If you had told me as recently as two years ago that Meta was going to create a microblogging platform, I would have scoffed. If you had told me that same network would federate over ActivityPub, I would've laughed in your face. But here we are. It's happening. We're no longer at a point wher

The Fediverse is currently divided over whether or not to block Threads. Here are some of the things people are worried about, some opportunities that might come from it, and what we need to do to prepare.

  • nutomicA
    7·
    11 months ago

    The Activitypub protocol is nothing but a piece of paper. Meta can rewrite it if they want, but that doesn’t mean Lemmy, Mastodon or the many other platforms would automatically use it. Programmers have to implement it, and then instance admins have to deploy it. So by inertia it’s likely that changes would be ignored by most platforms. However they could easily bribe developers or admins to make certain changes.

    • density@kbin.social
      3·
      11 months ago

      My understanding is that corporations are constantly trying and sometimes succeeding at influencing w3c standards to go in a direction which is favorable to themselves. For example increasing the legitimacy of DRM and surveillance. Developers of non-profit software (eg mozilla) then have to choose whether to be out of compliance or support nefarious technologies. If they choose against supporting the standards, then all users notice is that the application “doesn’t work” on certain websites.

      I don’t necessarily know if running away and hiding is along term solution to this though.

      • nutomicA
        3·
        11 months ago

        Federation is different from a browser. Even if Threads pushed through some protocol changes on their side, it would change anything for Lemmy, Peertube etc federating with the original protocol. They couldnt federate with Threads then, but clearly most users wouldnt mind.