We could witness billions of users joining the #Fediverse soon, which means instance admins on #Mastodon, #Misskey, #Lemmy & #Pixelfed will need to brace themselves & raise funds to handle the pending traffic.
@darnell so yeah, DMA's aim is to force the huge platforms to interoperate.
However, it's up to the smaller providers who want to interoperate to request interoperability with the huge ones.
In other words, the initiative is with the smaller providers (i.e. every AP instance out there), the smaller providers have the choice to interoperate or not. That choice is very limited on the huge platforms' side.
So, it's not like Fb will suddenly be forced to federate with everyone.
@darnell I would need to slowly re-read the DMA to figure out if there are specific things blocking the huge providers from suddenly deciding to just implement ActivityPub and start federating with everyone, though.
My gut feel is, however, that the interplay of DMA and GDPR might in fact make that unlikely.
And that's even ignoring the fact that the very business model of huge platforms is built on the assumption of them being walled gardens, i.e. not federating with anyone.
No, unfortunately the #DMA does not force gatekeeper social networks to interoperate even if smaller ones want it.
Despite #DigitalRights groups like @edri fighting for this, there was much political & #lobbying resistance, and now Article 7 DMA on mandatory #interoperability only applies to messaging services, not social networks.
@darnell as much as I made a rookie mistake of forgetting that DMA forces interop only of IMs, the rest of what I wrote I believe still holds — so the initiative is on the service that wants to go into interop with a huge platform.
So if Messenger is considered to be affected by DMA interop, and Instagram is not, if Instagram requests private message interop with Messenger, Meta will have to provide for it.
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