this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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It looks like articles today are saying that Meta is delaying integrating ActivityPub at launch.
That said, I'm not seeing how we get to the last E, extinguish. By its very nature, ActivityPub is decentralized to avoid total control. So even if Meta embraces the technology and wants to monetize it (because capitalism, of course), extending ActivityPub would (hypothetically) be open source - or they would fork it, diverging and making their version closed, and otherwise not function in full with other ActivityPub instances (like with kbin, Lemmy, and Mastodon). Without buying the platform from the developers in full, I don't see how ActivityPub or the greater Fediverse dies. And I could just be missing something obvious, so if you can explain how we get there, I would really like to hear and understand.
I guess the only way I could see it is if Threads got so popular that people literally stopped using the other apps - but I also don't see that happening, because anyone already using stuff like Mastodon are using it because Twitter, Facebook, etc, suck ass and they've moved away from sites like that.
EDIT: Thanks to the one person that actually replied, I saw I was on the right track at the end, but failed to see the obvious (as I assumed).
It’s hard to predict but the extinguish part would come from bigger non-Threads instances implementing compatibility with Thread-only extensions (in the interest of their users, or for money) and fragmenting the community. Threads then becomes the defacto ActivityPub standard. Maybe some instances stay true to the standard but with extremely reduced communities because now they can’t see what other instances are publishing. So now you have to decide between your ideals and your social network. At best, you’re back to square 0.
i.e.: The IE approach. Take an open standard (HTML), then fill in the gaps it's missing with proprietary components (ActiveX), wait until your solutions become entrenched, then start doing evil stuff (implementing HTML slightly wrong so that developers have to do extra work to support compliant browsers).
Right, and that's exactly how IE/Edge is the one globally dominant browser it is today. Oh no, wait, that's the very standards compliant Chrome
Wow, you really got me there. I had no idea that IE was no longer the dominant browser by usershare. That 13-year stretch of singular dominance may as well have never happened at all since it didn't literally last forever 🙄
And... yes, Chrome is very standards compliant, isn't it? Isn't it great how they publish excellent standards like FLoC & Manifest V3 without any regard for pushback from external vendors & web engineers? It's a very not evil thing that they're doing with their very not entrenched product.
Yes, google, the beacon of privacy, has decided to cancel FLoC. See? Google is actually listening to the web community's plea. What's that in the latest version of Chrome just released globally a few weeks ago? Ad Topics? No, it's totally unrelated to FLoC, no need to worry about that, for realsies!
The internet is saved thanks to Google's commitment to pushing forward with new standards