How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)
Yeah, it does acknowledge that it still exists and has a solid community at the very bottom.
I do excuse it, it's an article from an insider with an axe to grind that is bummed out that the Google integration didn't make them win the IM wars and that Google was bad at supporting a secondary app, as they do. That's legit.
But as a breakdown for a mallicious plan from Meta to "EEE" ActivityPub... well, it's not even pretending to be that.
That is already how ActivityPub apps work.
It's also not what happened to XMPP and, interestingly, not what the article claims happened to XMPP, even. You'll note in the postmortem about it the recollection is that Google was too slow to adopt features and fix bugs, not the other way around.
I guess once you get enough confirmation bias in play you can embrace, expand and extinguish both by doing that and the opposite of that.
Yup. This is pretty much right on the money.
BlueSky and Threads are looking at interoperable protocols because they a) have engineers at home that think it's cool, and b) see the writing on the wall about upcoming regulation and want to preempt it. This is probably good for other networks already based on interoperability, but there are definitely a ton of open questions.
The article is 100% revisionist history written backwards to justify a knee-jerk conclusion and XMPP is indeed not dead. Or not any deader than anybody else that got washed away by WhatsApp winning the messaging wars over the 2010s.
EDIT: Re-reading my own post, it's too harsh. The article isn't "100%" revisionist history, so much as a biased insider account. The revisionist history is largely coming from both the misattribution of what happened to a deliberate move from Google and the fact that it's being misread and misquoted when people react to it.
Oh, I read it when it came out back in June. Many times, as it kept being shared as an explanation of the first Threads backlash.
It's full of incorrect assessments and false equivalences.
Threads doesn't really have the volume (yet) to subsume ActivityPub. The process it describes for standards drifting towards the corporate actor doesn't apply to ActivityPub, which is engineered from the ground up to support multiple apps with differnent functionality (hence me writing this in Kbin and others reading it in Lemmy and being able to link it and follow it from Mastodon), the article only acknowledges that XMPP survived and kept on going at the very end as a throwaway and doesn't justify how it "never recovered" and, like I said, it doesn't acknowledge the real reasons Talk and every Google successor to Talk struggled and collapsed.
So yes, I read it. Past the headline and everything. I just didn't take it at face value. This piece keeps getting shared because XMPP wasn't ever that big to begin with, so this sounds erudite and informed while the similar arguments being made at the time about SMTP and RSS were more obviously identifiable as being wrong for the same reasons.
Man, I'm not gonna relitigate this but no, Google Talk didn't kill XMPP. XMPP is not, in fact, dead. WhatsApp killed Google Talk and pretty much every other competitor and XMPP would have been in that boat with or without Google Talk.
This is gonna keep coming up, it's gonna keep being wrong and I'm really not gonna bother picking this fight each and every single time.
And that's why all social media is bad.
Look, open socials can either replace closed socials or be a niche little fun exclusive club for techheads exclusively focused on Star Trek and Linux and how open socials should replace closed socials. You can't have both.
So if the conclusion here is that popular social media sucks... yeah, you're right. Because all social media sucks. The content won't be better if the same people join Mastodon than if they come from Threads.
The conversation doesn't start there, though. Before Threads was announced everybody was buzzing about how everyone should come over here and they really hoped new services would join ActivityPub and it should become just like email.
Then Threads and BlueSky started suggesting doing just that and it was all "actually, Google kinda EEE'd the crap out of email and RSS and we don't want those guys here at all".
So no, EEE wasn't always part of the converrsation. It was only part of the conversation when the hipstery claim that the cool obscure thing should be for everybody got replaced by the hipstery claim that the cool obscure thing was selling out and should be gatekept to keep it real.
With thinking Facebook sucks? Nothing.
With thinking Facebook sucks and Facebook's audience should stay in Facebook while the "fediverse" stays small and exclusive? That it goes against the stated goals of providing decentralized, open social platforms as a replacement for current closed platforms.
I mean, social media sucks. It was a mistake. All of it. This included. So yeah?
But no, a specific choice to defederate can make more or less sense. Not every option is equal. Defederating because some place is too popular and you kinda don't like that it has a bunch of normies in it and is made by a big social media corpo? Kind of irrational. Defederating because disruptive trolls are harassing your users? Yeah, alright.
FWIW, I'm not even saying that an influx of Meta users wouldn't be disruptive. I have a strong suspicion that it would show big gaps on moderation and usability around here if you suddenly added a couple of zeros to the userbase. I still don't think making it a rule that federated services have to be small is the right solution to that.
Sure. And that the users get to pick their instance based on those decisions.
Which is what I'm saying I'll do.
Problem with that train of thought is you always land in weird anarchocapitalist loopholes. Ultimately there is a level of communal decisionmaking that ends up happening and needs some degree of organization, even if the alternatives are also supported on the fringes.
It's honestly kind of irrational. The "embrace, extend, extinguish" stuff is on shaky grounds as a framework as it is, but it wasn't even part of the conversation until people started trying to retroactively justify the knee-jerk rejection to Meta.
So it's mostly "we should grow the "fediverse" into the new universal social tool. No, not like that".
But hey, here we are. I'm on the record saying that I'll mvoe instances if they join to keep them available.
It's not that it's annoying that I have to fact check these things because they sound plausible.
It's that things are dumb enough now I don't even have to bother because yeah, sure, that's probably a thing that's happening.
FWIW, our universal health coverage here will cover medical dental care, but not cosmetic. They'll patch up or remove your bad tooth, but I think it'd be harder to get an implant or a crown without paying for it. Weirdly, dentists are still one of the two or three basic services where people here are still willing to pay for uncovered medical attention, the others being eyecare and pediatrics.
When I needed surgery my private dentist still sent me over to the public system, though. Took a look at my X-rays, told me she wasn't gonna touch any of that without an MRI and an OR on standby and told me to go to my public doctor with a note and tell them to get me booked with a maxillofacial surgeon, which I did. It wasn't that big of a deal in the end, but the reaction was... revealing.
No, the last paragraph says that these results (seen on a desktop PC) suggest that if you're on lower powered hardware (like a handheld) you may want to ditch the preinstalled Windows and try a Linux install to get a bit more performance.
Which is very debatable on a couple of counts, including the worse 1% lows, the fact that these desktop GPU results may or may not carry over to low TDP AMD APUs and that there's no guarantee that you'll get support for other custom features like the Legion Go's funky detachable controllers. But that's what it's saying, not that the results are about handheld performance.
As for the other thing, man, you're all over this thread being weirdly hostile, All I'm saying is you don't have to be. This isn't a big deal, the article isn't clickbait and nobody is out to get you. There are actually enough things here that are interesting to debate without trying to make this about some weird journalism standards thing. Some of them are even about how shaky some of the reporting is, if that's your angle. It's just... not for the reasons you're getting all worked up about.
Borders on the Internet get weird. Effectively, as quoted above, GDPR applies if you do business in the EU even if you aren't there. Things are murkier if you're not in the EU when the data gathering takes place and the operator is outside as well, though.
Also, not technically a country.
It's linked as the source of the article in this link. I would have preferred OP link to it directly, assuming the actual source being in German was a dealbreaker, but it's still linked alongside the TH at the bottom of this one.
I am not sure why you're so adamant about a quote in the article that doesn't say this is about handhelds and getting defensive about a source that is in fact linked in the same article.
For the record, also plainly stated in both articles, the differences in performance are fairly small in all runs, exempting one or two outliers, and seemingly the Windows 1% lows were higher. Despite the Linux fans' overreporting these results, "Proton run good" is not an unexpected result.
Nope, from the Tom's Hardware source:
ComputerBase's testing was done on an all-AMD test rig, featuring a Ryzen 7 5800X (non-3D) and a Radeon RX 6700 XT.
It's still relevant that this was not running on a Nvidia GPU, IMO, but not about handheld PCs.
I'm not surprised at the confusion, because they're using it... not wrong, but very confusingly.
Frame time is literally the time to render a frame. So you'd expect that to be a number of miliseconds per frame and so for lower to be better.
But they're not looking at frametimes, they're looking at 1% lows and expressing that in fps, not in frametimes. So yeah, confusing.
For the record, the reson why the term is becoming popular is that there are now widespread visualizations that will give you a line of your frametimes in a graph so you can see if the line is flat or spiky. You've probably seen it on the Steam Deck or performance analysis videos or whatever. The idea is that all frametimes being consistent is better than high fps but low 1% or 0.1% low. So stable 60fps can look better than spiky 90fps and so on.
It absolutely matters under ActivityPub because, as I said earlier, it comes down to the client to manage the incoming packets. If Meta is out of date with the protocol but the rest of the federation is not (and retains backwards compatibility at all), then everybody else gets nicely formatted but feature-limited Meta content and they get garbled stuff.
It's only relevant if we get garbled stuff and they get nicely formatted content. Which should be entirely avoidable if they "pull down".
So no, not the same. And crucially people are still misquoting the article and the article is still misrepresenting the so-called "EEE" strategy.