Everyone's been dumping on Meta for integrating ActivityPub support, but I wonder if perhaps that's what's precipitating smaller projects like Flipboard and Discourse to be making similar announcements more. Here's hoping it's the start of an avalanche.
this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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More competition is better, but Facebook is still the 800-pound gorilla. It took a landmark court case to stop Microsoft from taking over the Web. We might need something similar for social networking.
A large portion of the Fediverse is composed of people who walked away from Twitter and Reddit, who are also 800-pound gorillas. If Threads decides to play silly buggers with the ActivityPub protocol, people can walk away from that too.
The Threadiverse in particular is actually ideally suited to not care about what Meta is doing because generally speaking people don't follow other people here (like they do on Mastodon and its ilk), they follow topics. There's no benefit from having a single gigantic pool of users all piled into the same community, and maybe even some significant downsides.
Two main reasons I can think of for each camp. For smaller projects and groups, removing walled gardens means they stand a chance to actually get users. For larger groups, it means they can argue they aren't monopolistic.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The company announced on Monday that it is beginning to switch its user accounts to ActivityPub, which means that everyone curating stuff on Flipboard is now doing so in a way that apps like Mastodon can see and interact with.
At that point, Flipboard will essentially be an ActivityPub-based platform like Mastodon or Pixelfed but with an interface designed for reading articles instead of bite-sized posts.
In spirit, a federated Flipboard shouldn’t feel all that different from, say, one of those Twitter users who would obsessively curate news or information around a specific topic.
The promise of the fediverse is that if you like or respond to a post, that is also compiled and synced across apps and services, but Flipboard hasn’t quite finished that yet.
McCue has spent the last year telling anyone who will listen (including The Verge) that ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the federated social internet are the future.
Flipboard launched a Mastodon instance called flipboard.social earlier this year, and recently announced it’s no longer integrating with X and focusing instead on open platforms.
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