r/wallstreetbets has entered the fediverse
cacheson
joined 2 years ago
Remember kids, "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent".
!RemindMe 7 years
I think it's less to make tankies angry and more to make anarchists laugh (which I did)
Anti-tankie memes and anti-nazi memes. Y'all are alright. ^_^
Flatbread! :D
Kbin and Lemmy are licensed under the AGPL, so instance source code changes are required to be shared with those that connect to that instance (I assume that includes peer instances as well as users). Corpos can make their own proprietary instances, but they'll have to start from scratch and not just piggyback on top of our work.
So just speaking from my personal experience, XMPP was absolutely useless for me, whereas OpenOffice wasn't. Microsoft did succeed in preventing OO from eating significantly into its market share, but OO continued to exist and be useful. It eventually caught up on the ability to read and write MS Office XML files, and in the meantime I only had a few occasions where I had to tell people "I can't read docx, send it to me as doc or rtf". To be fair though, I'm not a super heavy user of Office software.
In contrast, XMPP was basically nothing without Google. I couldn't use it before Google federated, and I couldn't use it after Google defederated. ¯\(ツ)/¯
Kbin/lemmy/mastodon are in a far better bargaining position than XMPP was, and in a better position than OO as well. They're perfectly usable without being connected to corporate platforms, and they don't need to market to corporate customers either. To be clear, I'm not saying that they should or shouldn't block the corporate platforms. I think it's actually probably best if some of them do and some of them don't.
Which actually makes me think that mastodon might have a little to worry about since its less anonymous and who you follow actually matters. And there is more interaction between (not anonymous) people.
Yeah, I guess there's more of a focus on individual personalities. Still, mastodon has its core of users that choose to use it despite the fact that it doesn't have the celebrities or the millions of people that twitter has. They don't need any of the corporate platforms to federate with them, whereas XMPP did. That puts them in a much better negotiating position as far as protocol changes go.
One key difference between link aggregators (kbin/lemmy/reddit/digg) and microblogs (twitter/mastodon) on the one hand, vs social networks (facebook/myspace/diaspora/friendica) and instant messengers (aim/icq/xmpp/signal) on the other, is that the latter is highly dependent on your real-life social network, while the former is not. People using instant messengers and people on facebook want to use them to interact with their friends and family, so they have to use the platforms that those friends and family are on. On the other hand, people are happy to use link aggregators and microblogs as long as there are interesting people and communities to follow, even if they consist entirely of strangers.
Back in the early days of XMPP, when it was still known as "Jabber", I tried switching to it from AOL Instant Messenger. I told all of my contacts about it, and tried to get them to set up Jabber accounts. I was super excited that instant messaging was finally being standardized the way email was, and we wouldn't have to deal with AIM vs MSN messenger vs Yahoo messenger vs etc. I think I was also still bitter about being forced to switch from ICQ to AIM because all my friends had switched. I don't think I got a single person to start using Jabber, though. At one point I even declared that I was going to stop using AIM entirely, and that people would have to switch over so that we could keep talking to each other. Didn't work, of course. I just ended up not being able to talk to anyone until I finally went back to AIM.
A bunch of my friends use reddit, but we don't use the site to interact with each other in any meaningful way. This made switching to kbin really easy. Sure, I've told a few of them about it, but it doesn't really matter to me if they switch or not. As far as I'm aware, XMPP never really became it's own "thing" and experienced the kind of growth that the threadiverse has. Since we've passed the point of being self-sustaining, we can keep growing one user at a time, as individuals decide that they're tired of reddit and make the jump.
Because of this difference in dynamic, we're in a much better position against Meta than XMPP was against Google. The fact that we can even consider outright blocking Meta is a really good sign for us, regardless of whether we do so or not. Even if we do end up in a situation where 90% or even 99% of users are on Meta's platform, we can still refuse to allow them to compromise the ActivityPub protocol. Attempts to "embrace, extend, extinguish" will likely just result in non-blockading instances joining the anti-Meta blockade. With the connection to Meta severed, we'll just go back to enjoying the company of the 1 to 10% that remain, and that portion will likely be much larger than what we have now.
I have been wondering how instance-wide moderation will end up looking on kbin, once you've had a chance to get a team in place for that. While it is (I assume) a "generalist" instance, it's important to keep in mind that you can't please everyone. Trying to have too broad of an audience will just result in retaining those with a high tolerance for toxicity (usually highly toxic themselves), while everyone else leaves in favor of better-managed spaces.
Communities in general, and particularly on the internet, need to understand what their purpose is, and be proactive about filtering out those that are incompatible with that purpose. This doesn't mean judging those people as wrong, or "bad people", it just means recognizing that not everyone is going to get along, and that some level of group cohesion needs to be maintained.