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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.
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Everyone’s been dumping on Meta for integrating ActivityPub support, but I wonder if perhaps that’s what’s precipitating smaller projects like Flipboard and Discourse to be making similar announcements more. Here’s hoping it’s the start of an avalanche.
More competition is better, but Facebook is still the 800-pound gorilla. It took a landmark court case to stop Microsoft from taking over the Web. We might need something similar for social networking.
A large portion of the Fediverse is composed of people who walked away from Twitter and Reddit, who are also 800-pound gorillas. If Threads decides to play silly buggers with the ActivityPub protocol, people can walk away from that too.
The Threadiverse in particular is actually ideally suited to not care about what Meta is doing because generally speaking people don’t follow other people here (like they do on Mastodon and its ilk), they follow topics. There’s no benefit from having a single gigantic pool of users all piled into the same community, and maybe even some significant downsides.
Two main reasons I can think of for each camp. For smaller projects and groups, removing walled gardens means they stand a chance to actually get users. For larger groups, it means they can argue they aren’t monopolistic.
Or maybe, activity pub is doing way better than anyone thought and they want to get in on the action. You sound like a positive person, what positive thing would Meta do for the fediverse other than bring lots of people to it?
Best case scenario it becomes a Linux Kernel situation where the big players invest heavily into the project, and it becomes corporate-y and boring because it’s become the standard and not the weirdo in the corner
Boring tech is awesome.
Isn’t bringing people to it a quite important thing ?
I know this is a polarizing subject but in my opinion there is not much as important as increasing a social network userbase.
I’m sticking to Lemmy, but I’m pragmatic, I know it may never grow enough so that a niche community can live.
Right now my favorite game doesn’t have a community and even if I create one and actively post to it I know we will have 3/4 people subscribe to it at peak.
Overwatch has a very small community on Lemmy even though it’s a pretty huge game still. It’s thousands of time smaller than the subreddit. I accepted it and moved on but that kind of sucks.
So bringing users and content creators to Lemmy through other more mainstream social networks through activityPub is fine by me. As long as you control when to cut the cord I don’t really see the issue.
“Isn’t bringing people to it a quite important thing ?”
Depends. Smaller places tend to develop certain traits, that the people there like (because they were part of creating them, or decided to stay because of them). When such a place becomes popular and gains a lot of new users, there comes a point where those traits that made the place feel good to the people who were there tends to get lost and the place loses what was good. Eternal September and all that.
If it’s really that necessary, maybe we need better mechanisms to preserve small communities, but I feel like trying to keep most people in big techs walled gardens so that we can enjoy our spaces just feels selfish and short cited.
Isn’t bringing people to it a quite important thing ?
That depends on when you ask. When the fediverse is gaining users people on the fediverse would agree. When the fediverse is losing users people on the fediverse will say it’s better if it stays niche.
Yes, it’s important with one very important distinction. We want more people that are going to make the place better, not worse. Bringing threads people here isn’t likely to do that. What if we block them until we have our feet under us with great people, then we can decide if it’s worth it. This would be way easier than building a new fediverse. Also, start inviting small forums to check out your community to make it thrive, not huge userbases with hellish corporate overlords.
Do you know how I know the people coming over won’t be great? Not a single person has ever brought up how great the people who would be coming over would be. It’s only, there would be more.
I don’t necessarily want more people, just the people I have interest in following. Most of those people didn’t stick around here for more than a couple weeks after the Twitter takeover though.
I don’t know anything about the flipboard people, they might be a nice add in?
I don’t agree with this “”“gatekeeping”“” ideology for the Fediverse.
Who’s to decide if the threads user are a good addition or not ?
Can’t we just give them a chance and then decide if we want to defederate. It feels like pre-emptive moderation.
It’s rejecting people just because they are using Threads instead of attempting to filter the bad users of Threads through moderation. Also even if you try to keep these bad users out nothing prevents them to create an account on your instance and keep on bring a nuisance. The only solution to these users is moderation with defederation being the ultimate moderation tool.
Let’s give new users a chance to fit in the Fediverse and defederate only if the issue arises but not before that.
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.
Are you arguing just for the sake of arguing
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.
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.
This is the best summary I could come up 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.
At that point, Flipboard will essentially be an ActivityPub-based platform like Mastodon or Pixelfed but with an interface designed for reading articles instead of bite-sized posts.
In spirit, a federated Flipboard shouldn’t feel all that different from, say, one of those Twitter users who would obsessively curate news or information around a specific topic.
The promise of the fediverse is that if you like or respond to a post, that is also compiled and synced across apps and services, but Flipboard hasn’t quite finished that yet.
McCue has spent the last year telling anyone who will listen (including The Verge) that ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the federated social internet are the future.
Flipboard launched a Mastodon instance called flipboard.social earlier this year, and recently announced it’s no longer integrating with X and focusing instead on open platforms.
The original article contains 599 words, the summary contains 176 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Seeing bigger companies start using the fediverse makes me think back. I want to say that this is a good thing because the fediverse is open and can’t be owned, it’s a stream of information that no company can control. I do have one nagging thought though: that’s exactly what we thought about the Internet in general. It’s an open public network, no one can own it, information will be democratized, etc. And that was all true to a degree but companies did find ways to dominate it and control the flow of information (at least for a lot of people - I know all of us here are liberated internet super gurus). It makes me wonder what the fediverse will look like in 10 years. Will it be powering every TV and social media app? Will we hearken back to the days when it was small and cool? Seems likely.
