this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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I'm struggling to think of a reason that Meta is implementing ActivityPub protocol in Threads. There are a couple of possible reasons:
What I can't figure out is how they intend to make money while allowing external instances access to the content? After all, any client could be used to strip out ads. It just doesn't feel like it benefits Meta.
It leaves me a bit worried that they intend to divert the protocol in some way.
Seems like they're just trying to get their fingers in the pie, it's what they always do regardless of whether they know it will work or not.
It's a well founded worry.
Activitypub represents the lowest dev entry costs and as a bonus it comes with an audience. If Facebook is standing up a cheap competitor just to take advantage the barrier to entry is miniscule.
Given the trouble some users have noted deleting content (erasing also kills your Instagram account), it might also be a play to deprecate a duplicate platform under their control.
It's also a heck of a lot cheaper than creating a legless zombie universe. Shareholders are probably drooling at the potential of returning to the old sabatoge playbook
They already have a significant amount of theoretical users since they're allowing it to be used with an Instagram account, and they're obviously not going to let users sign in to other instances using the official app. And frankly, the kind of user interested in using threads probably has near zero overlap with the people who would actually bother to join a different instance to browse content from threads.