When Meta launched their new Twitter competitor Threads on July 5, they said that it would be compatible with the ActivityPub protocol, Mastodon, and all the other decentralized social networks in the fediverse “soon”.
But on July 14, @alexeheath of the Verge reported that Meta’s saying ActivityPub integration’s “a long way out”. Hey wait a second. Make up your mind already!
From the perspective of the “free fediverse” that’s not welcoming Meta, the new positioning that ActivityPub integration is “a long way out” is encouraging. OK, it’s not as good as “when hell freezes over,” but it’s a heckuva lot better than “soon.” In fact, I’d go so far as to say “a long way out” is a clear victory for the free fediverse’s cause.
Yes I read it and I simply do not agree with most of what is said there. XMPP is not dead and saying google killed it on purpose is to much of a simplification.
Worst thing that could happen if we federat with meta and decide on some point that this is a bad instance and block it, is that we go back to where we are now.
But since some governments and news companies already started to run their own mastodon instances it would be easiest for them to just keep up their own instance and federate with threads instead of creating another account on threads.
This plus all de Content created by people from the “free fedivers” would meta bring into a situation where they would want to be federated and therefore would (to an extent) do stuff to satisfy other instances. Our position against meta would be much stronger than how it is now.
So definitely not growing at all cost but excluding all form of commercial use of the fedivers by default would lead to fedivers remaining just a footnote in society without changing anything.
So I want not only meta but all of the big player to use ActivityPup and fighting for our (the users) favor without all their lockin tricks.