This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
This is brilliant in both it's brevity and accuracy; and could be borrowed to describe their coverage of bitcoin when it first started to bubble.
Hello, I'd like two ActivityPubs please.
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.
What's left of them are writing 6 stories a day, every day, so no, there's no time left for the old due diligence.
Vendor made me laugh too. :)
If you spend too much time in Microsoft-land or Enterprise-ville, you will start to see everything as vendors. But in the open source world it's different.
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??
It's Fortune. What do you expect? They all think in capitalism, and the very concept of OSS is alien in their mind.
ActivityPub is the best pub ever 🍻
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.
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.
Not if I say this: "NO!"
If you want the fediverse to work, you have to accept that large companies will want to be part of it.
But it works now
But mega corporations will eventually want to crush the competition, which means making everyone else's experience worse. I guess that somehow hasn't happened to email, but for most everything else
This. Anything with a million users is chock full of megacorps. The noteworthy bit is that this isn’t run exclusively by one of them.
Colonise? Lol. I'm pretty sure meta doesn't care that much about us.
They want to prevent us from ever becoming an alternative to their platforms
Trust me we’ve done a good enough job of that on our own lol. I mean I love it here, but everyone I’ve shown this concept to is immediately confused and intimidated. Maybe it’s still early days, but it’s difficult for me to imagine this ever catching on outside of niche tech circles.
We need a homepage or something that lets you very easy register an account (maybe with a randomly selected large instance?) and sub you to some default communities. Something that someone can follow the instructions for for 1 minute instead of the 8 or 10 minutes it took me.
Um, did you think colonisers ever cared about the people they colonised?
Good luck with that.
Especially when everyone is defederating from them.
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.
My primary beef with
huge pool of new users for the protocol
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.
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.
