I like Mastodon and ActivityPub, and I like that they're seeing relatively broad adoption. That said, I'm not hopeful for the future. If it ever actually sees broad adoption beyond the tech community, all Facebook or whatever comes next has to do is incorporate ActivityPub posts into Facebook, perhaps even send back Facebook comments to those posts, but not publish Facebook-originated content. At that point, you can either be on Facebook and follow all your Facebook and ActivityPub friends, or use Mastodon or whatever and only follow your ActivityPub friends.
And even if Facebook does not do that, if a particular ActivityPub client becomes wildly popular, it could do the same, much like how Google Talk started out as interoperable with XMPP, only to ditch it when Google Talk was popular.
I think that most instances would block Facebook if they tried to do something like that. They'd have nothing to gain and everything to lose by allowing FB to get away with it.
As for your other point, it's also possible it will go the way of GMail, which is still compatible with other email providers. I think a large part of it depends on how big ActivityPub gets before a GMastodon appears.
Email is pervasive and decently well diversified on the web, with multiple email providers, and many businesses and users not being on GMail, partially due to inertia (they already had an email before GMail became big). Maybe GMail could afford to cut off emails from external providers, but it would be a big risk, and it would definitely break a large part of the web.
If ActivityPub does the same, with websites integrating it into their user experience, and news organizations and businesses self-hosting or joining various instances, I expect it would gain the same kind of resilience as email for when a GMastodon shows up.
So I'm not too pessimistic about this. The more pressing concern is increasing adoption, IMO.
Also its virtually impossible to be smaller than a few hundred mails to gmail a day as a server and not have your mails instantly spamboxed. Yes, i have gone through the laundry lists of things it could be, and stuff i should set up.
If Google wanted true lock-in they could implement a Gmail-only end-to-end encrypted protocol. Ironically, that's the only thing they don't want to do.
"I think that most instances would block Facebook if they tried to do something like that."
I don't think so. Doing so would mean that their users wouldn't be able to get events from the biggest network; the one where most people are on. While today, most users of ActivityPub are likely to be people who are against Facebook and not wanting to interact with it, if ActivityPub becomes huge, then more people would be using it that are ambivalent about FB or even users of it. Blocking FB would mean that those people leave the instances, because they're no longer able to get a significant amount of their messages.
I've thought about it more, and it's a tough question. If Facebook did allow Facebook users to see and interact with ActivityPub posts, but didn't allow other ActivityPub instances to see Facebook posts, there would be three types of instances.
There would be FB itself, of course. Then there'd be AP instances, short for ActivityPub instances that don't block Facebook. And finally, there'd be AP-FB (AP minus FB) instances, short for ActivityPub instances that do block Facebook.
FB accounts can interact with AP but not AP-FB. AP-FB can interact with AP but not FB. AP can interact with AP-FB, and only partially with FB.
If there aren't many people on AP-FB instances, then the incentive for people on AP is to jump straight to FB, because that's where you have the most reach.
If there are a lot of people on AP-FB instances, then there's some incentive to jump to AP accounts, because then you can interact with AP-FB and Facebook people can see your posts, even though you can't see theirs. It's not clear how strong this incentive would be, though, because people being able to see your posts might not matter if you can't see theirs.
If every instance is AP, they lose users to FB, so they have an incentive to coordinate to make a strong AP-FB block. But if there's a strong AP-FB block, AP-FB people would have incentive to jump to AP. This is likely to stabilize with FB winning, if the incentive is strong enough, so we could have a Bad End.
This means the correct game-theoretic solution, as far as I can tell from my armchair, would be for the AP-FB block to coordinate and block not only FB, but also AP instances, so that there'd be no incentive to jump to AP.
So it would all depend on how well instance owners can coordinate, and how willing they'd be to block AP instances, who could be framed as "defecting". I have no idea how that would turn out; humans have been known to coordinate, but also been known to fail to coordinate. It's something we'll see in the future, if Facebook ever partially implements ActivityPub.
Well, what would probably happen is that Facebook interactivity would be some kind of plugin, which instance runners would have to enable (and possibly configure). Convincing them to do so may not be easy.
The big challenge for publishers right now is censorship. Platform censorship happens in many ways:
- Visibility hidden because an algorithm in a non-chronological news feed thinks your content won't get enough engagement
- Visibility hidden because you aren't buying advertising
- Account banning or throttling because of grey area content (everything from nipples to politics)
- "De-monetization" (Youtube specific)
Most people using the internet are now aware of these problems. It used to be a fringe issue that like people doing SEO and spammers thought about.
Will it be easy for a platform to convince content publishers to return after it has chased them off the platform?
Facebook's usage exploded just as Myspace's was struggling to keep their servers up and was users were being hammered by very invasive ads. Once those users started logging on to Facebook instead, they never looked back. May be it was inevitable, but there was a very clear value proposition to users and it benefited Facebook immensely. The users were literally chased off of Myspace, by Myspace, and went to Facebook.
My hope is that we will get open protocol adaptation instead of startups building another walled garden to replace Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Youtube. Open protocols are better for everyone, including startups.
(and few things scare me more than a startup that is going to "fix email" by creating a new walled platform.)
Censorship is not the root problem. The root problem is spam. For example, the main reason that we all choose one of the giant tech corps to host our email is because of spam. Spam defenses are why it's so difficult to run your own mail server these days. Thus spam causes email provider centralization even though though there is no network effect lock in. Then with centralization you get the secondary problems such as censorship.
And even if Facebook does not do that, if a particular ActivityPub client becomes wildly popular, it could do the same, much like how Google Talk started out as interoperable with XMPP, only to ditch it when Google Talk was popular.