This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Can someone ELI5 what this means for Lemmy, Mastadon, and other platforms that are federated?
I thought the point of federations was to allow server instances the ability to prevent other instances from interacting with one another?
Couldnt servers just block or prevent Threads from interacting with them?
Just reading this? I don't understand how this truly changes anything at all. Why is everyone concerned? The API isn't owned by Zuck but open for usage.
The fear is a practice called "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" (or EEE). It's been used by tech companies before: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
It, in theory, could work like this:
Meta embraces ActivityPub in its tech in an attempt to garner good will and make it easy for users to transition to Threads.
Meta extends on ActivityPub by saying "oh we're just adding a few things that make this better for our users (on our service) but we're still supporting ActivityPub!
Meta then extinguishes ActivityPub support, and severally hobbles AP, after they secure enough users to be happy and think AP offers no real competition anymore.
Then the enshittification process begins, by moving the focus from users to other interests (usually advertisers) at the expense of users. And eventually to the platform owners, at the expense of advertisers. Though I guess they'll skip the middle step, being a public company?
