Have you seen the latest update from the #Instagram Help Center? It offers insight into how #Meta views the #Fediverse. Let's take a closer look at the highlighted text together:
"#Threads is planning to use a protocol called #ActivityPub to connect with other servers that support this protocol. Our aim is to enable communication between Threads and users on different fediverse platforms that we don't own or control."
Now, considering everything we know about Meta and their business practices, you might wonder why they're doing this. Well, here are a few reasons that could shed some light:
Regulatory pressure: While Meta is doing its best to compete with #Twitter, they also want to avoid appearing like a monopolistic force. By joining the Fediverse, they can show regulators that they are simply becoming part of an existing social network.
Zuckerberg's strategy: Mark Zuckerberg has been observing what's been happening with Twitter ever since Elon Musk acquired it, and he's learned some lessons. Twitter has faced criticism for various missteps like alienating journalists, restricting API access, and even requiring logins to view tweets. Zuckerberg wants to assure people that Threads is different from Twitter and avoid those same pitfalls.
Embracing social media decentralization: It's widely acknowledged in the social media industry that the future lies in decentralization. The era of closed-off platforms is gradually coming to an end. Just as Compuserve couldn't survive the open Internet, walled garden social media platforms won't be able to thrive in the open Fediverse. Meta doesn't want to become the next Compuserve.
Early entry into an emerging ecosystem: Meta is eager to establish itself in the emerging Fediverse ecosystem, much like they tried to do with the Metaverse. Being an early player allows them to take a leadership position before other major players like #Google, #Apple, and #Automattic jump on board.
However, it's worth noting that there might be a personal rivalry at play here. There have been rumors of a rivalry between Zuckerberg and Musk, and it seems they don't particularly like each other. So, one could speculate that Zuckerberg might want to undermine Musk by taking down Twitter, the platform Musk acquired for a hefty sum of $44 billion.
Hope that provides some context and clarity on why Meta is making these moves.
What do you think about Meta’s Fediverse explainer?
I find it strange that #BlueskySocial wanted to create their own protocol just because the existing ones weren't "good enough". Who's to say everything will always stay the same? We've been having development in every major protocols throughout the history of the Internet, look at http for example.
No, I think they know they won't get enough money or control in any other way than to develop their own. The openness is just a facade here. #ActivityPub#Fediverse
Non posto qui da mezzo secolo, perché mi capita più che altro quando il flusso della mia giornata si interrompe e ultimamente ciò non succede perché trovo sempre qualcosa da fare in un modo o nell'altro, ma penso sia più adequato fare qui questa domanda...
Devo implementare #ActivityPub nel mio #forum#phpBB che non integra assolutamente la tecnologia, quindi devo imparare da zero almeno certe parti.
Che risorse consigliate per imparare? (A parte i doc #w3c che meh, comprensivi ma bruttini)
It took 4 months and 50 code commits, but my federated version of reddit (written in #python) can now follow and be followed by instances of #kbin and #lemmy!
Getting #ActivityPub working has been ... a journey.
"Rozpoczynamy test, w ramach którego posty z kont Threads będą dostępne w serwisie Mastodon i innych usługach korzystających z protokołu ActivityPub. Zapewnienie interoperacyjności Threads da ludziom większy wybór sposobu interakcji i pomoże treściom dotrzeć do większej liczby osób. Podchodzę do tego dość optymistycznie.
[EN]
Starting a test where posts from #Threads accounts will be available on #Mastodon and other services that use the #ActivityPub protocol. Making Threads interoperable will give people more choice over how they interact and it will help content reach more people. I'm pretty optimistic about this."
Nie piszę tego tootka przez XMPP, bo go Zuck przetestował, rozszerzył, przejął i wyłączył...
Loops is a new platform for sharing short videos, and it's open source + federated using #ActivityPub
We're really excited to share this sneak peek that showcases the new onboarding flow and discovery features (Connect Mastodon) and look forward to the upcoming beta release!
Part of my frustration with #ActivityPub and one of the things I find baffling giving everything else in it: the lack of tools for backpressure.
Backpressure is fundamental in building reliable distributed systems (c.f., Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods). From a C2S perspective I get why it wouldn't need to be specified, but from a S2S federated protocol perspective its absence is frustrating.
All that it says is to take care not to overwhelm others and a bit on rate limits
The danger of the excessive use of the #fediblockmeta can be seen in email today. If you're using your own domain name or server, the message often doesn't go through. The big email providers say they are doing this to prevent abuse, and maybe that's true. But the presumption of malice, the centralization of services and the use of shared block lists is bad for free expression and market competition. This can happen to #ActivityPub too. Open protocols are not enough, it matters how we use them.
Help, I have an #Activitypub / #fediverse question: if you own your own domain, can you use that one domain for hosting accounts for multiple fediverse apps?
For example, if I owned bjones.com (alas, I do not), could I have mastodon@bjones.com, pixelfed@bjones.com, etc? #fedihelp
You can now have this post federated to your social media site by following @blog If you're on Mastodon, it should look something like this: You should be able to follow it on Lemmy, kBin, PixelFed, and some cool social network I've never heard of. How This blog runs on WordPress. Thanks to the tireless […]
The more I read on #Meta, #ActivityPub and #GDPR, I get the impression that the fundamental architecture of the #Fediverse is almost incompatible with GDPR. How is this discussed within the Fedi #admin circle?
EDIT: because people ask me, here are two insightful sources:
WordPress now offers official support for ActivityPub - The Verge
The ActivityPub plug-in is now available for all WordPress.com plans, allowing users to communicate with each other across other federated platforms like Mastodon.
#Facebook#Meta isn't planning to open up #ActivityPub federation for #threads anytime soon, IMHO. It was just a marketing bluff to get that sweet ad money from advertisers who need a new place to spend their money now that #Twitter goes down the drain. That's why they created shadow accounts for Instagram users, so they can claim 100M users in just a few days. And you can only delete your threads account by deleting your complete Insta profile. Weirdest opt-out ever :)
#Threads (if it ever actually gets #ActivityPub support) means institutions — government organizations, NGOs, media orgs, whathaveyous — will have way stronger incentive to set up their own instances, allowing them to be followed and interacted with both from fedi* and from Threads. :blobcatthink:
*) I do not believe Threads will ever be a part of #Fediverse even if it does implement the protocol: fedi is more than just the protocol, it's a set of values. :blobcatthinksmart:
It looks like "youtube" is covered already, but any #scuttlebutt about that is appreciated. The knowledge about what's best or hot at any time is also federated 😕
Don't be naive, people. #Facebook is only interested in collecting more data and to connect that data to profiles to feed to the ad machinery. If #ActivityPub can be used for that, they will give it a try. That's it. That's all. It's still Facebook.
While I don't want to get into #ATProto until some questions on governance are answered (and I'd rather something like AP), there is a lot to like here and a lot of things I think we'd be extremely foolish not to use as concepts as we look to the future of #ActivityPub.
Going into some of the specific things I like a lot here that are simply not possible* in AP today…
(* yes yes it is possible to conceive of how to do it in AP in a completely non-interoperable way, you're very smart)
A rant about social protocols Introduction
Recently, I read an article that talked about that someone, tried to do a new platform called “Content Nation”. This is a German platform that allows people to write content (to be honest, I don’t really know what it does.) and publish it. And recently, the creators tried to implement the ActivityPub protocol. They did so by using the official documentation provided by @w3c.
The problem was that the last time the official documentation was updated, was in 23 January 2018. So, this means that a lot of new standards that other platforms like Mastodon, Misskey, etc... use are not written in there. But this isn’t the fault of the service developers, this is the fault of the W3C that hasn’t been an update to the protocol officially to support the new standards in the industry such as Webfinger, SharedInbox, Privacy Scopes, and Opt-Out for Search…
The thing, is that this led to a lot of people thinking that this site was some kind of scraper and started making the crawler crash or, even worse, someone tried to load CP inside the platform. BlueSky
Recently, BlueSky opened its AT protocol for everyone to use and federate, due to this, there has been a bit of a discussion inside these platforms. This made me think, why did BlueSky feel the necessity to make another protocol? If there is one already, why do we need another one that competes, wasn’t the objective of protocols to allow interoperability?
So, I did a bit of digging and I found two things. The first one is that they wanted so solve a few things that AP does not support officially (here are the main points, not all of them):
Account portability. A person’s online identity should not be owned by corporations with no accountability to their users. With the AT Protocol, you can move your account from one provider to another without losing any of your data or social graph.
Algorithmic choice. Algorithms dictate what we see and who we can reach. We must have control over our algorithms if we're going to trust in our online spaces. The AT Protocol includes an open algorithms mode so users have more control over their experience.
A lot of these problems are already present on ActivityPub for a long time. The account portability of ActivityPub let’s say it’s not intuitive. You have to do a lot of things and even then, there are some things like the posts that you make or the favourites that don’t transfer (in the case of favourites you need to transfer them manually, the same for blocks and mutes).
Also, right now 99% if not all software that uses ActivityPub, does not have an algorithm that orders content for you to see, but shows you everything in chronological order (I don’t know if its intentional or if it’s a limit of AP) and the only thing you have to discover topics is trough hashtags that maybe someone forgot to tag.
Furthermore, not to mention that on ActivityPub, you are at the mercy of the server moderators, so this means that if you know someone that is on an instance that is blocked by yours, you won’t be able to talk to them unless you change the instance, which in a way it’s not very decentralized. The other protocols
By doing research, I realized that there are a lot of other protocols (for example Nostr) that have its own implementation of things maybe there are some that are bridged and other not.
Such protocols have different features, for example Nostr allows you to suggest content edit to other people’s posts, move your content easily, etc. How can we solve this?
First, we have to know why all these other companies make their own. I must say, that most of them probably do because AP does not allow customization of posts or the adding of new features for everyone and the fact that it’s not been updated for 6 whole years makes matters worse.
What the developers want, is a protocol that lets them create wherever they want and add everything the want, for example the edit thing that I said the Nostr supports, the only way to add it to AP, would be or only on your software or find another software that is willing to implement that feature, the rest of the market is left behind as well as the users that depending on what it is, they don’t understand.
My solution to this problem would be to add some kind of per user plugin system directly to the AP that allows for devs to implement add-ons that do with the JSON strings that add buttons or scripts at least to send and receive data. As well as to add some kind of CSS support for the posts and profiles. Of course, the point of these is that if you make a platform, and you are the only one using these characteristics, well… but in case that everybody wants to use it and everybody makes their own plugins it would be chaos.
For this, the solution I proposed would be like something you add while the W3C updates the protocol to support a very popular feature. #socialprotocols#nostr#activitypub#W3C#ATprotocol#rant#blogpost#ContentNation