It Won't Be Meta That Kills ActivityPub
— Ploum writing one of the many arguments against Meta adopting ActivityPub that are circulating at the moment:
the Fediverse is not looking for market dominance or profit. The Fediverse is not looking for growth. It is offering a place for freedom. People joining the Fediverse are those looking for freedom. If people are not ready or are not looking for freedom, that’s fine. They have the right to stay on proprietary platforms. We should not force them into the Fediverse. We should not try to include as many people as we can at all cost. We should be honest and ensure people join the Fediverse because they share some of the values behind it.
By competing against Meta in the brainless growth-at-all-cost ideology, we are certain to lose. They are the master of that game. They are trying to bring everyone in their field, to make people compete against them using the weapons they are selling.
ActivityPub is an open protocol. Open as in anyone can adopt and implement it. As much as we all want to break away from big-corp social media, these companies aren’t just going away. And anyone adopting open interfaces should be welcomed at this point, even if we don’t like what they have been doing in the past and will be doing in the future.
Consider this: Even if Meta builds a platform on top of ActivityPub and defederate eventually, how is that future situation different from the current situation? Mastodon isn’t compatible with Twitter, and if you want to chat to friends on Twitter, you need to use Twitter. If Meta’s new platform doesn’t implement ActivityPub, you won’t be able to interact with people on the platform.
If ActivityPub fails to develop into a de-facto standard for social networking, and that scenario is very real, it won’t be because Facebook added incompatible extensions to ActivityPub and subsequently cut off their service from the Fediverse. People don’t care about the protocols underpinning the services they use. They have needs, like staying in touch with friends and family, and they want to address their needs in the simplest way possible. If ActivityPub fails, it will be because the clients and services that support the protocol are hard to use, their design is not appealing or their feature set is limited.