Throw 50 fulltime programmers at development and crowd everyone else out. Or fork it with something clearly superior since they can afford to pay people to work on it fulltime.
This is what I’ve been wondering. Facebook’s past behavior definitely worries me, but I haven’t been able to think of the mechanism by which they could actually hurt ActivityPub. What more could they do beside just defederate from everyone? We would be left with what we currently have, which is fine with me.
Can anyone else think of a direct path by which Facebook could hurt ActivityPub?
squiblet@kbin.social 9 months ago
asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world 9 months ago
What does “crowd everyone else out” mean specifically here? People could still choose to use non-Threads ActivityPub apps.
squiblet@kbin.social 9 months ago
I mean development. It's happened with other projects before when large corps get involved. Of course, the existing developers of a project don't have to allow that to happen.
Corgana@startrek.website 9 months ago
Fork Mastodon? You mean like Threads?
squiblet@kbin.social 9 months ago
Yeah, but open source it.
Corgana@startrek.website 9 months ago
Right, I’ve also yet to see what defederating from a hypthetical Threads instance could prevent.
Black616Angel@feddit.de 9 months ago
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
1. Embrace:
They implement ActivityPub and connect to all the available servers. A load of new users will see the content here and all the communities here will be absolutely flooded with new content and users.
2. Extend:
ActivityPub will be extended. Many new features will be added, that don’t really match the standard, but they are mostly useful so some developers will try to add them to let’s say Lemmy. They won’t be blr to develop new features on their own and some stuff with threads will always be broken or half baked. Threads users will belittle the users here, some will maybe go there, cause it just works and is otherwise the same.
New users at the same time will most likely go directly to threads cause it’s backed by a giant company, always works and has more features.
3. Extinguish:
They will cut the federation.
Communities here will feel empty and most users will just leave. Only the hard core will stay and that won’t be sustainable. The fediverse becomes even less attractive for new users and will devolve into a niche community.