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Meta and Mastodon: What’s really on people’s minds?

Meta and Mastodon – What’s really on people’s minds?

https://ianbetteridge.com/2023/06/21/meta-and-mastodon-whats-really-on-peoples-minds/

There has been a lot of chatter about the decision of some instances on Mastodon to pre-emptively block Meta’s purported new ActivityPub-compatible service: Dare Obasanjo: It’s a weird own …

A very detailed article about the whole Meta (Instagram/Threads) vs. Fediverse discussions. It's a long read, but well-worth it if you're interested in the subject.

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sdx

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Not convinced by the e-mail analogy rebuttal. There are plenty of small e-mail providers thriving alongside the giants. Nothing is stopping you today from paying your friendly local business or association to host a mailbox for you. Of course self-hosting e-mail is an absolute pain, but that's because most e-mail sent is spam, the drastic blocking is just needed. Similarly if the Fediverse sees any kind of meaningful adoption, preemptively blocking small instances will be needed to crack down on spam.

I'm cautiously optimistic about Meta adopting Activitypub for their new platform. It might signal enough interest to make other smaller (and more trustworthy!) actors follow suit and set up their own platforms or Mastodon instances.

anji

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I think a difference between email and ActivityPub-based social media is there's arguably less of a need to have federation between any two servers. If you can't email the government, your sister living abroad, or a client, that's a big problem. But if you can't follow a cat pictures account or your friend's constant stream of baseball rants because the servers don't federate it's not quite the same.

If Meta becomes ActivityPub interoperable instances may or may not federate with them. Either way it's not necessarily going to change my social media experience.

tinselpar

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Not convinced by the e-mail analogy rebuttal. There are plenty of small e-mail providers thriving alongside the giants.

Indeed. It's a bit of fake news that the e-mail market is dominated by a handfull of big players. It's enterely possible to self-host a small e-mail server and have to e-mail accepted without problems. Of course, don't run and open relay, and make sure your reverse dns and DMARC and DKIM records are correct.

paco

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