Gregory's ServerWhy would Meta implement ActivityPub? 1½ reasons are compelling, another is not. Those reasons have consequences.
Blogged. Would love your thoughts.
 20 comments
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 @J12t Well put: "“Meta is hoping for at least tens of millions of users within the first few months of availability”. The Fediverse currently has between 1 and 2 million active monthly users. So Meta is expecting at least 10x of those numbers by the end of the year. (If you think of it, of course they want those kinds of numbers. Both Facebook and Instagram have far more than a billion users each." I'd offer a fourth possible reason: To kill Twitter. @tchambers I don’t think ActivityPub is going to be terribly helpful for them in a fight against Twitter, except for reasons #1 and #2 I give. @J12t One factor I think applies to Twitter -- I think it is a fight for top influencers, and every post they do on "Threads" is one less Tweet, and the top 10 percent of Twiter users produce 50 percent of Elon's revenue. As top accounts shift from Twitter to Threads, it sucks a disproportionate level of revuen away from Twitter. @J12t And DSA compliance does make sense. I'd forgotten about that: "The European Union is coming down hard on Meta, demanding all sorts of interoperability as part of its Digital Services Act. By implementing a bona-fide W3C interoperability standard as part of a new app, Meta can signal both cooperation with the EU authorities, while delaying opening its core business as long as possible."  @J12t A good post as always -- DSA compliance makes a lot of sense. Along similar lines, from a privacy perspective, Meta could potentially avoid legal liability by acting as a service provider to the instances they're federating with. Most US laws only apply to entities above a certain threshold, so it's possible that many medium-size instances could be essentially unregulated (not sure how this works under GDPR). 1/2 @J12t Big tech companies have been lobbying heavily to shape service provider language -- here's a good example from the #ADPPA consumer privacy legislation, where they successfully inserted some major loopholes. I doubt they were thinking specifically of ActivityPub federation when they were doing that but it certainly applies! At least potentially, we'd need to know more about their plans to know for sure 2/2  @J12t Scenario #2 is more or less in line with my current contingent theory; scenario #3 is entirely plausible, and it actually plugs the biggest hole in my own theory (that getting big instances into a franchise-type agreement would just end up with users vacating those instances). It makes sense if the real goal is chaff-deployment to get around regulations.  @J12t Yes, agreed it shows appeasement to the EU requests, and prepares for the horrific mash up of state specific GDPR type laws already in progress within the U.S. it’s definitely a toe in the water. I’m not sure they have figured out quite yet how to make it profitable, but have to start somewhere.  @J12t even if Facebook's plan is not to try and control Activity Pub-based applications, blocking is the right thing to do because Mark Zuckerberg is a fascist.  @J12t Do you have a RSS feed for your blog? My software can't find it - Thanks - Love your thoughts @J12t I like the angle on eu law. But looking at xmpp's example, I don't think network size matter as much as potential. I don't think one reason is enough to do anything, as far as facebook or other companies are concerned.   @J12t Why did Facebook spend $19 billion (mostly in cash) to acquire WhatsApp back in the day? Monopoly preservation.  @J12t To quote the Violent Femmes, "third verse the same as the first" part of embrace and extend for open protocols can be a play to hold off regulators for anti-trust, especially when used against a smaller group embrace and extend being a play to mollify regulators doesn't mean Facebook isn't bent on controlling the space @lufthans You have a good point here. Even if the "taking-over-the-existing-fediverse" reason is not compelling, as I point out, that doesn't mean embrace and extend won't be part of the game plan -- and it almost certainly will be, I agree. I'm going to add this to the post. |