this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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I don’t share everyone’s pessimism at all. All I’m thinking about is hundreds of millions of people using ActivityPub who would otherwise stay on Facebook and Instagram. That’s a huge pool of new users for the protocol, and many of them will end up on Lemmy. This is best case scenario for growing an open protocol.
Maybe I'm just too cynical, but I think it's naive to assume Meta is embracing ActivityPub out of the goodness of their heart, effectively giving free content away to federated instances with no strings attached.
I think it's also naive to assume Threads users will migrate to the Fediverse proper and not just interact through Threads. The vast majority of those users may not even realise they're interacting with people outside of Threads.
I don't believe it'll translate to a growing community, it may very well oversaturate us instead.
This is not cynicism. It's realism. Corporations (especially Meta) have no heart, soul, or care for any externalities to the generation of profit.
The best case is that they will slowly ease into things by contributing to FOSS repos/projects while silently developing proprietary versions or extensions which wall it off.
I don’t think anyone suggested Meta is doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. I certainly didn’t write that. They want to make money.
As for cross-pollination, it’s basically a law in SaaS now. When you expose users to something, some of them engage. Meta can’t hide the existence of other instances else there’s no point in federating. If users are other instances, and interact with users from those instances, some of them will create accounts on those instances.
My primary beef with
Has to do with the scary-low number of developers working solely on ActivityPub, lemmy, etc - and lack of incentive for more to dive in head first.
This is NOT ready for prime time, and I worry that reliance on devs from Zuck's army will facilitate EEE of the protocol. Slow and steady is better.
Pic related.
It’s FOSS. Meta is free to spin off their own version of ActivityPub, but we don’t have to join them. The entire point of federalised instances is to allow competition like this. If Lemmy devs are dropping the ball then other developers will compete for a better user experience. Competition rocks and I’m looking forward to it.
Nah, I'm fully aware of what FOSS is and does - but nothing in this entropic universe is permanent.
FOSS has gone private before (RedHat, etc) due to profit motive. I'm not sure I could resist several million dollars to keep it that way.
Exactly. ActivityPub needs continued organic growth, not to be inundated by activity from a giant monolithic, social media company controlled instance who's heavily financially incentivised to wipe us out.
I don't believe the average person who uses a meta activity pub based social media will ever know about instances beyond theirs and the options to create accounts to get non meta social media. The service will feel no different from Instagram or Twitter and to them just be another site.
The benefit will be more for Facebook to try and entice instance owners to find more users to datamine, and try to influence development in a direction that starts putting them in greater control like Google did to Android.
I don't see this scenario of average people randomly seeking out independent non corporate instances to make accounts in and escape meta. Most are there because they enjoy the Meta experience and the large user base that all congregate there. Meta's only play in this is an attempt to expand their influence to those trying to escape them.