When Meta launched their new Twitter competitor Threads on July 5, they said that it would be compatible with the ActivityPub protocol, Mastodon, and all the other decentralized social networks in the fediverse “soon”.
But on July 14, @alexeheath of the Verge reported that Meta’s saying ActivityPub integration’s “a long way out”. Hey wait a second. Make up your mind already!
From the perspective of the “free fediverse” that’s not welcoming Meta, the new positioning that ActivityPub integration is “a long way out” is encouraging. OK, it’s not as good as “when hell freezes over,” but it’s a heckuva lot better than “soon.” In fact, I’d go so far as to say “a long way out” is a clear victory for the free fediverse’s cause.
“healthy” here means “healthy for the Fediverse”, which means “being nice to each other” and supporting diversity, both values being contrary to the Facebook network, which is predatory to other networks, as having proven in the past.
The need is to prevent the predatory network from accessing the weaker one that promotes diversity and freedom of choice.
It’s that way because of moderation. Trust me when I say, there are some extremely vile servers out there that are significantly worse then anything you’ll find on Facebook. Also I just read this as gatekeeping, assuming that the current users are somehow better to each other then the average person. Also the fedi is one of the least diverse communities I’ve ever seen.
It’s not about the users, but Facebook as a company that has its own agenda against its users in order to make as much money as possible.
It’s also about Facebook seeing other networks not as friendly co-spaces, but as competitors that it tries to crush.
If you talk about users though, the “worse servers than Facebook” are by far less powerful than Facebook, and they impose no danger to the Fediverse.