this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Sorry if tbis is dumb of me but why should we avoid ever using any web tech that has been associated with Meta, just because we are worried about E-E-E affecting Activity Pub?
Are you worried about EEE coming for those techs?
It's the same thing. Why are people treating them differently?
A more likely explanation for Meta's actions is that the Digital Markets Act is forcing them to adopt the fediverse: https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/digital-markets-act-ensuring-fair-and-open-digital-markets_en
The interoperability is the big one. The fediverse gives a way for Meta to be in compliance. EEE that breaks the wider fediverse will cause the EU to come down on them.
Thanks for the explanation. I guess I'm not as worried about the ubiquitous technologies because I'm ignorant about whether/how they could shut down the aps and sites I use.
I don't go anywhere near the list of websites and aps if I can help it. I do have to use WhatsAp sometimes and it really bothers me that Meta has hold of it now. I wish my wider society would adopt something else instead.
React is a JavaScript library that was created by Facebook.
It makes webpages pretty, basically. It makes things load really really fast while still looking clean and modern.
Dropbox, Paypal, Discord, Slack, Netflix, AirBnB all use React.
Facebook didn't create MySQL, but they have contributed to it.
MySQL is a way of efficiently storing large amounts of data. Users, passwords, credit card info, anything that needs to store a lot of things will have at least considered MySQL.
Other places that use MySQL are Twitter, Pinterest, GitHub, YouTube, Spotify, and so on.
Memcached was originally developed for LiveJournal, but Facebook has contributed to it.
It's a way to quickly store arbitrary data, and reduces how many API calls you need to make. This in turn makes running a large website cheaper, since you can just look up the data in your own memory rather than needing to make an API call.
YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, and Pinterest all use Memcached.
HHVM was created by Facebook.
HHVM is what executes the Hack programming language (also made by Facebook). Hack is based on PHP (the same thing Kbin runs on), but is optimized in a different way and is more flexible than traditional PHP.
Slack and Wikipedia are the biggest users of HHVM.
Cassandra was created by Facebook.
Cassandra works basically as an alternative to NoSQL (mentioned above). It does much of the same job, but works a bit better making sure there's no single point of failure.
Uber, Netflix, Reddit, Spotify, and Twitter all use Cassandra.
Scribe was created by Facebook.
Scribe aggregates logs from many many servers and helps engineers find problems in large networks.
The name is a little generic so it's hard to find examples, but I know that Dropbox uses Scribe internally and other large companies probably do too.
Facebook did not create Hadoop, but has contributed to it.
Hadoop is meant for solving problems that take a lot of data. Machine learning (ChatGPT etc.) is the classical example, but really it works well any time you need to process a lot of data.
Uber, Pinterest, Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, and Slack all use Hadoop.
Facebook created Hive.
Hive lets you query the results of work done by Hadoop (above). It provides an interface that is similar to MySQL but lets you access Hadoop data.
Uber, Pinterest, Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, and Slack all used to use Hive. It's largely dying out now because it can't keep up with modern data sets.
Thrift was created by Facebook.
It connects programs that were created using different programming languages. They can all share a data format through Thrift, which lets them talk to each other.
Thrift is used by Netflix, Evernote, Twitter, Uber, and reCAPTCHA.
Facebook did not create Varnish, but has contributed to it.
It dynamically figures out what to load when you're on a website, so you can have a lot of stuff on one webpage but have it still load quickly.
GitLab, Pinterest, Twitch, and Udemy all use Varnish.
Literally you could not use the modern web without using these technologies. Meta has a loud voice in most of those techs, and outright controls a handful of them. That's been the case for most of the 2010s into the 2020s.
While I don't think Facebook necessarily has good intentions - they're a corpo, corpos are never your friends, Facebook especially has proven to be evil - they have proven to be good stewards of open-source technologies for over a decade now.
I wouldn't say I trust them with the fediverse. But I'm also not so quick to jump to EEE because they do have a fairly solid track record when it comes to web tech.
Thanks for the detail! The only one of those I notice when I use it is mySQL. The contrarian in me is saying that several of of those would probably be even better without facebook's sticky fingers in them, but that's unfair of me as it's a counterfactual and there's no way of knowing without a deep dive into the history of development.
I get tired of extension breaking other things, but a lot of that is the nature of tech evolving. I guess this is what bothers me the most about EEE - for many of us it won't be clear what is happening and how much of it is just attrition. I remember getting annoyed by Firefox for not working with gmail and "discovering" gmail still worked with Chrome. I had no idea that bug was a feature.