Dude a federated SO would be a dream. Imagine actually be able to post something without it being flagged as a duplicate of a 10 year old outdated question.

It’s because you can’t “kill” a the AP protocol. XMPP didn’t go away when Messenger and GChat removed support for it, it just went back to how it was before hand, a fraction of tech enthusiasts using it for private communication. It would probably be the same with AP. A separate collection of sites using it to federate information.

… even if Threads abandoned ActivityPub down the line, where we would end up is exactly where we are now. XMPP did not exist on its own outside of nerd circles, while ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.

Granted this leaves out how Google used it’s influence to control and stagnate the XMPP protocol, but that’s another can of worms.

Identity federation isn’t the main point of the Fediverse, though. Federation is just meant to distribute content and facilitate communication. So you can have a book blogger manage their reviews and bookshelf on BookWyrm, a vloger can upload a video on PeerTube, and a city government can share water outage updates on Mastodon, and someone can interact with that content from a single interface and account of their choice.

That’s interesting. I’m not a huge supporter of it, but wasn’t account portability one of the reasons that Bluesky created their own AT protocol?

That’s pretty much what the controversy is about. People are, rightfully, afraid that Facebook will dominate AP and eventually destroy it (akin to Google and XMPP[1]). There are also those who, also rightfully, believe that this will help adoption of the AP protocol and bring innovation into the Fediverse (maybe like podcasting and Apple Podcasts have done for RSS). Both are valid, and we as members of the community and those who develop for this space should be cautious of corporate intrusion leading the innovation.

[1] https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

It’s using ActivityPub. It’s interesting because Bluesky (basically, former Twitter) explicitly stated that they didn’t think AP was robust enough and created their own shitty protocol. Facebook might be one of the first traditional SNS platforms to experiment with AP. I would’ve been happier if it were Tumblr, who said they were working on implementing AP last year.

I wonder how much of the recent Twitter drama has influenced Facebook’s decision to release Threads so soon after its announcement. It’s probably going to be shit quality and just try and monopolize on people leaving Twitter but not wanting to jump to Mastodon.

I think mostly 50/50 between both camps, at least on my instance.

Yeah this seems false. SD cards are unreliable, hard to keep track of, and don’t actually store that much data for the price. I do think they use tapes though to store long term, low traffic data.

Not sure if it’s related, but the EU does seem quite interested in the #fediverse. See the EU Commission’s official #Mastodon account: @EU_Commission

Mastodon’s filter option doesn’t work all that well. I have it turned on and I still get stuff in other languages with the tags that I follow. I don’t mind it much since Mastodon has a translation feature.

#Mastodon has a feature where it’ll consolidate all the most linked to URLs in its explore tag. It doesn’t take you too any toots about the discussion, but shows that something similar is possible, even with federation involved.