Flipboard is pivoting to ActivityPub and the fediverse
Flipboard is pivoting to ActivityPub and the fediverse
Another walled garden is opening up to the new social web.
The company announced on Monday that it is beginning to switch its user accounts to ActivityPub, which means that everyone curating stuff on Flipboard is now doing so in a way that apps like Mastodon can see and interact with.
Everyone's been dumping on Meta for integrating ActivityPub support, but I wonder if perhaps that's what's precipitating smaller projects like Flipboard and Discourse to be making similar announcements more. Here's hoping it's the start of an avalanche.
More competition is better, but Facebook is still the 800-pound gorilla. It took a landmark court case to stop Microsoft from taking over the Web. We might need something similar for social networking.
A large portion of the Fediverse is composed of people who walked away from Twitter and Reddit, who are also 800-pound gorillas. If Threads decides to play silly buggers with the ActivityPub protocol, people can walk away from that too.
The Threadiverse in particular is actually ideally suited to not care about what Meta is doing because generally speaking people don't follow other people here (like they do on Mastodon and its ilk), they follow topics. There's no benefit from having a single gigantic pool of users all piled into the same community, and maybe even some significant downsides.
Two main reasons I can think of for each camp. For smaller projects and groups, removing walled gardens means they stand a chance to actually get users. For larger groups, it means they can argue they aren't monopolistic.
Or maybe, activity pub is doing way better than anyone thought and they want to get in on the action. You sound like a positive person, what positive thing would Meta do for the fediverse other than bring lots of people to it?
Isn't bringing people to it a quite important thing ?
I know this is a polarizing subject but in my opinion there is not much as important as increasing a social network userbase.
I'm sticking to Lemmy, but I'm pragmatic, I know it may never grow enough so that a niche community can live.
Right now my favorite game doesn't have a community and even if I create one and actively post to it I know we will have 3/4 people subscribe to it at peak.
Overwatch has a very small community on Lemmy even though it's a pretty huge game still. It's thousands of time smaller than the subreddit. I accepted it and moved on but that kind of sucks.
So bringing users and content creators to Lemmy through other more mainstream social networks through activityPub is fine by me. As long as you control when to cut the cord I don't really see the issue.
You're asking me "other than the positive thing that Meta would do for the Fediverse, what positive thing are they doing for the Fediverse?"
That's it exactly. They're bringing people to the Fediverse and spreading usage of the protocol.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The company announced on Monday that it is beginning to switch its user accounts to ActivityPub, which means that everyone curating stuff on Flipboard is now doing so in a way that apps like Mastodon can see and interact with.
At that point, Flipboard will essentially be an ActivityPub-based platform like Mastodon or Pixelfed but with an interface designed for reading articles instead of bite-sized posts.
In spirit, a federated Flipboard shouldn’t feel all that different from, say, one of those Twitter users who would obsessively curate news or information around a specific topic.
The promise of the fediverse is that if you like or respond to a post, that is also compiled and synced across apps and services, but Flipboard hasn’t quite finished that yet.
McCue has spent the last year telling anyone who will listen (including The Verge) that ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the federated social internet are the future.
Flipboard launched a Mastodon instance called flipboard.social earlier this year, and recently announced it’s no longer integrating with X and focusing instead on open platforms.
The original article contains 599 words, the summary contains 176 words. Saved 71%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Seeing bigger companies start using the fediverse makes me think back. I want to say that this is a good thing because the fediverse is open and can’t be owned, it’s a stream of information that no company can control. I do have one nagging thought though: that’s exactly what we thought about the Internet in general. It’s an open public network, no one can own it, information will be democratized, etc. And that was all true to a degree but companies did find ways to dominate it and control the flow of information (at least for a lot of people - I know all of us here are liberated internet super gurus). It makes me wonder what the fediverse will look like in 10 years. Will it be powering every TV and social media app? Will we hearken back to the days when it was small and cool? Seems likely.