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iOS AppStore privacy preview for Meta’s upcoming ActivityPub-based app Threads
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this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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The MO for large companies who use open standards like this is to use the sheer gravitational pull of their ad dollars to get most people to sign up on ActivityPub, then change their own code just enough to break the experience for anyone trying to read their content from any other instance website or app.
If that happens, won't we just be back to how things are now? People like you and me who are already here probably won't be making accounts on Threads, it will be pulling in new people who wouldn't have joined the fediverse otherwise. If they break something in their implementation of ActivityPub, we'll just be separated from them again which doesn't seem different from the current situation. The open source ActivityPub protocol we all currently rely on cant be taken away, so the independent instances we're already using should be fine too.
Research what happened with XMPP thanks to Google. It’s the same thing here.
I might be missing your point since I never used it, but looking around their website and reading Wikipedia, it doesn't look like a dead standard. Looking from the outside in, it seems like Google adopted the protocol and brought a lot of new users with them, and when they dropped it in 2013, they took those users with them again.
It does feel very similar to ActivityPub today, but in a way that seems to support the point I was making. Correct me if im wrong, but it seems the people using XMPP through Google Talk signed up to use a Google service, while those who joined through independent providers did it for XMPP itself. Even with Google gone, it looks like those other providers continue to function and the protocol remains relevant to the people who want to use it, similar to ActivityPub right now.
It’s basically in zombie mode right now. Most of the users left except for those on WhatsApp.