this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
83 points (96.6% liked)
Technology
59243 readers
3452 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
And yet. It might also be a way to kill ActivityPub protocol. Google did the same with XMPP last decade
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
I know that is a popular narrative in the Fediverse community right now, but I honestly find it unreasonable. Google and Meta didn't kill XMPP, they abandoned it and without them it went right back to where it was originally: barely used whatsoever. The Fediverse already has a small, but relatively healthy user base. Meta can abandon ActivityPub or twist it into something unacceptable, but all that will do is bring us back to where we are right now.
All that is irrelevant, though, because the difference is that Meta is legally required to incorporate interoperability with other services and that's why they are going with ActivityPub. Not from the good of their hearts, but because they need to and is in their own self interest to keep alive.
Right now, they are early adopters of ActivityPub and have a very early strong position there. When they federate they will be by several magnitudes the largest instance on the network. Whether we like it or not, they will inevitably be a major player in dictating the future of ActivityPub. Thus, they want to keep ActivityPub alive because they want to make sure that becomes the future EU mandated industry standard for SoMe. Otherwise, some other technology will be chosen, one that might not be lead by Meta, but by Google, Apple or ByteDance.
Note, that I'm not arguing whether this is good or bad, but only what I predict is happening.