this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
190 points (97.5% liked)

Technology

59347 readers
5227 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

And then they will shut it down like Google did with XMPP.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

The story of how Google "killed" XMPP is a popular just-so story, but it's not as clear cut as is so commonly described and isn't directly applicable to ActivityPub. It's not the same situation. XMPP is an instant-messaging protocol, which was very dependent on network effects - you had to adopt Google's changes if you wanted to be able to talk to your friends, and when Google eventually ditched XMPP support (apparently because external servers were the source of a tidal wave of spam they didn't want to deal with) that meant everyone was cut off from Google's users and that was bad.

Whereas if you look around the general opinion of the Fediverse, it sounds like being cut off from Threads' content would be seen as a positive thing by most. There's no need for complete interoperability in the Fediverse, there are already plenty of servers that refuse to talk to each other even though they share a protocol. If Threads proposes some change to ActivityPub that nobody else wants to use and Threads gets cut off as a result, how bad will that really be?