The company announced on Monday that it is beginning to switch its user accounts to ActivityPub, which means that everyone curating stuff on Flipboard is now doing so in a way that apps like Mastodon can see and interact with.
The company announced on Monday that it is beginning to switch its user accounts to ActivityPub, which means that everyone curating stuff on Flipboard is now doing so in a way that apps like Mastodon can see and interact with.
You’re asking me “other than the positive thing that Meta would do for the Fediverse, what positive thing are they doing for the Fediverse?”
That’s it exactly. They’re bringing people to the Fediverse and spreading usage of the protocol.
And then they will shut it down like Google did with XMPP.
The story of how Google “killed” XMPP is a popular just-so story, but it’s not as clear cut as is so commonly described and isn’t directly applicable to ActivityPub. It’s not the same situation. XMPP is an instant-messaging protocol, which was very dependent on network effects - you had to adopt Google’s changes if you wanted to be able to talk to your friends, and when Google eventually ditched XMPP support (apparently because external servers were the source of a tidal wave of spam they didn’t want to deal with) that meant everyone was cut off from Google’s users and that was bad.
Whereas if you look around the general opinion of the Fediverse, it sounds like being cut off from Threads’ content would be seen as a positive thing by most. There’s no need for complete interoperability in the Fediverse, there are already plenty of servers that refuse to talk to each other even though they share a protocol. If Threads proposes some change to ActivityPub that nobody else wants to use and Threads gets cut off as a result, how bad will that really be?
Ok, great scene. Now what’s comparable to the aqueduct and sanitation that Meta is bringing.
… I just said. You said it too. It’s the thing that we both keep saying. They’re bringing people to the Fediverse.
Again, that’s not a good thing. I also noticed you didn’t say they were bringing great people to the fediverse, just people. lol.
Free and open discussion, but only for the people you like?
Be picky about which communities you join. Use the block feature if you have to. That already applies to the Fediverse.
Are you arguing just for the sake of arguing
Most people are good. If the versions of people we see online are bad, it is because the systems we are using have failed to help us communicate properly.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
what positive thing are they doing for the Fediverse?
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.