One reason reporters are slow to see the threat ActivityPub offers to Threads and Twitter is the nature of open source.
It moves slowly. It’s reactive.
Open source isn’t innovative, in the classic sense. You can have innovations in open source, but they’re in addition to something meant to emulate something else.
Given time, however, open source always wins.
My son and I still laugh over the 2009 CompuTex show in Taiwan, where I set out after “desktop Linux.” Finally found a few booths outside the main hall, and even met Jim Zemlin, head of the Linux Foundation, as he finished a speech to attendees.
But if you own an Android phone, that’s Linux. If you own a Chromebook, that’s Linux. If you go online to a cloud server, that’s Linux too. Linux beat Windows in market share. It even beat iOS.
The same thing will happen in social networking.
Mark Zuckerberg believes the centralized nature of Threads will overcome the fact that it’s based on an open source standard, ActivityPub. I expect many, if not most, instances will resist linking to or “federating” with Threads. It’s huge and will gain enormous traffic. But it’s also limited. It has privacy problems. As Mastodon instances and other ActivityPub systems learn to adapt, they will. It will take years, but over time ActivityPub services will prove better for users than Threads, whose main purposes were to extend Instagram and beat Twitter.
But hardly any reporter is saying that today. Most reporters cover tech on their way to something else. If you stay on a beat too long, you “go native” like a cop doing community policing. You can count the number of tech writers who really get it on two hands. I know most of them.
That’s OK. Mastodon and ActivityPub don’t need the publicity. What they need is time, and the attention of a growing cadre who can keep the software updated, adding to it at their own pace.
Open source is on the case in social networking. Meta just gave it a huge boost. But even without that boost, it’s moving forward. I’m @DanaBlankenhorn@journa.host. That’s my new home. See you there.
