♾️ The rise of ActivityPub

Unravelling the magic behind ActivityPub and its true potential to create a decentralised communication for social media platforms.

🧵 The Threads app

To kickstart, I totally don't feel Threads has a sustainable advantage in the long term. Of course, Meta made a killer move with the User acquisition strategy by allowing Instagram accounts to transfer all their network to the Threads app in one click of a button, therefore reducing friction. No wonder it reached 100M users in just 5 days. To set some context how big it is -

But will it work in the long term is the question. You can create an awesome customer acquisition strategy but what about customer retention? Acquisition without customer retention is like filling a bucket that has holes in it. What's the point of acquiring new users while you are losing your existing ones?

Threads got an unfair headstart by taking the liberty of the Instagram user base, but hold on, the user persona of Instagram is totally different. These people are mostly Gen Z and Gen Alpha who have less attention span and are not used to reading text. They are so addicted to pictures and short-form videos (aka reels) and how can we expect them to read a long para of text?

- The Morning Brew on 15/07/23

So personally, I don't feel Threads will win in the long term and hope it doesn't turn out to be another Clubhouse.

But I could be totally wrong and why did I bring the Threads app all of a sudden?

🤳🏻 The ActivityPub

Okay, I wanna shift gears to an interesting part of this. While everyone is talking about the massive sign-up rate on Threads, Mark is (sub)consciously using an old decentralised technology - The ActivityPub.

So what is actually ActivityPub?

Imagine you're on social media, like Twitter or Instagram. You have your own profile where you can post updates, pictures, or videos, and your friends can see what you share. ActivityPub is a technology that works behind the scenes to make these platforms work and connect with each other.

Here's how it works: Let's say you post a cool picture on your social media profile using a platform that supports ActivityPub. When you hit the "post" button, ActivityPub kicks in and sends that post to your followers' timelines on the same platform.

Image from The Verge

But that's not all! ActivityPub also makes it possible for your post to be shared with people who are using other platforms that support ActivityPub. So, even if your friend is using a different social media platform, they can still see and interact with your post. So, when you follow someone on one platform, ActivityPub allows you to see their posts, even if they're on a different platform altogether. It's like having one big social media party where everyone from different platforms can join in and interact with each other.

ActivityPub creates a decentralized network of interconnected platforms.

“I was there in the early days of the web, and this whole thing with ActivityPub is as big a deal as HTML was back then. This is the single biggest opportunity I’ve seen for the web since the dawn of the web.”

- David Pierce from Verge

You can read more about ActivityPub in this article.

👔 The Monopoly

Mark is on his way to becoming the Monopoly of social media platforms. He already owns more than half of the mostly used social media apps - Facebook, Whatsapp, Messenger, Instagram and now Threads.

Is it good? I have no clue. It is highly debatable on socialism vs capitalism.

But this is what Peter Thiel talks about monopoly capitalism -

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.

- Peter Thiel in his book 'Zero to One'

Let me know what you think in the comments and do check out the decentralised communication tech - The ActivityPub.