@evan They probably will. I suspect #Amazon will partially federate #Twitch in the future (basically you can follow but not interact with the content) as another way to subscribe.
@evan The problem for me is not about having easy to to deploy products, that would be great, it’s that Amazon is an awful company that I avoid as much as possible.
@evan I started down this path as a side project. I was pretty happy with the progress I made but got tied up doing things that pay the bills. Hoping to get back to it this summer.
I think that cloud service providers making Open Source ActivityPub servers that run on their infrastructure is amazing. Wildebeest is a great model, and I hope it thrives and that other service providers follow suit.
@evan this is really smart for them. It's also an opportunity to publicize and dog food their platform, to check if it's actually usable by their clients to build fully fledged products, as a serverless Mastodon
@evan i personally think it should be down to the community to provide such things. Mastodon isn’t that difficult to deploy if you know your way around servers, there are managed services available already for those without the technical knowledge or want to manage such things and then projects like #GoToSocial have made deploying AcitivityPub servers very nearly plug and play easy.
@evan I sincerely doubt they could ever pull off a social network of any kind, but they could probably do a fine to great job being a vendor of whitelabel #ActivityPub related infrastructure. I could imagine an ecosystem of frameworks in the vein of Web frameworks like #SpringBoot or #Flask where instead of managing the complexity of sockets, http protocol transmission, routing, etc. these frameworks are instead managing the complexity ActivityPub, simplifying common patterns of usage, etc.
@evan qualified yes for the same reasons I want Google and Microsoft to partake of ActivityPub. They're going to spend a bunch of money on a bunch of tools and teach a bunch of people about AP and federation.
I think the odds are low that they will meet their business goals. But I think the odds are high that the community will benefit.
As somebody who is a paying customer of all of these companies in some fashion, I do think there are some possible wins.
@evan Qualified no because I don't see why they would all of a sudden want to get into the social space, and I can't see their efforts bringing a flood of users to the Fediverse with benefits to said users or us. But maybe there are strong use cases I haven't thought of.
@mark sure. So, they do run the biggest cloud service in the world, so having an open source product that runs on AWS might be reasonable. It was what cloud flare did with wildebeest.
@evan I don't see them trying to operate on open platforms unless they can find ways to monetize them.* I don't know what that would look like, but I assume it involves some harvesting of data of people who share platforms but didn't agree.
*since they're cutting back on internal programs like the Alexa effort because they don't generate enough revenue, I find it unlikely they're going to suddenly become altruistic. I also look to the way they rolled out Sidewalk for an idea as to how they will treat notification and asking permissions beforehand.
Not because I want to see such companies try to dominate the Fediverse.
But because I look forward to these companies paying thousands of employees to learn about ActivityPub.
The employees, and the research, knowledge transfer, documented learning journeys, and actual documentation they create will be beneficial to the ecosystem.
@evan the option I would want to add is "who cares?"... because if they did, I would almost certainly shun it because it's Amazon (similarly, Meta, Google, Microsoft, or Apple).
@evan my only reason for leaning qualified no, was strictly due to their launch of Strange Worlds.
They handled the Twitch/Justin.TV thing beautifully. They handle Prime very well.
AWS has its struggles for adopt-ability (at least).
I am concerned about their ability to adopt. They don't seem very keen on listening to the copious amounts of feedback they've gotten in the areas they aren't very strong in. They find or make a product that tests well and they launch it and funnel money into making it a thing.
I feel that that would be a misstep in this environment.
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