(Opinion:) You're So Vain, You Probably Think This App Is About You: On Meta and Mastodon
(Opinion:) You're So Vain, You Probably Think This App Is About You: On Meta and Mastodon
Those of you not plugged into the Mastodon community may not be aware of the predominant reaction to Instagram Threads. This started when it was merely rumored, reaching a crescendo with reports that Meta had been talking to a few of the larger Mastodon instances under NDA, presumably to encourage them not to “defederate” with Threads when it came online.1 Let me describe that reaction for you, with only mild exaggeration:
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While I think that the article is correct in stating that mastodon isn't currently a serious competitor to facebook, it's possible that it (or something else based of activitypub) might become that one day. I think that there's a decent chance that facebook might want to prevent fediverse spaces from potentially becoming serious competitors, and even if that's not the main reason why their implementing activitypub, if e.g. mastodon ever does get to a point where it can challange meta (which I think most of us are hoping!) then facebook will use the position of power they will have over activitypub to try to prevent that. I think it's a misstake to give facebook any power of our spaces because that means essentially giving up on the idea of an internet not controlled by large corporations like facebook.
Definitely. And I don't think this article is "right" or does predict future (because it can change in a drop of a hat) but with all these doom and gloom comments about Meta/Facebook ruining ActivityPub I enjoy hearing about opposing (and valid imo) views.
But like I commented somewhere else, there is something here that Mastodon and ActivityPub can gain here. Threads is already big (10M users or something) compared to Mastodon (2M users or something). My biggest fear was that Threads was going leech users off of ActivityPub but looking how things are, there's a chance it would go the other way with Mastodon gaining users. And you're absolutely correct that Meta won't play nice but I don't really see how they'd be able to stop the growth Mastodon would've potentially already gotten. But what do I know.