Itty53

The value of the Russian ruble has fallen by almost half in the last year. They have taken a severe pay cut, that ten percent doesn’t even kind of bring them up par.

For the record, OP posted the article title and not a question of their own.

Ah yes, Facebook, where all the users on activity hub are from.

Wait. That’s not correct at all.

Just because it happened a once or even twice does not mean it can’t succeed despite that. Facebook doesn’t have some core of active users using there activity hub protocol that they can unplug and snuff out the protocol for. Also every implementation like Lemmy and kbin and even mastodon have custom implementation allowing additional features beyond just what the protocol itself has.

At this rate mastadon, lemmy and Kbin themselves are more likely to hinder the growth of activity hub as FOSS. They’re the ones implementing bunches of features the others have to either keep up with or defederate from. But a hundred walled gardens is still better than the one.

There’s also a lot to say about the mindset of the users. Reddit still exists. Twitter does too. So does Facebook, etc etc etc. The users here chose this over those. These are distinct differences that make the argument of the article a bit weightless. The warning isn’t weightless, and people need to be adamant that new users use different instances in order to block all this from being effective. But again, the fact that that article is shared over and over here shows the mindset of the users. We can’t stop them from federation. Protocols are protocols. That’s the point.

Ask yourself these questions…

How long until http protocol is monetized?

How long until POP, IMAP and SMTP (collectively referred to as ‘email’) is monetized?

How long before torrents are monetized?

The answer is, quite nearly from the start you could … but anyone can still do everything you could with those protocols by themselves, for free, without any strings. Still people monetized all those things early.

Because those are all just protocol, or a digitized agreement on rules of communicating fixed sets of information. Sets like an email, or a website, or a collection of files. No one owns any of these rules they just exist and any two computers can agree on them and use that to exchange information.

Fediverse is a protocol. Lemmy, kbin, mastodon, and the others are all just programs talking the same protocols. No one allowed any of them to do so, they just agreed to. All the entities that make up the fediverse agreed to the same thing, so all of them can talk to each other, in theory. In practice each one can choose which others it wants to talk to. Just like you can build an email client that just will not send emails to Gmail. It’s not because it can’t but because it doesn’t want to.