Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
Facebook/Meta starts talking about the "Extend" phase of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish as predicted:
"“You could imagine an extension to the protocol eventually — of saying like, ‘I want to support micropayments,’ or … like, ‘hey, feel free to show me ads, if that supports you.’ Kind of like a way for you to self-label or self-opt-in. That would be great,”
Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
"It's not our evil plan, you people are already doing it" is the typical argument for Divide and Conquer. Unsurprisingly they bring that argument too:
"For instance, fediverse advocate and co-editor of ActivityPub Evan Prodromou @evan created a paid Mastodon account (@evanplus) that users could subscribe to for $5 per month to gain access. If he’s on board with paid content, surely others would follow."
Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
(And this will in turn enable more divide and conquer. Also part of the usual strategy to break a movement that is perceived as a possible threat by big organisations)
Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
I have raised the alarm bell already several years ago. Explained how the (at that time mostly dormant) Working Group at the W3C that is responsible for #ActivityPub must be reinvigorated (that happened) and must became a loud defender of the #fediverse (that didn't happen) or else we risk losing our ecosystem to fragmentation and infighting.
Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
And that infighting is already visible in the comments. Divide and conquer always works and costs close to nothing. Unfortunately.
ClaraBlackInk
@jwildeboer Ads and advertising are (unfortunately) too much of a wedge.
I see it with creative folks who argue that they need to eat. And they're not wrong but it's incredibly nuanced in social spaces.
There's a big risk of losing a sense of any space where you just connect with other people when everything is just reaching into your wallet.
Mutual aid and people sharing their work (which deserves compensation) is different but all money looks the same to people seeking to maximize profit.
Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
@forthy42 What will happen in that case is that they will claim they can, unfortunately, not allow your instance to federate with them as your instance does not meet the minimal requirements wrt support for whatever extension they deem necessary.
And as they talk a lot about moderation, they could even g0 as far to say that only instances that pay for their (Metas) moderation work are allowed to federate. Which can be for free if you "just" support their tracking, ad and other extensions.
Bernd Paysan R.I.P Natenom 🕯️
@jwildeboer If ads are opt-in parts of the protocol, and not shown and not spread around when I'm not in Meta, that's perfect.
Martin Hamilton
@jwildeboer Tech bros always trying to speed run the product decay cycle these days...
Evan Prodromou
@jwildeboer extensions have always been a part of the ActivityPub design.
https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/#extensibility
Extensions in ActivityPub are optional.
Evan Prodromou
@jwildeboer why do you think the SocialCG should be a defender of the fediverse?
What does defending the fediverse mean to you?
Evan Prodromou
@jwildeboer @serapath I don't think this is possible with ActivityPub.
It might work with a much more centralized design, and with some very heavy cryptographic intervention. But even then, I'm not sure.
All protocols are extensible. Good protocols include a structured mechanism for extensibility; bad ones don't.
Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
@serapath Have a strong standard that doesn't allow for such extensions. I've been saying that since many years.
𝓼𝓮𝓻𝓪𝓹𝓪𝓽𝓱【ツ】☮(📍🇬🇧)
yes and it will happen.
the big tech standard bodies are theirs anyway and it is what fediverse embraces.
if an instqnce doesnt, it left the generally accepted consensus mechanism i suppose.
whata your take on defending against this?
Evan Prodromou
@jwildeboer @serapath and are you specifically saying that you'd want to prevent commercial activity on the fediverse at the protocol level?
silverpill
@serapath @jwildeboer FEP process doesn't prevent people from extending the protocol, in fact it has the opposite goal. But it protects Fediverse by decentralizing standards development. It doesn't dictate what is a standard and what is not, instead developers decide for themselves which FEPs they want to implement, and eventually some FEPs may become de-facto standards
𝓼𝓮𝓻𝓪𝓹𝓪𝓽𝓱【ツ】☮(📍🇬🇧)
@jwildeboer
But even if you had a strong standard.
Isnt the point that https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main still collaborates with W3C?
Hope it stays independent enough and will be able to protect against these kinds of attacks 🙂
Nick @ The Linux Experiment
@Chocobozzz @fabio @Techaltar @dansup @jwildeboer It’s just a link to another payment system, with no integrations inside of Peertube though (unless I’m mistaken?)
Something like financially subscribing to a channel to get members-only content, or just setting up a « each time I watch a video from this person, I want to pay 1 cent automatically » sort of preference, these types of things :)
silverpill
@thelinuxEXP @dansup @jwildeboer @Chocobozzz @fabio @Techaltar
A mechanism for federated payments was proposed in FEP-0837: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/0837/fep-0837.md
It should work with any currency and in any kind of application. I'm already using it to facilitate subscription payments in my own project.
Nick @ The Linux Experiment
@fabio @Techaltar @dansup @jwildeboer Yeah, honestly, if there was an easy way to support me on PeerTube, I would much likely promote that first instead of YouTube. I would at least try to push PeerTube first for a while to see if that worked out.
Same for the podcast on Castopos, I would invest more time and effort on it if it could easily be user supported without having to mention Patreon in each episode.
Chocobozzz
@thelinuxEXP @fabio @Techaltar @dansup @jwildeboer What would you see in PeerTube? We have a `Support` field in channels & videos (video field inherits channel's one). A `Support` button is displayed below the video player
Fabio Manganiello
@jwildeboer I’m honestly ok with some of the ideas outlined in that interview.
Content monetization is a topic that has been floating around on #ActivityPub implementations long before Zuck’s helpers considered playing with it.
@dansup already toyed with the idea a year ago.
@Techaltar recently also brought up the topic in his series of Fediverse interviews.
And creators like @thelinuxEXP have mentioned multiple times that the lack of financial incentives to post their content on e.g. PeerTube vs. YouTube acts as a deterrent for many.
And the Fediverse community in general has already a strong sense of “reward-based” ethics - many already make LibrePay/Patreon donations to their instance admins and favourite content creators, so why not embed such ability in the protocol itself and bypass the middlemen?
Allowing micropayments in ActivityPub (per-post, one-off, recurrent etc.) would actually attract many creators who are currently stuck against their will on proprietary platforms, are at the mercy of YouTube’s mercurial monetization algorithms, don’t have much freedom in deciding how they want to get paid, and have to give back a non-negligible share of their revenue to the platform itself.
Imagine instead a world where micropayments are handled at protocol level itself, a piece of content or a profile that requires the user to make a payment would transparently respond with an HTTP 402, the money would move from the donor’s account to the contributor’s without any middlemen to shave off profits, no external algorithms are in charge of what can be monetized and how, and creators don’t even have to worry about posting the same content across multiple different platforms because ActivityPub would take care of the whole distribution problem. I can’t think of a better silver bullet to get content creators to do the jump.
The thing is that if we don’t implement this right on the protocol level because we oppose commercialization on ideological grounds, then Threads may implement it anyway on their version of ActivityPub (and then yes, it’d really be E-E-E), and content creators who do content creation as a job have one more reason to avoid the Fediverse.
I’ve got a bit more of a mixed feeling about ads instead. There’s sensitivity on the Fediverse about donations and micropayments, but almost everyone here hates the ad-based business model to the core. If the payments idea and implementation works right, then I don’t think we need to pollute our walls with such low-quality littering. I’m happy to leave that to Threads if they want to implement it, because I really don’t see much of added value in it and I don’t see why anybody out there would like that idea.
silverpill
@fabio @dansup @jwildeboer @Chocobozzz @thelinuxEXP @Techaltar
No, the $XMR field in profile is just a static address. The link to subscription page is just below that. This special page is only needed for compatibility with other software, and with FEP-0837 users don't need to leave their instance (that's the intent behind this FEP).
I should note that FEP-0837 does not require people to use digital currencies, it is designed to be currency agnostic, and even supports gift economy. The relevant part of the proposal is "Accepting an agreement" step:
>The finalized agreement MAY have url property containing one or more links to resources associated with the agreement. An example of such resource is a payment page (which can be represented as FEP-0ea0 link).
In other words, payment actually happens outside of protocol, and the recipient server sends a confirmation only when the payment is complete.
Transaction states were outside of scope of this FEP, but we can add them if necessary (it is still a draft).
Fabio Manganiello
@silverpill @Chocobozzz @Techaltar @dansup @thelinuxEXP @jwildeboer this is actually very interesting. And that FEP seems to provide a good model for an open implementation of the offer/buy/accept/reject mechanisms, but I can’t find much about the actual interfacing with the payments gateway/API - I guess that it’ll need to also handle the transaction states if we want a full in-app experience.
Is this the implementation you are already using on your profile fields? It’s interesting because I see that my #Akkoma instance already renders the $XMR profile field by expanding a Monero donation form, but Mastodon still renders it as a raw field.
Evan Prodromou
From reading over your thread, I feel like there may be some values that you think are implicit in the fediverse, and that you want to enforce at the protocol level.
It may be worthwhile to a) enumerate what those values are (non-commercial, FLOSS?, ...) and consider other structures for advocacy or enforcement.
Evan Prodromou
@jwildeboer @serapath The main parallel I can think of here is amateur radio. In the US, and I think in many countries, ham radio bands are restricted to non-commercial use. Part of the licensing procedure is learning what kind of transmissions are considered non-commercial. And participants enforce the requirements with each other. It would be hard to enforce these rules at the protocol or equipment level, though.
Felipe :wyd:
@jwildeboer
Why aren't we blocking threads already?
What are we waiting for?
#fediblock #fedipact
Ooze 𓁟
@Felipe_B @jwildeboer Because @Gargron is so naive he though this would never happen.
always tired (moved to chaos)
In my experience it's not only @Gargron . Otherwise more of the rest of Fedi would at least have defederated (and possibly enabled authorized fetch).
always tired (moved to chaos)
@tokyo_0 @Ooze @Felipe_B Gargron has no influence on the moderation policy of say this server here (wandering dot shop, running vanilla Mastodon), for example.
Evan Prodromou
@jwildeboer Yes, I understand that. In the particular case of paid subscriptions, I don't think we need to extend the standard to make it happen. It's easy to handle the payment out of band, and controlling distribution so it only goes to paying followers is trivially easy. Nobody has enhanced SMTP and IMAP to include payments; it was never necessary.
Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
@evan I am not a fan of extensions, as you know, but that aside — Facebook (and others) are fast to blame the standard for missing functionality they'd like to see when good solutions are possible without changes or extensions to the standard. This is then often met with fundamentalist arguments a la "block them all! They are evil!", making productive discussions next to impossible. So I'll try the pragmatic approach and see if there is a simple solution that I can share.
Evan Prodromou
@jwildeboer I also share with you the concern of having a supernode in the fediverse. Threads is going to be about 90% of the network when it comes online fully for two-way federation. The best way to manage that is to attract many other small, medium-sized and large networks so it goes back down to under 50%. In other words: the most sustainable fediverse is a big fediverse.
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