2023 in social media: the case for the fediverse

Sometimes I feel like the internet is reliving in a 30 year span what retail went through over a whole century. General stores and small specialized shops serving a limited number of clients, same as when you could put on a website to sell to the world the birdhouses you made as a hobby. Then came shopping malls and Walmarts and everybody went oh my god this is so cool, everything in one place. The same enthusiasm we felt over Facebook, Google, amazon. And now, seeing how the big players all sell cheap stuff, control the market and kill all competition, we look back at a time when there were more options, more freedom, and choose to use Lemmy instead of Reddit, and buy our coffee at the local roaster rather than Starbucks.

I was excited to see this article written on the verge but then I read it. Seems like they are only interested in what the fediverse can do now that Threads is getting in and sticking their foot in the door. It's likely they needed Meta as a corporation to validate federation as something with real potential. We need to be highly critical about the entities who just see this as another way to make money off our data

My main concern with this is I don't know how well activity pub can scale, and we've already seen various interop problems between different types of platforms. And if email is any indication, once activitypub gets popular it will NEVER GO AWAY and all the developers will hate it.