https://www.theverge.com/23990974/social-media-2023-fediverse-mastodon-threads-activitypub
We’ve barely scratched the surface of what the open social web can be — and it’s already better than what we have.
Sometimes I feel like the internet is reliving in a 30 year span what retail went through over a whole century. General stores and small specialized shops serving a limited number of clients, same as when you could put on a website to sell to the world the birdhouses you made as a hobby. Then came shopping malls and Walmarts and everybody went oh my god this is so cool, everything in one place. The same enthusiasm we felt over Facebook, Google, amazon. And now, seeing how the big players all sell cheap stuff, control the market and kill all competition, we look back at a time when there were more options, more freedom, and choose to use Lemmy instead of Reddit, and buy our coffee at the local roaster rather than Starbucks.
I was excited to see this article written on the verge but then I read it. Seems like they are only interested in what the fediverse can do now that Threads is getting in and sticking their foot in the door. It's likely they needed Meta as a corporation to validate federation as something with real potential. We need to be highly critical about the entities who just see this as another way to make money off our data
Vergecast people and @davidpierce@mastodon.social who wrote this piece have been on board with Activity Pub for much longer than Threads has even been a thing.
I do wonder if they know about Lemmy though :)
That's a ridiculous take, can't believe it has so many upvotes. The Verge has staff on Mastodon for a while now.
The Verge has staff on Mastodon for a while now.
Is this an article for staff of The Verge? Or is it for an audience that might only relate to something if it's connected to something they've heard of?
I honestly don’t see how this was your takeaway from the article. That’s not at all what they were saying.
My main concern with this is I don't know how well activity pub can scale, and we've already seen various interop problems between different types of platforms. And if email is any indication, once activitypub gets popular it will NEVER GO AWAY and all the developers will hate it.
Here is an interesting thread about activitypub's scalability https://hachyderm.io/@hrefna/110198847653604631
You'd get a better response if you asked a developer who has actually worked with it. But most of it comes down to bad, outdated, nonstandardized tech
Given ActivityPub is newer, I hope they've made it with less of the issues email has! Email as we know it is like, what, 40 years old at this point?
First inter-user messaging was 62 years ago, first email client was 51 years ago, first spam was 45 years ago, first attachments were 31 years ago.
I don't work with it directly, but it seems we've bolted on a lot of "fixes and functionality" onto email, but the underlying protocols haven't changed dramatically.
And now nearly 56.5% of all emails were spam last year. Though I don't think that counts intranet spam I get from my bosses all the time.