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this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Technology
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I think among other issues would be the Gmail-ification and iMessage-ification of the fediverse. What I mean by that is open standards like email are dominated today by many people using Gmail accounts as it is popular, “free”, and comes with a ton of features. Then google started “walling off their garden” by adding features that only work between gmail accounts. Similarly, apple also took the open standard SMS and started adding on features only available between other iPhones.
What we might see is some of the coolest features the fediverse has ever seen, but it will come at the cost of most users ignoring or dealing less with "irrelevant" things not on meta ran instances.
Hope we can resist such a change, but that is what I am concerned about.
@emi @Helix those standards don't really change though. We have the power over ActivityPub. Plus, if they do create cool features, why would we not also add them?
Who is 'we'? And who doesn't say that there's something on top of activitypub?
Because we don't have multiple thousands of paid developers.
@Helix we have a legion of trans coders in pink striped programmer socks. They can do anything!
One of the "powers" of OSS is that the license usually required changes to be fed back upstream.
If Meta were not to do that the authors of Lemmy could ask someone like EFF to take legal proceeding against them.
Facebook can easily circumvent most requirements like that if the license isn't invasivively copyleft. Usually web standards have permissive licenses.
i'm not sure if ActivityPub is copyleft or not. meta might be able to build proprietary features on top of it if the license isn't viral.
If it is copyleft, they will probably try to reimplement it permissively.
ActivityPub itself is just a protocol, everybody can reimplement it. Lemmy and Mastodon are AGPL3 and thus copyleft along with "you must release source code for your server".
Though if Meta does anything, I'd expect it to be written from scratch and MIT licensed. Companies don't like to get near anything GPL as long as they can avoid it.
Having worked at a company with thousands of developers, that's a significant advantage for us.