Can ActivityPub save the internet?
David Pierce,
The Verge,
Apr 21, 2023
This is a good article and covers a lot about Mastodon and the fediverse we've seen here in the last few months, but it's important to understand that as a former Wall Street Journal writer the author is coming from a 'money usually wins' background. "The bigger question looming is more existential," he writes. "Can ActivityPub grow without getting lost? There's a familiar pattern with protocols like this, known as "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish." Step one: start an app on an open protocol, grow quickly because it's easy to adopt. Step two: add new, platform-specific features, usually while complaining that the open protocol isn't powerful enough to keep up. Step three: bail on the open protocol altogether, saying it simply didn't serve your users' needs anymore. Microsoft did it with the early internet; Google Talk did it to the open XMPP messaging standard." At a certain point, I think, society needs to learn that a great concentration of wealth and power is the problem, not the solution, to whatever ails us.
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