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by KoftaBob
1117 days ago
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Their choice to make the app "compatible with Mastodon" (uses the ActivityPub protocol and is basically a huge Mastodon instance) reminds me of the famous Microsoft "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" model. Not sure that Extinguish part is going to work though, considering AP/Mastodon are open source protocols/platforms and easily forkable. |
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That's not really a safeguard against "extinguishing". When you become the first mover, your extensions to the protocol/platform drive out competitors that cannot afford to interoperate with you.
Actually, it may be pretty easy for a Meta-owned AP instance to drive out a lot of competitors. It definitely won't have the space/compute/bandwidth constraints of the average instance, and can work around most protocol warts by just throwing money at them. At the same time, federating with it might have a huge cost for a small instance.