Hot take/rant time for #ActivityPub with the news that #Meta plans to dip their toe in the water.
I would view Meta as an existential threat to a non-corporate, AP-based #fediverse in large part because of the immaturity of and lack of interoperability in the AP spec itself.
Why?
Because when you have that big of a fish involved in your space made up of small players, the big fish gets to set the rules unless you have some pretty strong protections in place.
We saw this with Microsoft back in the 1990s and early 00s: a player that big gets to basically push weak standards around in incompatible ways.
When there is a strong standards body in place you can get some pushback on that point. When there isn't then the largest player gets to define the spec that most people will build to and everything else becomes an ad hoc implementation.
They don't even need to do it deliberately—just an accidental breaking change or a different interpretation with how mastodon works can shift clients that direction.
Do I know that what they generate will be incompatible with #Mastodon? No, especially right out of the gate they have several incentives to play nicely.
But those incentives become less and less as time goes on.
Maybe nothing bad will happen, maybe Meta will fall on their face, but I'd very much take this seriously regardless.
I place no trust in cultural protections (NO ONE FEDERATE WITH THEM, NO ONE SUPPORT THEM, etc). They might rebuff #meta in this attempt, but they won't work long-term. Especially if Meta/others gets all #EmbraceExtendExtinguish about it.
The kicker of course is that they need to do extensions to even implement the protocol in the first place—making it even easier for them—and where not absolutely necessary still some of the things I would think them likely to add are desperately needed.
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