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by bonney_io 845 days ago
It seems to me that Mastodon, tumblr, Wordpress, Threads, and any future platform's support of ActivityPub could theoretically make the entire internet "old Facebook".

Facebook is/was two things:

1) a microblog (your personal page)

2) an interface for following other's microblog posts

This sounds an awful lot like a following, say, a bunch of WordPress blogs in your Mastodon feed. We just need the interface over it all.

Heck, if Threads does what they say it will, Threads very well may become that interface for many folks.

2 comments

I certainly hope Threads has no future in the internet of tomorrow. We need to move away from centralized systems.

ActivityPub is dangerous too! The protocol suffers from federated cabal censorship. Entire Mastodon instances will ban over the prettiest rationales, just like Reddit moderators and their little fiefdoms. It's quite fascist.

I'm hoping BlueSky's protocol of distributed opt-in filtering and extensions wins. I don't want anyone deciding things on my behalf. You're free to filter me out, you're free to subscribe to someone who filters me out, but I get angry when the means of communication and those chosen to rule over it do it without recourse. The reasoning, despite being mostly petty, shouldn't even matter - it's authoritarian and awful.

Who moderates the moderators has always been an issue.

Still, there is no way around it. If that community has toxic mods, you probably don't want to stick around there anyway : go to a different one or make a new one yourself ! This is still better than being in a situation where there are only giant platforms like Facebook/Reddit/Discord/Xitter and no hope of starting a community outside their walls.

A facebook ActivityPub alternative already exists with Friendica.

https://friendi.ca/