this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2023
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While it's DEFINITELY not a bad idea to not put all eggs in one basket and prevent stuff from even happening in the first place, i think this person is worrying too much about the consequences. We do have a recent important precedent of a very public corporate takeover of a very popular free software service: The Freenode IRC takeover. After the nutcase effectively took over the network's ownership, people just... left. They remade the service elsewhere (Libera.Chat) and everybody moved, making the takeover meaningless. So, if worst comes to worst i don't think there's gonna be a problem. Here's the info on Wikipedia of the event and the exodus to Libera Chat
It's not that simple. ActivityPub is at risk of centralization, just like email. There are no built-in protections against centralization or EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish). Furthermore, Mastodon makes it difficult to migrate accounts, especially from an instance that is unreachable or just disabled the export function.
Unfortunately locking users into a platform is extremely valuable because they can be shown ads, used for data mining, manipulation (like Cambridge Analytica). ActivityPub is not automatically immune to all of this.
The comparison with IRC is not very meaningful: moving from one server to another is much easier because IRC users don't lose followers, bookmarks, posts, etc.
The point is that IRC is normally used in a way that leaves more to the client. ActivityPub services usually expect that users put much more trust in the instances. It might be worth thinking about that.