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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Filing a patent means little to nothing for a company like Apple regarding future consumer products. All it likely means is that a patent engineer managed to throw something together outside existing prior art that they could file. Maybe they will do something with it, maybe they won’t. If they do, they will have a patent portfolio that will hopefully give them some legal protection from patent trolls and competitors that will attempt to block them.


  • I guess it depends on how this “Data Protection Review Court” actually functions in practice. What is written on paper doesn’t seem to really matter much to US agencies so we’ll see how strong these safeguards actually are.

    Nevertheless, it’s good to see that the new agreement is finally in place at least. We’ve had this legal vacuum for years now and it was completely unsustainable in the long run. Sans a complete legal overhaul of the nonexistent privacy laws in the US (hah good luck with that), this is probably the best we could hope for now.


  • I know that is a popular narrative in the Fediverse community right now, but I honestly find it unreasonable. Google and Meta didn’t kill XMPP, they abandoned it and without them it went right back to where it was originally: barely used whatsoever. The Fediverse already has a small, but relatively healthy user base. Meta can abandon ActivityPub or twist it into something unacceptable, but all that will do is bring us back to where we are right now.

    All that is irrelevant, though, because the difference is that Meta is legally required to incorporate interoperability with other services and that’s why they are going with ActivityPub. Not from the good of their hearts, but because they need to and is in their own self interest to keep alive.

    Right now, they are early adopters of ActivityPub and have a very early strong position there. When they federate they will be by several magnitudes the largest instance on the network. Whether we like it or not, they will inevitably be a major player in dictating the future of ActivityPub. Thus, they want to keep ActivityPub alive because they want to make sure that becomes the future EU mandated industry standard for SoMe. Otherwise, some other technology will be chosen, one that might not be lead by Meta, but by Google, Apple or ByteDance.

    Note, that I’m not arguing whether this is good or bad, but only what I predict is happening.



  • Meta has several billion active users across their platforms. 30M is nothing to them.

    Also don’t forget that we’re talking about a microblog, so it will inherently generate a large amount of individual posts, much more so than e.g Instagram. The quality is however likely very low initially and a lot of users are probably just trying out the current talk of the day.

    I do suspect that Threads will probably grow to a few hundred million users before the end of the year; anything less would probably be regarded as a colossal failure for Meta.







  • There are probably several reasons, many not entirely clear to any one of us now, but one can guess.

    I think not an insignificant reason for this is the coming expansion of the EU Digital Markets Act where Meta among a few other tech giants are labeled as gatekeepers. As always, while the EU might be one of the earlier ones, other markets will likely follow in the coming decade.

    Meta will going forward be forced to open up their platforms and incorporate interoperability with other services. It starts with messages, but knowing the EU, that is probably just the first stepping stone.

    If Meta have to do it anyways, they will probably want to make sure that they are the first one in establish a strong presence in the technology that every other tech giant will also need to embrace.

    I don’t think they care even a little about the present Fediverse community, what they do care about is the technology that Apple, Microsoft, Google, TikTok and so on will agree on to use going forward. By embracing ActivityPub early, they are betting on having already a strong position when these companies are inevitably going to have to try to agree on a common standard.