Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

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As many others have said before, this isn't very likely to happen for many of the reasons it never happened with the web or Linux.

- ActivityPub is an open protocol. If Meta goes all-in on it, they'll be implementing a transparent spec everyone knows. Modifying that would send obvious shockwaves through the network and signal their non-cooperation. There isn't a covert way for them to really try this.

- Mastodon itself is AGPL licensed, meaning any Meta fork (for whatever reason) would be subject to "provide the source code of the modified version running there to the users of that server. Therefore, public use of a modified version, on a publicly accessible server, gives the public access to the source code of the modified version."[0]

- Meta has no reason to. If they decide the app is sufficiently popular without ActivityPub integration, then things return to the status-quo for Mastodon. Meta loses what little control they had over the direction of the standard/protocol/applications and nothing really changes.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html

There's no reason for Meta to use Mastodon in order to federate, so I don't see why the license of Mastodon is relevant.

Then there's nothing for them to extend or extinguish. If they're not able to manipulate the client and they can only control the content on their own server, what leverage does Meta have to extinguish the fediverse?

They can potentially try to make changes to the protocol, and try to leverage their users numbers to force people to accept it. I think, though, that they'll find that a lot of us are stubborn and don't like them and will not react well to that.

Which is what mastodon already does. It has extended the ActivityPub protocol in a few places. Everyone copies because you must work against Mastodon to really participate.

Change is fine when they make sense and are made by a party people aren't extremely suspicious and at times hostile to. Even sometimes if you don't fully agree with every aspect.

It doesn't have to be a technical strategy, but a UX path to EEE.

I've been thinking about this in terms of Lemmy (also built on ActivityPub), which I understand isn't currently on the table for interop (but if Facebook is after Twitter's lunch, why shouldn't they be after Reddit's). It could even be the same application - Kbin is another AP service which has separate tabs for "link aggregation" and "microblogging" (Reddit and Twitter, respectively).

With Lemmy, the way a large corp could come in and push it around is by simply creating it's own version of the top 100 (or N, whatever) communities, and automatically subscribing users into them based on their interests (already known, due to existing accounts/profiles elsewhere). c/linux on lemmy.ml has ~6k subscribers, and is the largest Linux community on Lemmy, afaict. It's not unreasonable to think a large corp willing to pull in its existing userbase couldn't increase that by an order of magnitude in very short order. Overnight, those communities become the place where conversations are happening on those topics (maybe even with some pre-seeded content) and the existing lemmy communities stagnate.

Fast forward a while and one day BigCorp decides to pull the plug. Existing non-BigCorp Lemmy users are now separated from the communities they've been in and need to create BigCorp accounts. You could argue that those non-BigCorp Lemmy users are no worse off than they are pre-BigCorp-federation, but they're effectively migrating their communities all over again.

As far as why, I think it's pretty invaluable for Facebook to:

1) appear to be "playing ball" from a regulatory aspect 2) eat a competitor's lunch 3) control a (potentially!) up and coming federated service

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