Patton: "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."#
Facebook is launching an ActivityPub service to compete with Mastodon. There's a lot of talk in the webs about locking them out. Big words but not much power behind them. They will, in an instant, have millions more users than the existing ActivityPub services will, so the question really is -- who's being locked out? It was never a good bet that the architecture of ActivityPub would somehow be able to resist Silicon Valley-scale social networks. That doesn't mean there are no answers, just that bluster isn't one of them. You have to think. #But here's some good news. There's no guarantee that Facebook will be successful on terms that matter to them. Unless a half billion people use their service, it's probably not worth continuing, for a company the size of Facebook. Podcasting has withstood countless attacks like this, and has always been left standing as unsullied as ever. But podcasting is "really simple" and the benefit of federation is well known to users. That's been what's kept it from being pwned by bigco's all these years.#
Also it'll be interesting to see how much of ActivityPub Facebook supports in their product. When Google Reader came out for RSS their trick was to break RSS by not supporting a key feature. This did huge damage that we're still dealing with long after Google is gone.#
I asked ChatGPT for 25 words: "The MetaWeblog API is a standard protocol for remotely managing and posting content on blogging platforms, enabling cross-platform compatibility and streamlined content management."#
A response from Coralie Mercier at the W3C and my response. I'm hoping they'll point to the actual RSS 2.0 spec instead of hosting a hacked version of the spec. You can't ethically take the copyright notice off someone else's work and pass it off as your own. It happens all the time on the web, but the W3C can't be one of those places. We're talking about the integrity of the web and its history. RSS 2.0 is a big milestone. What an awful way to try to show support for a standard, esp one created by independent developers and the news industry. #