When Meta launched their new Twitter competitor Threads on July 5, they said that it would be compatible with the ActivityPub protocol, Mastodon, and all the other decentralized social networks in the fediverse “soon”.

But on July 14, @alexeheath of the Verge reported that Meta’s saying ActivityPub integration’s “a long way out”. Hey wait a second. Make up your mind already!

From the perspective of the “free fediverse” that’s not welcoming Meta, the new positioning that ActivityPub integration is “a long way out” is encouraging. OK, it’s not as good as “when hell freezes over,” but it’s a heckuva lot better than “soon.” In fact, I’d go so far as to say “a long way out” is a clear victory for the free fediverse’s cause.

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    3•1 year ago

    But this is a very unpopular opinion here.

    As it should be.

    Users should decide what will be the best platform for them to use, free from any content locking mechanisms

    Meta being able to create completely new social network overnight and still get more users then the entire Fediverse without the need to open up anything… That feeler like more of a loose for me.

    Meta didn’t spin up a new service overnight; it’s integrated with an Instagram. The reason why they were able to get 100 million users in a few weeks is because they have a pre-existing user base… do you really think that Meta will give up their users so easily? The users that they make massive profits off of? If so, what makes you think that your local instance would have the resources to work against Meta’s billion dollar marketing budget to ply away a sizable chunk of their users?

    Also, Meta now sits on the ActivityPub W3C committee… I don’t think that they will allow portable user accounts any time soon, especially if it threatens their profits.