They definitely want to know about your sex life. Advertisers want to target pregnant/expecting women, happily married people, unhappily married people, men in dry spells, gay men, lesbians, kinksters and so on. Even if they're not marketing sexual products, advertisers will want to target those groups.
I think it's a valid take to have. If it makes it possible to follow more people from my Mastodon account who I want to follow, that seems like a good thing. I won't be making an account there, but I think I'd like to at least have the option to follow the people who do.
The MO for large companies who use open standards like this is to use the sheer gravitational pull of their ad dollars to get most people to sign up on ActivityPub, then change their own code just enough to break the experience for anyone trying to read their content from any other instance website or app.
If that happens, won't we just be back to how things are now? People like you and me who are already here probably won't be making accounts on Threads, it will be pulling in new people who wouldn't have joined the fediverse otherwise. If they break something in their implementation of ActivityPub, we'll just be separated from them again which doesn't seem different from the current situation. The open source ActivityPub protocol we all currently rely on cant be taken away, so the independent instances we're already using should be fine too.
I might be missing your point since I never used it, but looking around their website and reading Wikipedia, it doesn't look like a dead standard. Looking from the outside in, it seems like Google adopted the protocol and brought a lot of new users with them, and when they dropped it in 2013, they took those users with them again.
It does feel very similar to ActivityPub today, but in a way that seems to support the point I was making. Correct me if im wrong, but it seems the people using XMPP through Google Talk signed up to use a Google service, while those who joined through independent providers did it for XMPP itself. Even with Google gone, it looks like those other providers continue to function and the protocol remains relevant to the people who want to use it, similar to ActivityPub right now.
It’s using ActivityPub. It’s interesting because Bluesky (basically, former Twitter) explicitly stated that they didn’t think AP was robust enough and created their own shitty protocol. Facebook might be one of the first traditional SNS platforms to experiment with AP. I would’ve been happier if it were Tumblr, who said they were working on implementing AP last year.
I wonder how much of the recent Twitter drama has influenced Facebook’s decision to release Threads so soon after its announcement. It’s probably going to be shit quality and just try and monopolize on people leaving Twitter but not wanting to jump to Mastodon.
Ok interesting. I need to read up more on it, I wonder what benefit Meta gets from building on or integrating with AP. Like a short term image / branding thing, or a longer play because there is some fear of what the fediverse could turn into without them.
That’s pretty much what the controversy is about. People are, rightfully, afraid that Facebook will dominate AP and eventually destroy it (akin to Google and XMPP[1]). There are also those who, also rightfully, believe that this will help adoption of the AP protocol and bring innovation into the Fediverse (maybe like podcasting and Apple Podcasts have done for RSS). Both are valid, and we as members of the community and those who develop for this space should be cautious of corporate intrusion leading the innovation.
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