’m sure they’ll come up with some compression scheme or something

@Elizafox @MadestMadness @garbados mandatory client-side caching

@Elizafox @MadestMadness counterpoint: EEE is a specific strategy that doesn't always pay off.

FB dropped XMPP support for messenger because it hampered their ability to monetize data. Twitter has crushed 3rd party interfaces for the same reason -- it's no coincidence that they bought tweetdeck at the same time they locked down their API.

fedi is vulnerable to EEE like pretty much anything tech but it would take a significant investment at a significant loss. to see a zaibatsu turn its gaze toward fedi would represent a profound recognition of its power.

@garbados @Elizafox @MadestMadness
EEE ends up doing damage even if it doesn't end up making profit. Best case scenario here seems to be that federation & eventual defederation doesn't actually affect big or small nodes directly because communication between them is rare (like with gab or j3st3r's thing) & the whole thing blows over before protocol is affected.