It weirds me out that the discussion has moved to “quality of content” when that wasn’t the problem with Meta/Facebook embracing the “federation” (ActivityPub).
The problem that got people worked up is that there’s a history of big companies stepping in, benefitting from open protocols, and then essentially hi-jacking them. A common example would be Google doing it with XMPP, but similar things have happened, not to protocols, but to FOSS in the past. Like with Oracle buying SUN and essentially killing OpenOffice, causing people to fork it to LibreOffice to continue the product.
You also saw it a lot in the early days of the web, with the “browser wars” where Microsoft behind closed doors, added features to HTML and JS that other browsers then had to rush to implement. Companies have done it to one another too, Microsoft reverse-engineered AOL’s AIM to make MSN Messenger compatible with their protocol, so AIM and MSN users could chat. AIM didn’t like this, and it resulted in a long back and forth, until Microsoft uncovered that AIM was using a secutity exploit in the AIM client to authenticate, and eventually acted whistleblower on this.
Facebook/Meta doesn’t want the federation, they just want the users, or more accurately their data. They’ll happily federate and contribute until they feel like they’ve gotten enough from it, at which point they’ll pull the plug.
It weirds me out that the discussion has moved to “quality of content” when that wasn’t the problem with Meta/Facebook embracing the “federation” (ActivityPub).
The problem that got people worked up is that there’s a history of big companies stepping in, benefitting from open protocols, and then essentially hi-jacking them. A common example would be Google doing it with XMPP, but similar things have happened, not to protocols, but to FOSS in the past. Like with Oracle buying SUN and essentially killing OpenOffice, causing people to fork it to LibreOffice to continue the product.
You also saw it a lot in the early days of the web, with the “browser wars” where Microsoft behind closed doors, added features to HTML and JS that other browsers then had to rush to implement. Companies have done it to one another too, Microsoft reverse-engineered AOL’s AIM to make MSN Messenger compatible with their protocol, so AIM and MSN users could chat. AIM didn’t like this, and it resulted in a long back and forth, until Microsoft uncovered that AIM was using a secutity exploit in the AIM client to authenticate, and eventually acted whistleblower on this.
Facebook/Meta doesn’t want the federation, they just want the users, or more accurately their data. They’ll happily federate and contribute until they feel like they’ve gotten enough from it, at which point they’ll pull the plug.