Chris Trottier on Nostr: Many people are asking me, "How will #ActivityPub ultimately be #Meta's own undoing?" ...

Many people are asking me, "How will #ActivityPub ultimately be #Meta's own undoing?"

Meta's current business model is not built for an open protocol like ActivityPub. It's very much dependent on them owning and controlling the network effect of services like Facebook and Instagram.

Not only does Meta want to collect all your personal data -- they want to control it too. They enforce this control through proprietary APIs. In this sense, they're not different from Twitter and Reddit.

The point of ActivityPub is that services, such as #Mastodon, #Kbin, and #Calckey, can depend on an open protocol instead of a proprietary API.

What if I, the admin of calckey.social, don't like what a dev is doing? Well, too bad. The protocol is open. I might be able to twiddle with my own server, but I can't do jack with anyone else's.

And what if I'm a greedy asshole who wants to monetize the user data on my server? Too bad for me, everyone on my server can migrate elsewhere.

This is not how Meta does business. In almost all ways, ActivityPub is counter to their business. Yet, here they are -- wanting to join the Fediverse.

The tech industry is awash in stories of big corporations that own proprietary tech that become undone by open standards.

Remember IBM's dominance of PCs? It was undone by the IESA standard.

Remember Novell's dominance of networking? It was undone by the bundling of TCP/IP in operating systems.

Remember AOL's dominance of online services? It was undone by the World Wide Web.

ActivityPub is yet another standard that pierces the opaque walled gardens that largely depend on proprietary technology owned by one company. And Meta happens to be one company that owns an opaque walled garden.

If history is to be repeated -- and usually it's worth learning from history -- then Meta opening the door to ActivityPub is company suicide. It's the first domino to fall before everything else in their catalogue of walled gardens also falls. Contrary to popular opinion, creating an ActivityPub enabled social network does not "kill" ActivityPub -- it validates it.

As it happens, I've known quite a few people who work at Meta. I have a little insight into what they're thinking.

Most folks at Meta know very well that Facebook will eventually die. But not just Facebook, Instagram too. Social networks, by their nature, are generational and transient. They have a shelf life.

Meta very much wants to build the app that kills Facebook and Instagram.

They have to build it because they can't acquire competition. That will raise the ire of regulators.

Likewise, Meta have already tried to leverage their own proprietary APIs to build compelling platforms. We've already seen this with the likes of Portal and Oculus.

What's apparent is that, even for a Big Social company like Meta, it is extremely hard to build a network effect from scratch. Sure, billions of people use Facebook and Instagram, but it was a whole lot of work for Meta to do that themselves.

And what was the end result of building Facebook and Instagram's network effect? More regulation by governments.

Thus, ActivityPub gives Meta two things it craves: the ability to piggyback on the network effect of an open protocol, and the ability to head off regulators by saying, "Hey, we don't own this protocol -- we're no different from Mastodon and Calckey."

Again, open protocols usually mean the demise of big corporations who leverage success through proprietary APIs. And ActivityPub will be no different.

Meta joining the Fediverse means that Automattic was right to build ActivityPub plugin for WordPress. It also means competitors, such as Apple and Microsoft, should probably start investing in ActivityPub.

What else does it mean? That small developers should start building apps that appeal to people who use Meta services. They should build these apps based on garden-variety ActivityPub -- because Meta can't own or control ActivityPub.

The first domino has dropped 😉