@BraveSirZaphod Hey, I'm the guy that wrote this. While I absolutely hold negative bias towards Meta, the point of the article was not to produce a piece of propaganda, but instead illustrate that their policies have updated to acknowledge the existence of third-party accounts on other servers, that they will be collecting data, and that this is likely a sign that federation may be happening sooner than expected.
Not everybody is happy about that, and some developers are working on hardening their applications to protect against unauthorized access for edge cases related to this.
@fazalmajid Maybe so, but Mastodon historically has only allowed users to look up other users, search hashtag indexes, and depending on the server, search your own posts. A lot of this was done under the pretense of protecting users from harassment, but it's a bandaid covering over insufficient tooling for post-based interaction capabilities.
Anyway, the bigger problem is that it's harder to find stuff in federated systems, which can be a big headache for getting new people into the Fediverse. Search isn't a silver bullet, but it goes a long ways towards making discovery easier.
@stopthatgirl7 lmao, looks like we literally posted at the same time 😅
It's entirely possible that a fediverse platform emerges that's capable of performing many different kinds of activities. But, the far more likely outcome is that platforms eventually implement the Client-to-Server half of the ActivityPub protocol, which currently very few platforms implement.
The idea is that virtually every Fediverse platform could, in theory, act as clients for one another, enabling a "one account posts everything" possibility with different frontends accessing different subsets of data.
This has nothing to do with the Fediverse, get this spammy crap out of here.