Excellent post, and it is truly heartbreaking stuff. We know Eugen signed an NDA with Meta which just seals the deal for me given the other refusals to answer basic questions. I think he is probably a person who is finding validation for something he’s worked on for a very long time, and Meta is blinding him. But that’s what they do. They are emotional manipulators by trade.

Mark my words, this’ll be the end of Mastodon especially when Meta can outspend Mastodon all day every day to add proprietary functionality

This is exactly what happened with RCS. Sure, it is an open standard. But Google EEE’d it by adding proprietary functionality using their near unlimited budget and influence, then built it all around their own proprietary middleware, like Jive, to lock out others. Some of the most popular messaging apps, including Signal, had been begging Google for RCS access for years. Google refuses, because they firmly control it now. Only a handful of partners get to access the supposedly “open” standard which Google has co-opted. Sure, you could pour resources into the old, unmaintained RCS standard from over a decade ago. Before Google essentially killed it by moving proprietary and snuffing it out. But then it wouldn’t work with Google’s RCS, and Google’s RCS is what people know as RCS at this point.

Meta will do the same thing with ActivityPub specifically, and decentralized social media in general. They will EEE their way to the finish line. They will wall it all off and prevent account portability and cross-communication outside of a preferred partner network. I could see them walling it off to the Meta-owned properties as they seek ways to further tie Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp together under a common protocol which they’ve EEE’d.

I don’t think it is an overreaction. There is a reason Meta won’t allow Threads accounts to be deleted without also deleting your Instagram account. They are holding people hostage in a sense. It is a deliberate move, and there is no reason they couldn’t disassociate a Threads account from an Instagram account and delete it. Hell, no need to even disassociate it at all.

Isn’t a major reassurance from Eugen, and others who also signed Meta’s NDA, that you can move your account from Threads? How is that truly possible if they don’t let you delete the account without also deleting your Instagram account?

This is the type of malignant and anti-open behavior we can expect from Meta. And they are doing it right out of the gate, before they even embrace ActivityPub as they rush to capitalize on Twitter’s mess.

I stand by my previous statements: Meta’s vision of Threads is to suck up as much growth in our community, then wall it off with tactics like the above, all while embracing open standards.

It isn’t like we don’t see it happen elsewhere. Google did it with their “proprietarization” of RCS. Google promoted its growth and adoption, then slammed the door shut. That is why Signal and others do not have RCS; Google refuses to allow competitors to have access to it. They’ve walled it off. Only preferred partners, like Samsung, are allowed to dabble in it now. And so, too, will Meta go that route with ActivityPub if we let them.

Good question and observation. I think Reddit set out to crush any and all competition with loyal fanbases and a business model. No coincidence that the surviving apps are severely feature-limited and run almost exclusively by hobbyists (such as is the case of Narwhal; it is not the dev’s job. He is an executive with a side project).

It seems pretty clear what is going on here. Reddit thought Christian of Apollo would just roll over and take it. He exercised his rights and recorded conversations and saved transcripts of Reddit lying to him, and released them after they started libeling and slandering him and his business.

Reddit doesn’t want that to happen again. I would guarantee that the NDAs being forced on these devs have clauses which prevents them of speaking ill of Reddit or making any statements regarding similar circumstances. They will just bend over and take it when the time comes.

And those devs are OK with that because the surviving apps are all hobbies, nothing more. Reddit lined them such that they can be easily swept away when needed.

Meanwhile, even communities under active attack–like r/Blind–are not moving. They are, similarly, just taking it. Even as mods make it very clear that they cannot perform their jobs even with Reddit’s “carve out” to profit from the unpaid labor and expertise of mod tool creators. Even as users reaffirm that they can not use the site anymore, whether through surviving hobby apps or otherwise, because reddit refuses to hire on certified accessibility professionals or even put their own users through that training.

Great post. Lemmy right now reminds me of Reddit 15-16 years ago. Mostly tech workers or tech hobbyists who know far more than an average person and thus aren’t put off by something new and different. I don’t think Lemmy is very complicated as a concept and it boggles my mind that people are saying “making a new account on Lemmy.world or Kbin.social is too complicated for normal people.” Yet I see it written all the time, sometimes here but mostly on reddit. And who knows; maybe the latter is a disinformation campaign since we know reddit pulls sneaky shit like that all the time (and targeting Lemmy, like with the warnings they placed on links at one point).

Lemmy’s barriers to entry also somewhat remind me of early Facebook after they expanded to several universities. You needed to have an email address from one of those univerisities in order to create an account. So, not so much self selection in that scenario but another gate to keep people out.

I can respect Tildes’ decision to become invite-only (with a very limited number of invites) for that reason. Lemmy, I think, is prioritizing growth at the potential cost of future community. Tildes is doing the opposite. I don’t think one is necessarily more correct. And, with Lemmy, there are tons of alternatives waiting in the wings. Hopefully a balance can be struck.

I think the real test comes when the first wave of good third party apps are released. Sync, in particular, seems very promising given the developer’s reddit app. Anything that can make it easier for people.

It blows my mind that people are actually defending Reddit on this.

I seriously think Reddit is operating a sock puppet scheme to push a narrative. They’ve done it before, and they’ve bragged about it to the press.

That is why there are so many baby accounts or long dormant accounts that suddenly came to life in the last couple weeks. This is a company which is coming off a month-long campaign of libeling and slandering its top third party developers, and then gish galloping all over the site after the recordings and emails were published.

Then you have Huffman idolizing Musk, saying he wants to do to Reddit what Musk did to Twitter.

Good third party apps cannot come to Lemmy and Kbin fast enough.

I’d argue that you’re right, and that it has already happened. If the bootlicking crowd on Reddit is actually organic users hearing a call to action to start commenting after months and years of inactivity, that is. Reddit is known to operate large networks of sock puppet accounts for fake engagement and narrative control (per Venture Beat’s reporting, which quotes an admission from Huffman).