Meta plans to work with ActivityPub, a vendor that already partners with Mastodon and is currently working on a deal with Tumblr. The agreement isn’t finalized yet, but has been referenced in press releases announcing Threads.
Lol. The author of this article is braindead and has no Idea what he's writing about. ActivityPub is an open standard not a vendor. There can't be an agreement because there's no one to agree with. All they will do is implement the standard
He's persona non grata these days, but the old quote from Scott Adams applies here:
"I read a newspaper article about something I know very well—my own field—and it was so full of errors that I had to wonder how many errors there were in other articles on topics I didn’t know much about."
If they're getting an important detail like this so mindblowingly wrong, what else are they getting wrong?
Journalists are not educated in anything except how to write. And they go and write about everything, aiming for an audience that is dumber than them. On top of all that journalism is an industry in contraction. Even the good journalists are paid as badly as teachers and they work under great pressure. Many of them are addicted to watching their click stats and not much better than a meatspace Facebook algorithm on legs. Is it any mystery how the end result is crap?
Does Fortune think Linux also partnered with RedHat, Ubuntu, Apple, Windows and everybody else who's every borrowed from/made use of/implemented an open standard??
If you spend too much time in Microsoft-land or Enterprise-ville, you will start to see everything as vendors. But in the open source world it's different.
I'm expecting FB to make some sort of proprietary fork of ActivityPub. I'm not quite sure what the point of Threads is, from Zuck's POV, excluding the desire to eat Musks's lunch, which is huge, so that's more than enough. The man needs a win, bad, after that Metaverse flop heard round the world.
But everything you'd consider an advantage to the Fediverse is a downside to his business model, and the things it enables, like user-controlled hosting, don't suit his ends. Maybe he intends to colonize this place, too, but up until very recently there wasn't a meaningful user base to gain control over. Still isn't. Mastodon got the biggest boost, they're up to 8 mil users now, a healthy number for sure, but Instagram is pushing a billion users, so the number isn't much to him.
So he's not going to actually like anything about the Fediverse, or what it offers, nor will he like its downsides much. ActivityPub, as it is, doesn't do him any favors. I can't imagine anything other than the skeleton of ActivityPub getting repurposed into something else that runs Threads in the locked down way that Meta is accustomed to. He just seems to be grabbing at anything that's loose for the taking.
I have the barest grasp on what "proprietary fork" actually means. All I know is that Meta is probably here because everyone is bailing to Mastodon, especially journalists. Fuckin Fox News threw up an outpost, they're all there, the userbase is ramping up past 8mil. Meta sees that, and wants a piece of Musk's market. The question is how, exactly, they are going to make the model become something they control properly, or worse, they manage to engulf the whole thing and somehow this all becomes facebook against everyone's will. Hopefully they make their own walled garden out of it and we can all stay safely outside the cursed thing, being dweeby and free.
I don't have the background to judge the situation, and I don't like it. Somehow I went as far away from facebook as I could and ended up back on facebook, gimme a fuckin break
All I know is that Meta is probably here because everyone is bailing to Mastodon, especially journalists.
I wouldn't exactly say that everybody is bailing on Mastodon. I don't like the Twitter format, but a lot of people prefer that over a threaded set up like Reddit/Lemmy/Threads. Right now, the only other option is Twitter, and Musk is actively burning that to the ground.
I just wish Mastodon would stop catering to mobile people and give me browser width space that's not the size of a large potato.
Fuckin Fox News threw up an outpost, they’re all there, the userbase is ramping up past 8mil.
Right-wing assholes gonna asshole their way into the platform with the most corporate influence, while still pretending they are "rebelling" and "sticking it to the man". Fox News are the Kings of Astroturfing. Not surprising at all.