I am assuming many of you have heard about the potential of Meta creating an ActivityPub enabled client (TheVerge, PCMag etc. have made articles). I was just wondering what people’s thoughts are on this, and if it came down to it should instances in the fediverse defederate from it considering it could be a case of Embrace, extend, extinguish.

There’s a DefederateMeta magazine at !DefederateMeta@fedia.io if you’re interested, which includes an anti-meta pact on cryptpad with the responses viewable on a seperate website if you care to see which instance admins have agreed.

I’m just curious what my fellow sh.it.heads think of this development in the fediverse, any input is appreciated!

  • Sparking@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’m honestly not opposed to Facebook developing software that uses activity pub. It’s an open standard after all. I get why you would want to de-federate it out of privacy concerns. I’m hoping that they make it open source, or that it introduces better federation navigation features that can get redeveloped in another client.

    I’m not sure I would want to sign a pact that is anti this app, since I would think that encouraging ActivityPub adoption is a good thing. But de-federate from it for sure if it spies on users. I doubt facebook really cares about de-federation anyway, and will try to make their own ecosystem based around activity pub. I honestly doubt that they will federate to private instances anyway.

    One pitfall: even if you de-federate, a market will probably emerge for content from federated servers and facebook might just start buying content from people who didn’t make it, but are getting it by setting up instances that act as a middle man between facebook and other server. That is the only real risk I can think of, since it could have the potential to discourage widespread good faith federation.