Is Apple going to make a Mastodon server? I think that’d be pretty cool. In Apple fashion, it would require an app only available on iPhone and Mac, and this app wouldn’t be able to connect to third party instances.
But it would move like half the US to Mastodon, which would be great.
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Please no… For the love of Foss, no. Apple would start making private changes to the ActivityPub protocol to support mundane things like images and polls in their own way while images and polls from other instances wouldn’t load properly and would be in a green bubble.
Ahhh, in true capitalistic fashion: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Everyone learned from Microsoft.
ehh when have we seen EEE happen to anything FOSS though?
Keep a sensor net on how the Linux subsystem in Windows evolves in the next couple of years.
I mean, instances could just defederate if it was annoying though.
Personally I would block any corporate instances on principle. It’s a community project and not a shopping mall. But I don’t make decisions for lemmy.ml alone.
Four of five times, you’re right about Apple’s M.O. But every once in awhile they surprise me like with their WebKit activity.
History lesson
WebKit is only open source because its a fork of KHTML, originally developed by the KDE project [0] for the Konqueror browser [1]. KHTLM was developed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) [2], which limits companies from taking the hard work of open source projects and claiming them as their own without giving back to the community.
If Apple’s surprising you with the “open code” released under the WebKit project, it’s because they’re legally requried to. We can thank the Free Software Foundation’s LGPL for that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konqueror
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_License
No doubt. I was careful not to give Apple credit for WebKit’s open source status, but nonetheless it remains surprising to me that Apple participates in open source software all.
Good point. Are there any protections to prevent that? I believe if they use Mastodon, they have to publish the source code. I believe Activity Pub would be the same, assuming it has a good license. But they could always use their own code without touching the open source implementation.
The ultimate protection shared by ActivityPub and all the platforms currently on it is that they are completely open. Which means they can’t be taken down unless no one wants to run them anymore. Even if the whole ecosystem follows some corporate manipulation to get screwed down the line, we can always pick up again from where everything is right now and continue using all of this as though nothing happened.
I don’t think apple is doing that, but it would be cool to see even though I don’t like apple’s practices that much.
will likely raise problems in the future but at the very least mastodon will get much more attention
How did such an uneducated take get so much attention and likes? Apple can’t manipulate ActivityPub for everyone. It would be for their purposes and they would still need to get buy-in from all of everyone else. This whole EEE stuff is alarmist and disingenuous.
They can build an activitypub compliant app and service? They don’t have to touch the open source project.
Apple has an amazing amount of influence. They could easily make the platform, and break it in an instance whenever they felt like it.
That’s an app and an instance but they can’t take over the Fediverse. Even if they got the biggest instance that’s all they have. The Fediverse isn’t opened by anyone so Apples influence doesn’t matter in that regard. It would only matter if they were able to buy up every project and the largest instances
Ngl, I’m curious to see how it all shakes out. An apple-run mastodon instance would probably bring a ton of traffic to the site.
Enough that it might crush the network for a while.
exciting
@butter Maybe they can help push Mastodon to having features everyone there’s been asking for that are quite common throughout the rest of the fediverse. ;)
You can also use friendica… it has all the features, people are asking for…
@jakob Exactly what I’m always tellin folks…
