A fair-minded article. This sounded off though:
a big attraction of Reddit—that its main page is a kind of greatest hits of an enormous community.
No, r/all was the lowest common denominator, full of karmafarming, ragebait, and reposts. Every time I looked at r/all I regretted it, so I mostly stuck to subreddits.
There was an article in Foreign Policy a couple days ago talking about how China’s WeChat is the only real Everything App, but it was a product of a very specific time and place.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/07/31/elon-musk-wechat-twitter-x-united-states-everything-apps/
The conclusion is that there’s not likely to be another Everything App. I’m still thinking that over, but it sounds plausible.
It’s telling that most of their problems were regulatory/legal rather than technical. (they only have one bullet point about “a bunch of techy stuff”.)
But the whole article has a very strong “how do you do, fellow kids?” vibe. I think the fediverse will manage to survive without the Financial Times’ mastodon server.
AI has gone through several cycles of hype and winter. There’s even a Wikipedia page for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
Of course it’s valuable to discuss the dangers and inequities of a new technology. But one of the dangers is being misled.
Agreed, “The simplest explanation is usually the best one.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor
Also the current news cycle is still on that Facebook Twitter clone.
Will Meta embrace-extend-extinguish the ActivityPub protocol?
There are comparisons to be made between Meta adopting ActivityPub for its new social media platform and Meta adopting XMPP for its Messenger service a decade ago. There was a time when users of Facebook and users of Google Talk were able to chat with each other and with people from self-hosted XMPP servers, before each platform was locked down into the silos we know today. What would stop that from repeating? Well, even if Threads abandoned ActivityPub down the line, where we would end up is exactly where we are now.
Yes, 5 years from now when Threads abandons ActivityPub, you will be 5 years behind Threads. That is not a good outcome.
XMPP did not exist on its own outside of nerd circles, while ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.
Mastodon is not exactly a household name.
I really hope for the best. And it’s not like anyone can stop Meta from making Threads and enabling ActivityPub. But this reasoning is not very convincing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning