Pretty common in tech layoffs altogether. Been through several waves over the years and typically the CEO goes “we don’t need this team, what do they do anyways?” before firing them and finding out exactly what that team did. I’ve always told coworkers to tell them hell no.
I think more than anything, this has shown the insecurity of ActivityPub for me. The whole point of federation is to get everyone on a decentralized platform that is aimed at ‘copying’ data. But there’s no reason that data needs to be unencrypted in plaintext. We should theoretically be very open to wanting to federate with a large new community, but the issue lies with ActivityPub. Because we can’t trust ActivityPub, we can’t trust Meta. So are we implying that we imperially trust the services we currently use? I think this should be opening a conversation about ActivityPub security, not ‘how quickly can we defederate from Meta to avoid the security issues’, we should be looking at options for resolving those security issues. End to end encryption is in absolute must. We should want to add and federate more users into the ecosystem without fear of where they’re data is coming from and where our is going to. So I’m not ‘for’ federation of Threads, I’m against defederation for ‘security purposes’ when everything is already so insecure. Fix the root problem, not these work around solutions.
I really wish more online personalities would move to Mastodon, right now it’s hard to justify when most of what I use Twitter for is to follow different online creators and such. And just none of them are moving over yet. It looks like Bluesky is where a lot of them are looking. It’s also decentralized, but honestly I’m not a big fan of jumping on another Jack Dorsey project. I don’t like ActivityPub as a tech myself and would be more interested in a holepunch kind of approach myself, but honestly it’s the most mature decentralized tech there is right now and it seems like the world is moving that way. Just wish the world would move quicker!
Thank God I’m not the only one, I have not been able to access archive.is in a long time. I get stuck in a loop on their captcha. Disabled AdGuard, disabled Ublock, nothing.