Instagram’s upcoming Twitter competitor shown in leaked screenshots. Supports ActivityPub, eh? Wasn't expecting that https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/8/23754304/instagram-meta-twitter-competitor-threads-activitypub
@omglinux embrace, extend, extinguish...
@mlabowicz People keep saying this whenever there's mention of a major implementation of activitypub, but I really fail to see what the extinguish part is supposed to look like.
People on the rest of the fediverse won't go anywhere if this takes off - if anything, they'll have increased incentives to stay where they are as there are more people to follow. If this service became popular and then dropped support, at worst it would just leave the fediverse exactly as it was.
@sab @mlabowicz I'm spitballing here, but would it look like this: extend means adding features, which would incentive people to switch to their instances. A suitably devious adversary, comparable to Microsoft of the 90s, for example, would create many instances and then use them & top notch new features to attract people while simultaneously penalizing regular instances, say by ingeniously corrupting, or adding latency to, responses to them. I'm sure all sorts of mayhem could be caused.
@tartley If they manage to add features and trick people into joining their instances before locking them in, wouldn't it be easier to just launch services with said features and trick people into using their services right away? At which point it's just the status quo?
For me, email seems a better comparison (even though everybody's tired of it). Gmail might be monopolistic and awful, but nothing done by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, or anyone else managed to destroy it.
