The recent Threads controversy brought this question to my mind.

It is certain that such a thing will not happen, but if it was in theory; what would your reactions be? Also are your views on this similar to your views on Threads?

  • lugal@lemmy.ml
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    11 months ago

    You already said that it won’t happen but from my understanding, it isn’t possible because the fediverse has a certain protocol and reddit most certainly works differently. Am I right? I don’t want to sound snobbish, I got that’s it’s a thought experiment. I just wondered if I’m correct.

    On your question: I think most servers wouldn’t federate but it won’t be as bad as with Threads. I myself wouldn’t be too sure. Maybe I would create a second account on a server that’s federated with reddit but I don’t want my feed to be fluted by it.

    • ryan@the.coolest.zone
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      11 months ago

      Reddit does work differently and they would have to implement the ActivityPub protocol in order to federate, which would be a lot of effort for them.

      The bigger thing is, ActivityPub is an API protocol. So for example, by knowing your username and instance I could call a particular API endpoint on your instance and get, just as one example, all your “outbox” messages - everything you have posted, the tags, actors you have sent it to (people or communities), etc. The reason for the large recent Reddit exodus is that they shut down their API because they do not want people to be able to easily pull all their data. So they would absolutely never implement ActivityPub, in my opinion. They want to remain walled off.

    • Phen
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      11 months ago

      Federation protocols can be implemented on top of other systems too. For example you can probably fork lemmy to make it also federate with the matrix protocol to some extent, or the other way around.

      • syd@lemy.lolOP
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        11 months ago

        Probably yes. Since ActivityPub is a content transfer protocol just like any other APIs.