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A clear victory for the free fediverse: Meta now says integrating with ActivityPub is "a long way out"
(privacy.thenexus.today)
this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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I keep seeing this article posted to scare people, but Lemmy and Mastodon aren't in the same situation as XMPP. XMPP had barely any users outside of Google Talks, with the overwhelming majority of interactions on XMPP being between Google Talks users. Google was tying their product to a public standard that they couldn't develop however they wanted, all for compatibility with very few users. When they pulled out of using XMPP to develop their own platform, the sheer lack of users on XMPP outside of Google Talks became apparent. This will not be the case with Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon/ect. Mastodon has 10 million registered users, and Lemmy has hundreds of thousands. The majority of both service's users are not about to switch over to sell their soul to the Zucc, so if Facebook federates for a while before defederating, Lemmy and Mastodon will have as large and robust communities as they have now, and the services will live on unlike with XMPP
Comes to mind that personally I had no commitment to Jabber or Pidgin, it was only a means to talk to people I wanted to talk, which I remained able to do after they were dropped. But Lemmy and Mastodon are communities, it takes more than tinkering with the protocol to kill it.
They would have to convince people who are here because they are already sick of Big Tech social media, that going back to Meta, of all places, is the right move. If they can do that, then it's not a matter of EEE or whatever, it's that we failed to maintain a compelling community.
I believe in this place more than that. Which is why I believe that if integration came to pass, it's more likely that we would gain users, who would peek through the Meta windows and notice that we are having a better experience.
Our content will be drowned by the amount of content a mainstream Meta can output.
And if you would like for users to notice the free fediverse among that content, they would need to ignore all Meta/commercial communities. That's not practical. It also amounts to defederating with Meta, which is practical, and what is suggested anyways. If people are curious about the free fediverse they will hear about it and find it.
Only if people consistently choose to subscribe to Meta creators and communities over the ones on the Fediverse. It's not like people here will be auto subscribed to whatever infiniscroll algorithmic slop Meta is serving. Meta can't forcibly implement that into other instances.
If Meta means to use the ActivityPub as a selling point, they need to show at least some of it to their users. But if they give up entirely, then there's no need to worry about defederating anyway.
That said I'm not naive and I expect that Meta will try to play dirty, but it seems to me like the extent of what they can do is pretty limited by the decentralized structure of the Fediverse. They can't just take other instances over, unless they downright buy the admins, and that's a whole separate matter than federation. If they do, still, it's trivial for users to jump into another instance away from Zuck's scaly hands.
But even then, if it's so easy to attract people away from the Fediverse, then it means that there is something it is lacking, and that's not going to be solved by being reclusive and trying to stay beneath notice.