• Skyler@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    The classic tactic is known as EEE (Embrace / Extend / Extinguish).

    It’s not impossible to imagine a scenario where in the future, if the Fediverse is thriving, a seemingly good-intentioned corporation chooses to Federate its own instance on its own hardware. This opens up the capacity of the network even more and makes it more accessible and less intimidating to a broader audience. This is the Embrace phase.

    Then comes the Extend phase, where they dedicate a lot of resources to improving their technology and platform and capabilities. They may add some functionality that is not defined in the ActivityPub standard, but it seems really cool or useful, and so a lot of people switch to it, and it becomes the de facto standard place to go on the Fediverse. Everywhere else is a ghetto that doesn’t have Feature X.

    Eventually, the corporate site, now the de facto, wants to continue to build on its capabilities, and adhering to an open standard is only a liability, especially given that the only people left on the Fediverse are unmonetizable weirdos. So they announce that they’re going closed. The majority of people on the platform don’t care because it’s where most everyone already is. This, of course, is the Extinguish phase.

    So yeah, it’s certainly a possibility that could come to fruition. The kind of scary part is that to begin with, everyone could have the best intentions. But corporations are amoral and driven by profit incentive, and historically, that need to drive growth and profit has led to staggeringly similar decision-making (see Twitter and Reddit as examples of that). And so even if a company comes in with seemingly truly noble intentions, eventually the need to turn a profit has a high likelihood of leading to the fate described above.

    • dsemy@vlemmy.net
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      1 year ago

      It’s crazy how many people I’ve seen since joining Lemmy who don’t realize this - it happened so many times before, and I would assume will eventually happen with ActivityPub as well… like anything else online, enjoy it while it lasts.

      • RickRussell_CA@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Linux is still kicking as an independent project 30 years in, despite the success of monetizing it. The EEE strategy has been tried by many.

        Granted, that’s in no small part because Linus Torvalds keeps driving it. It will be interesting to see how he manages succession in the next few years.

          • RickRussell_CA@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            Although, I would argue that what RH is doing is more “monetizing their investment” rather than a EEE strategy. Red Hat has done some wonderful things for the Linux ecosystem, and it absolutely sucks that they are trying to move their work under support contracts when it used to be freely available. But RedHat is not really essential for the Linux enterprise. You can buy robust support for several flavors of Debian, and of course SUSE is still out there kicking it old school.