Gregory's Server
@Christine Lemmer-Webber I'm not quite convinced that Twitter and Facebook thought that decentralised social networks couldn't possibly work.
They both had a run-in with #Friendica in 2011 when the latter unilaterally established bidirectional federation with both, using available APIs.
Later the same year, Twitter changed its API without documenting the changes. And Facebook changed its TOS so that third parties using developer accounts (which were necessary for Friendica nodes to federate with Facebook) were no longer allowed to extract data from Facebook, only send it to Facebook.
It's generally supposed that both Twitter and Facebook did this because they had found out about Friendica federating with them. Especially Friendica users tried to use the Facebook connector to advertise Friendica as a Facebook alternative (= direct competitor) to Facebook users, i.e. on Facebook itself! And they did so without even using Facebook directly.
So if Twitter and Facebook said that decentralised social networks aren't possible, what they actually meant was that they knew that decentralised social networks are very possible and actually fully-operational reality, but they want to do everything to keep more of these from popping up. And they feared that the ActivityPub standard might bring with it more Friendicas that'll directly compete with Twitter and Facebook or even try to connect to Twitter and Facebook.
I guess they also hoped that nobody in the Social Web Working Group would ever find out about Friendica. But I think the Friendica and #Hubzilla creator Mike Macgirvin was a member himself.
Granted, no decentralised social network has connected itself to Facebook since 2012, and AFAIK, nothing based on ActivityPub has ever had a Twitter federation connector. And yet, Mastodon has become a popular place to go for Twitter refugees.
They both had a run-in with #Friendica in 2011 when the latter unilaterally established bidirectional federation with both, using available APIs.
Later the same year, Twitter changed its API without documenting the changes. And Facebook changed its TOS so that third parties using developer accounts (which were necessary for Friendica nodes to federate with Facebook) were no longer allowed to extract data from Facebook, only send it to Facebook.
It's generally supposed that both Twitter and Facebook did this because they had found out about Friendica federating with them. Especially Friendica users tried to use the Facebook connector to advertise Friendica as a Facebook alternative (= direct competitor) to Facebook users, i.e. on Facebook itself! And they did so without even using Facebook directly.
So if Twitter and Facebook said that decentralised social networks aren't possible, what they actually meant was that they knew that decentralised social networks are very possible and actually fully-operational reality, but they want to do everything to keep more of these from popping up. And they feared that the ActivityPub standard might bring with it more Friendicas that'll directly compete with Twitter and Facebook or even try to connect to Twitter and Facebook.
I guess they also hoped that nobody in the Social Web Working Group would ever find out about Friendica. But I think the Friendica and #Hubzilla creator Mike Macgirvin was a member himself.
Granted, no decentralised social network has connected itself to Facebook since 2012, and AFAIK, nothing based on ActivityPub has ever had a Twitter federation connector. And yet, Mastodon has become a popular place to go for Twitter refugees.