Technology

Man who signed NDA with Meta is suddenly gushing about Threads. I know, I know, this isn’t just anybody.

He addressed a few issues very topically but side stepped a major one. What happens if Threads takes off and Meta decides to enforce a trusted partner network by defederating all but a handful of instances unless they conform to Meta’s demands?

After all, if we allow Threads to grow to a successful size, that is where almost everybody will be. It is why Lemmy was a tiny project for a long time until Reddit and Twitter fucked up too badly and for too long. Twitter sucked all the air out of the room for Mastodon. Arguably still does despite itself. And Reddit did the same with Lemmy by simply existing.

Now imagine if Reddit made a Lemmy instance, kept policies around to make it grow large, then cracked down with an iron fist once they had the dominant position?

Eugen considers what would happen if Meta abandoned ActivityPub. But I don’t think would need to happen. They just need to wall off. They can keep the standard.

Another example: Google and RCS. The RCS Android users have isn’t the open standard. Google built a layer of proprietary middleware around it. They fiercely guard API access, which is why only a few “trusted partners” get to use it. And now Google is RCS. There are no more competitors even though it is open.

Because Google sucked all the air out of the room and became the dominant player able to dictate to the rest.

And so, too, will happen with ActivityPub and this whole shebang unless we stop them from being interoperable first. I get Eugen wants this tech to grow and prosper. But you don’t do it by making deals with the devil.