Threads is using ActivityPub solely because it was available and stable to build with.
Threads is using ActivityPub solely because it was available and stable to build with.
That's it. It's just the fastest springboard this garbage company had to get yet another social media platform out the door when they sensed blood in the water.
Edit: This is a response to people who think FB users will somehow discover the fediverse and be converted by this action. They won't.
Or that FB has noble goals in choosing AP or will somehow be forced to be better. They won't.
It's just good software.
Truth.social did the same. It's essentially a standalone mastodon instance with hate built-in.
The only "good" thing would be more contributors but I sure af dont' want to be federated with them.
Yeah, just like big companies like Google use email protocols with Gmail. It's actually good for adoption. The alternative is that FB uses its own proprietary and competing protocol, making everything more fragmented.
The alternative is that FB uses its own proprietary and competing protocol, making everything more fragmented.
Oh, so Bluesky
What it sounds like is that we need other big players so that one of them can't taint the protocol with proprietary extensions
I think it's cool, the internet needs to go the way of decentralised stuff, no matter which way it goes about it. Just because a big company has gone and done it doesn't mean it's an ultimately bad thing to happen. At the very least, this is a gateway for people to understand other activitypub services.
"Mastadon is just like Threads but with no big company behind it or ads..." Kind of thing.
I think that many people worry about what Meta might be able to do wih all the data that they can access, and we don't know what they will do with it. We don't know what a Mastodon instance admin might do with the data either, but Meta has much more resources to use them.
Meta can access your data on the fediverse without thread federating though, they can just make a scraper if they really wanted to, and it wouldn't be hard, literally an afternoons worth of code.
Nono, as a mastodon user what i see there is mainly a concern bout they EEE'ing the fediverse
Oh you said many people, yeah i guess that's true too
So all these talks about possible federation with that trash heap were just false alarm? Well.... Good.
It seems like Threads isn't using Activity Pub at all
Thank you for saying this. The panic I've been seeing over this decision is unreal.
Meta are not engaged in some grand scheme to destroy the fediverse. Meta do not give two shits about the existence of the fediverse.
Meta wants to destroy Twitter. That's their only goal. Their only competition. They don't have a plan for killing the fediverse because they don't think it will ever be big enough to matter. And nothing about engaging with the fediverse gives them any leverage to do harm to it. There are so many whacked out theories about how this is some kind of attack but none of them even make any sense. "They'll start cutting off smaller instances." OK. So those smaller instances won't be connected to threads. Right now I'm pretty sure no instances are connected to threads. Last week they certainly weren't. And those smaller instances were doing just fine. We're not talking about taking away oxygen. It's just refusing something that nobody wants anyway.
You can't prove any of your assertions. It's all supposition. Meanwhile, history has many examples of corporations doing exactly what people are fearing. Like what Google did to XMPP, and Microsoft did to Kerberos. It's wise to be wary.
There's even a Wikipedia article on the tactic Microsoft uses: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
You're taking a realistic possibility and poo-pooing it when you don't know anything about the history of corporations destroying open source standards.
It's precisely because I do understand the history that I'm "poo-pooing" the mass hysteria that's going around here.
Everyone keeps citing examples like email and XMPP without actually stopping to think about whether they are actually comparable to what's happening with Meta and the fediverse. Because they're really not
You're more than welcome to explain to me how Facebook's dastardly plan to destroy Mastodon actually works, but I sincerely hope it's more than just "Oh, like what happened with XMPP," because it's not. These are different situations, plain and simple.