I really hope this is a complete failure, like Meta itself.
Meta plans to work with ActivityPub, a vendor that already partners with Mastodon and is currently working on a deal with Tumblr. The agreement isn’t finalized yet, but has been referenced in press releases announcing Threads.
Lol. The author of this article is braindead and has no Idea what he’s writing about. ActivityPub is an open standard not a vendor. There can’t be an agreement because there’s no one to agree with. All they will do is implement the standard
It comes from Fortune, they can’t conceive of something that’s not a business.
He’s persona non grata these days, but the old quote from Scott Adams applies here:
“I read a newspaper article about something I know very well—my own field—and it was so full of errors that I had to wonder how many errors there were in other articles on topics I didn’t know much about.”
If they’re getting an important detail like this so mindblowingly wrong, what else are they getting wrong?
Journalists are not educated in anything except how to write. And they go and write about everything, aiming for an audience that is dumber than them. On top of all that journalism is an industry in contraction. Even the good journalists are paid as badly as teachers and they work under great pressure. Many of them are addicted to watching their click stats and not much better than a meatspace Facebook algorithm on legs. Is it any mystery how the end result is crap?
It’s used to be they’d say least ask questions from people who know. Now I feel like they only make half assed attempts to Google something.
Exactly. Vendor my arse, it’s an open standard.
Does Fortune think Linux also partnered with RedHat, Ubuntu, Apple, Windows and everybody else who’s every borrowed from/made use of/implemented an open standard??
I’m expecting FB to make some sort of proprietary fork of ActivityPub. I’m not quite sure what the point of Threads is, from Zuck’s POV, excluding the desire to eat Musks’s lunch, which is huge, so that’s more than enough. The man needs a win, bad, after that Metaverse flop heard round the world.
But everything you’d consider an advantage to the Fediverse is a downside to his business model, and the things it enables, like user-controlled hosting, don’t suit his ends. Maybe he intends to colonize this place, too, but up until very recently there wasn’t a meaningful user base to gain control over. Still isn’t. Mastodon got the biggest boost, they’re up to 8 mil users now, a healthy number for sure, but Instagram is pushing a billion users, so the number isn’t much to him.
So he’s not going to actually like anything about the Fediverse, or what it offers, nor will he like its downsides much. ActivityPub, as it is, doesn’t do him any favors. I can’t imagine anything other than the skeleton of ActivityPub getting repurposed into something else that runs Threads in the locked down way that Meta is accustomed to. He just seems to be grabbing at anything that’s loose for the taking.
I’m expecting FB to make some sort of proprietary fork of ActivityPub.
ActivityPub is based on a W3C standard. I found this license here, but I’m not sure if there is any protections against re-privatization.
I have the barest grasp on what “proprietary fork” actually means. All I know is that Meta is probably here because everyone is bailing to Mastodon, especially journalists. Fuckin Fox News threw up an outpost, they’re all there, the userbase is ramping up past 8mil. Meta sees that, and wants a piece of Musk’s market. The question is how, exactly, they are going to make the model become something they control properly, or worse, they manage to engulf the whole thing and somehow this all becomes facebook against everyone’s will. Hopefully they make their own walled garden out of it and we can all stay safely outside the cursed thing, being dweeby and free.
I don’t have the background to judge the situation, and I don’t like it. Somehow I went as far away from facebook as I could and ended up back on facebook, gimme a fuckin break
This completely contrasts the idea of decentralizing the Fediverse.
In other words, meta wants to metastasize.
Developers would also be able to build their own features and set their own content moderation policies and standards for their respective servers. Meta bills this new capability as a way to protect people
So Meta is keenly aware of this and totally won’t use it as a way to attract and funnel users onto their servers until one day they decide to take everyone and leave.
…
Appeals to fallacies, but refuses to consider the most reasonable form of the argument and instead assumes ‘everyone’ doesn’t mean ‘enough people that the rest don’t matter’.
In fairness, I think we might already be the rest who don’t matter. Threads has just passed 100 million users in like three days. The entire fediverse, in about ten years (it’s tough to pin down an exact start date because “When did it become the fediverse?”), has accrued around 12 million users, of which less than 4 million are active. There’s any number of things Meta might want, but I don’t think greater access to 4 million geeks is at the top of their list.
I do think the embrace, extend, extinguish concerns have some merit. Meta isn’t threatened by the fediverse now, but maybe they do want to kill it before it becomes a problem. In the short term, though, we’re not overtaking Threads. Personally, I think another plausible theory is that Threads is using ActivityPub to demonstrate that they’re not running a monopoly or gatekeeping control of social media (which the EU’s new Digital Markets Act now regulates) by pointing to the fediverse–which will soon also include direct competitors Tumblr–and saying “See, we’re all on equal footing! We don’t control social media! Look over there at those 4 million geeks and whatever number of Tumblr users.”
You’re assuming that is the position I am taking. Which in itself is a fallacy.
I have no position other than pointing out the prior statement was a logical fallacy, I also don’t like Threads and that Zuck is an idiot.
Take your pretentiously written counter statement that wasn’t even properly directed at me and shove it.
When we’ve already seen this strategy play out in the form of Microsoft’s great EEE, it’s hard not to assume malevolent intentions when a mega-corporation suddenly starts getting buddy-buddy with the indies (who are creating an adjacent product) out of nowhere.
You don’t chop down a big tree on one go. You chop, chop, chop away over and over until eventually the trunk is too weak to support the rest of the tree.
If they can pull enough users and developers away from the Fediverse and ActivityPub, then it’ll kill off (or extinguish) the whole thing.
Zuck is not some mastermind engineer.
Meta is not just Zuck. It is a rapacious corporation.
The fediverse is like 2 to 3 million, Threads is about to hit 100 million. Instagram has billions. Something telling me that redesigning their entire infrastructure just to attempt to absorb that little amount of people who are known to be hostile towards them, is not their actual goal. Yet the fedi seems to think this makes sense somehow.
It makes way more sense to me that the experiment with federation will ultimately be to connect their own services. For example, so you can follow an instagram thot from your facebook, or you can message someone on whatsapp using facebook messenger.
