this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Technology

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

We have the power over ActivityPub

Who is 'we'? And who doesn't say that there's something on top of activitypub?

Plus, if they do create cool features, why would we not also add them?

Because we don't have multiple thousands of paid developers.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

@Helix we have a legion of trans coders in pink striped programmer socks. They can do anything!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

One of the "powers" of OSS is that the license usually required changes to be fed back upstream.

If Meta were not to do that the authors of Lemmy could ask someone like EFF to take legal proceeding against them.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Facebook can easily circumvent most requirements like that if the license isn't invasivively copyleft. Usually web standards have permissive licenses.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

i'm not sure if ActivityPub is copyleft or not. meta might be able to build proprietary features on top of it if the license isn't viral.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

If it is copyleft, they will probably try to reimplement it permissively.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

ActivityPub itself is just a protocol, everybody can reimplement it. Lemmy and Mastodon are AGPL3 and thus copyleft along with "you must release source code for your server".

Though if Meta does anything, I'd expect it to be written from scratch and MIT licensed. Companies don't like to get near anything GPL as long as they can avoid it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Because we don't have multiple thousands of paid developers.

Having worked at a company with thousands of developers, that's a significant advantage for us.