this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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The Activitypub protocol is nothing but a piece of paper. Meta can rewrite it if they want, but that doesn't mean Lemmy, Mastodon or the many other platforms would automatically use it. Programmers have to implement it, and then instance admins have to deploy it. So by inertia it's likely that changes would be ignored by most platforms. However they could easily bribe developers or admins to make certain changes.
My understanding is that corporations are constantly trying and sometimes succeeding at influencing w3c standards to go in a direction which is favorable to themselves. For example increasing the legitimacy of DRM and surveillance. Developers of non-profit software (eg mozilla) then have to choose whether to be out of compliance or support nefarious technologies. If they choose against supporting the standards, then all users notice is that the application "doesn't work" on certain websites.
I don't necessarily know if running away and hiding is along term solution to this though.
Federation is different from a browser. Even if Threads pushed through some protocol changes on their side, it would change anything for Lemmy, Peertube etc federating with the original protocol. They couldnt federate with Threads then, but clearly most users wouldnt mind.