I see some merit in Ploum’s argument that the same way the Google monolith slowed down XMPP development, Meta could slow down ActivityPub development or steer it in a certain direction by forcing others to implement their extensions if they want to keep interoperability, before finally dumping it. But yes the “extinguish” situation would then be a return to the current status-quo, Fediverse as a tiny niche of like-minded people doing their own thing.
As tracked by Oryx and aggregated by Andreas Hopf:
Ukraine lost
before even breaching the first line of fortification. The trickle of aid from the West really isn’t enough.
As someone who is cautiously optimistic about Meta’s ActivityPub adventure, my main disagreement with the author is over
The goal [of the Fediverse] is to stay a tool. A tool dedicated to offer a place of freedom for connected human beings. Something that no commercial entity will ever offer
I’d like to see ActivityPub and the Fediverse at large succeed, that is actually gain significant adoption among the average user, people that don’t care about freedom, decentralization etc. I disagree with a very common take on the Fediverse which seems to be “we don’t want to succeed, we want to make our happy little garden, it doesn’t matter if the overwhelming majority of people stay on centralized social media” because I think widespread adoption of federation (for social media, but also for code forges etc.) and open, interoperable protocols (matrix!) is important for society: less reliance on American tech giants, more resilience (services just shutting down as they run out of VC money impacts less content/users) and so on.
I only see widespread adoption happening through commercial entities setting up instances, the model of donation-supported admins simply doesn’t scale. The risk of EEE is very real though, but Meta making an ActivityPub move will hopefully be a signal for others to follow, and the best way of ensuring Meta doesn’t subvert ActivityPub development is by having other stakeholders that are just as important to counterbalance its influence, not by having 5k-10k-users instances de-federate from Threads because their admin (rightfully!) doesn’t like Meta.
I think my belief that donation-supported instances won’t scale comes from the assumption that the users donating today are those that do so for ideological reasons, they want to see the Fediverse succeed, they are anti-capitalists etc. Most of these type of users are already on the Fediverse, as you move towards “the average user” that propensity to donating gets rarer and rarer, because they just want a social media platform that works and are perfectly fine with ad-supported models of alternatives, so I assume that percentage of users willing to donate does not stay steady with growth.
But a good example of a project that has managed to get even the average person to donate is Wikipedia, so maybe with enough nag-bars and the appropriate messaging Fedi instances will manage to do so as well. I certainly hope so! I also hope to see other non-commercial entities like not-for-profit institutions and government bodies on the Fediverse but again I believe these tend to move slowly and only adopt things that have sufficient momentum, momentum that might come from the Meta move.
In my opinion there is some hurry, we’ve already seen Mastodon user count slumping before the latest Twitter fiasco and alternatives like Bluesky and Threads are coming online, whether they federate or not. Social media relies on network effects, and the current collapse of Twitter is a golden opportunity for the Fediverse to get that critical mass necessary for widespread adoption. Slow steady growth might not be possible, as people don’t tend to stick around if most of their (para-)social circle is consolidating on another platform.