This is what Instagram’s upcoming Twitter competitor looks like
Quote:One of Meta’s top executives showed employees a preview of the company’s upcoming Twitter competitor during a companywide meeting today that was watched by The Verge.
The new standalone app will be based on Instagram and integrate with ActivityPub, the decentralized social media protocol. That will theoretically allow users of the new app to take their accounts and followers with them to other apps that support ActivityPub, including Mastodon.
Meta/Facebook is inviting Fediverse admins under NDA for “meetings”
Eugen Rochko, creator of Mastodon Wrote:I think it’s important to understand what [Facebook is] working on and how it fits with what we’re doing. Even if an NDA is required, knowing is better than not knowing.
How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)
Quote:Like email, XMPP was a federated protocol: multiple servers could talk together through a protocol and each user would connect to one particular server through a client. That user could then communicate with any user on any server using any client. Which is still how ActivityPub and thus the Fediverse work.
In 2006, Google talk became XMPP compatible. Of course, reality was a bit less shiny. First of all, despites collaborating to develop the XMPP standard, Google was doing its own closed implementation that nobody could review. It turns out they were not always respecting the protocol they were developing. They were not implementing everything. This forced XMPP development to be slowed down, to adapt.
And because there were far more Google talk users than "true XMPP" users, there was little room for "not caring about Google talk users". Newcomers discovering XMPP and not being Google talk users themselves had very frustrating experience because most of their contact were Google Talk users. A typical XMPP roster was mainly composed of Google Talk users with a few geeks.
In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they were not 100% in control. So they pulled the plug and announced they would not be federated anymore.
Meanwhile, two years ago...
There have been many reports lately that Facebook is blocking links to https://joinmastodon.org
Quote:If you are still on Facebook, please keep spreading the word about Mastodon and the Fediverse.
If https://joinmastodon.org doesn't work, try posting a link to a reliable instance people can join. There are so many instances, Facebook cannot block all of them from being mentioned.
That Facebook are even doing this implies the Fediverse is on their radar, which is quite an achievement in itself!