If someone can spin up a replacement, even at great cost, it means that if and when the service gets bad in the main instance people can create a different big replacement. Whatever made the original viable remains in place, so the incentives should be the same.
That assumes that the biggest player keeps playing by the established rules even after deteriorating otherwise. But if the biggest player controls virtually the entire market, they can change the rules at will.
For instance, let’s say BlueSky suddenly switches to a new protocol, which happens to be proprietary (or they extend AT in a proprietary manner that breaks compatibility). Can you still offer a competing AT service? Sure. But the 90+ % of users who are on BlueSky aren’t going to drop everything to switch to your service, which has virtually no users or content, just because you use the protocol BlueSky used to use. Most users are there for the content, not because of the technical implementation.
That’s the point of the whole federalized service thing: To keep one single party from being able to dictate terms to everyone. But just like in any market, that relies upon no one having an overwhelming market share. Right now, BlueSky has an overwhelming market share. They currently aren’t abusing it but they have the power to do so.
That makes no sense. How is that any different from forking out of Fedi apps? This has happened a ton of times.
Look, I don’t mean to dump specifically on you, but I do hate this slippery slope fallacy crap, and you hear it a ton in these circles. What if Bluesky decides to defederate from itself or stop using an open protocol? Well then that’s bad. Also it hasn’t happened, there’s no indication that will happen and it would make no sense for it to happen considering Bluesky made AT willingly and could have just… not done that in the first place.
I mean, what if Mastodon.social defederates and stops using AP? What then? Huh? Well, nothing because it hasn’t happened it’s unlikely to happen and if it did the rest of the space would have to reconfigure around it.
I swear, we need to stop this. The small fish infighting is such a great way to keep the big fish in place. If you want to get depressed at the ability of more open alternatives to be functional in general, the insane fact that only BS managed to sorta capitalize on Twitter and then Twitter managed to keep itself in place and recover is a massive failure. We should all be doing a lot of soul-searching about how badly we suck at organizing and pushing a cohesive message because man, did they try hard to fail and we just wouldn’t let them.
That assumes that the biggest player keeps playing by the established rules even after deteriorating otherwise. But if the biggest player controls virtually the entire market, they can change the rules at will.
For instance, let’s say BlueSky suddenly switches to a new protocol, which happens to be proprietary (or they extend AT in a proprietary manner that breaks compatibility). Can you still offer a competing AT service? Sure. But the 90+ % of users who are on BlueSky aren’t going to drop everything to switch to your service, which has virtually no users or content, just because you use the protocol BlueSky used to use. Most users are there for the content, not because of the technical implementation.
That’s the point of the whole federalized service thing: To keep one single party from being able to dictate terms to everyone. But just like in any market, that relies upon no one having an overwhelming market share. Right now, BlueSky has an overwhelming market share. They currently aren’t abusing it but they have the power to do so.
That makes no sense. How is that any different from forking out of Fedi apps? This has happened a ton of times.
Look, I don’t mean to dump specifically on you, but I do hate this slippery slope fallacy crap, and you hear it a ton in these circles. What if Bluesky decides to defederate from itself or stop using an open protocol? Well then that’s bad. Also it hasn’t happened, there’s no indication that will happen and it would make no sense for it to happen considering Bluesky made AT willingly and could have just… not done that in the first place.
I mean, what if Mastodon.social defederates and stops using AP? What then? Huh? Well, nothing because it hasn’t happened it’s unlikely to happen and if it did the rest of the space would have to reconfigure around it.
I swear, we need to stop this. The small fish infighting is such a great way to keep the big fish in place. If you want to get depressed at the ability of more open alternatives to be functional in general, the insane fact that only BS managed to sorta capitalize on Twitter and then Twitter managed to keep itself in place and recover is a massive failure. We should all be doing a lot of soul-searching about how badly we suck at organizing and pushing a cohesive message because man, did they try hard to fail and we just wouldn’t let them.