You all may have already heard, but Meta is gearing up to release a Twitter clone (possibly called Threads). The weird part is that they intend to use ActivityPub.
What are your thoughts? And what are the odds that they get de-federated in most instances?
Isn’t the whole point of federation to allow users to choose the instance they want to use? I think it sets a bad precedent if instances were to block them from federating entirely without reason simply because that instance happens to be run by Meta.
If anything, this would be a huge boon for federated networks and ActivityPub as a whole to have participation from such a large-scale user base.
And there are a lot of people out there who would be scared away from the technical learning curve of things like Lemmy, Mastodon, etc - giving them a more “conventional” way to participate in federated networks is a great way to get people acquainted.
More participation is a good thing.
I hope that’s how it goes. I’m just wary or Meta with their love of data harvesting having an interesting in ActivityPub. That said, I’ll wait and see how it goes before making a judgment.
Sooner rather than later “we” will have to deal with the legal implications of federated systems like the ones around ActivityPub. If not Meta, OpenAI could just as easily tap into the data. And if not OpenAI, then someone else. Or all of them.
So while it might seem like a solution to just defederate these players, it will effectively be a cat and mouse game. So there have to be legally binding rules, so we can at least protect the data in western countries.
Couldn’t they already access pretty much anything on the fediverse through the APIs and scraping anyway?
I’d say this is more about getting fediverse market share and trying to exert control over the fediverse through influence of a large userbase.