Yes, yes I know this is an unpopular opinion but let me give you guys an example that relates to this. You guys know email? Well if you had made an email instance and then Google made Gmail, would you guys block it? No. Just because it’s made by a big company does not mean you should block it. What if you wanted to talk to people on threads? What if you wanted more content because there is more users on there? Please don’t defederate from threads people.
Threads supporting activitypub is an attempt at a hostile takeover of the fediverse. Please read this article: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Also, since you mentioned E-Mail, you’ll probably want to know how the exact same thing is happening there: http://www.igregious.com/2023/03/gmail-is-breaking-email.html?m=1
The fediverse isn’t as deeply integrated into our everyday lives as E-Mail, so we can still prevent it from being taken over by corporations.
Yeah, the email example is an unintentional counterexample: it’s nearly impossible to run your own email server these days and not have your email rejected by everyone because the IP address is unrecognized and the spam filter is beyond reject-happy. To put it into fediverse terms: it’d be like federating with them, but where their CloudFlare DDOS protection blocks ActivityPub requests (this is actually what broke kbin’s federation a week or two ago so it’s not just a hypothetical!).
I’m sorry but these arguments don’t hang together for me. The point of email is that you need to be able to communicate with everyone. That’s why blacklisting of self hosted services is forcing everyone into the big guys. But the people using the fediverse are already happy only being able to communicate with other fediverse members, so being excluded harms absolutely nothing. The fediverse was created at a point where monolithic social networks already existed, by people who wanted to get away from those things. We excluded ourselves right at the start.
The same goes for XMPP. If it was already viable as a communication platform, it would have been fine. It died off because it was always going to die off. Better alternatives existed. Google briefly interfacing with XMPP didn’t kill it, it put it on life support.
