Even Zuckerberg’s Threads is using ActivityPub. What makes this decentralized protocol capable of challenging Web 2.0 giants?

Why is the decentralized ActivityPub protocol a threat to Web 2.0 giants, even being used by Zuckerberg's Threads?

Users need good user experience and social protocols that can connect multiple clients, and blockchain is not necessary to achieve these.

Original author: Jaleel

This morning, Threads was officially launched, a new app launched by Meta after Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, directly competing with Twitter. Threads not only named one of Twitter’s features as a competitor, but also emphasized public conversation, which is extremely similar to Twitter. Some technology professionals in the industry even called it a “Twitter killer.”

On the first day of launch, Threads’ data performance was impressive. Zuckerberg said that more than 5 million users registered on Threads within four hours of launch, and more than 10 million users registered within seven hours of launch.

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It is worth noting that before the official launch, the application photo preview displayed in Apple’s App Store, many users speculated that they could log in to Threads using their Instagram accounts. At a company-wide meeting last month, Meta executives revealed that Instagram Threads will integrate with the decentralized social media protocol ActivityPub based on Mastodon. This also means that the content of Threads may be used on multiple servers, and Instagram usernames, followers, and other account information can also be automatically moved to the new Threads app according to user needs.

On the login interface of Threads, we can clearly see how Threads works. In future versions, a new type of social media network federated universe will be added, allowing users to follow and interact with each other on different platforms such as Mastodon.

Related reading: “First experience | Zuckerberg’s Twitter competitor Threads is online, is it really better?”

What is the ActivityPub protocol?

When it comes to the decentralized protocol ActivityPub used by Threads, many people may not know it, but when it comes to the federated social network Mastodon, there are many people who know it.

At the end of last year, when Elon Musk laid off a large number of employees and modified Twitter’s verification policy, causing a lot of confusion, the biggest beneficiary at that time was Mastodon. Mastodon, which had accumulated about 500,000 active users before Elon Musk acquired Twitter, suddenly received a large number of “refugees” fleeing from Twitter. At its peak, it added more than 130,000 users per day. In early December last year, the number of active users reached 2.5 million. After January this year, the number of active users dropped to 1.8 million, but it is still an order of magnitude higher than the protocols Lens and Nostr.

The number of Mastodon users is growing rapidly, and many celebrities have also found a “new home” on Mastodon, which has also attracted the attention of Elon Musk. Twitter has begun to ban links to Mastodon. In a Twitter SBlockingces, Elon Musk directly said, “Fucking post Mastodon all goddamn day long, I don’t care.”

Meanwhile, Mastodon seems to be the biggest winner in this dispute over users fleeing Twitter. Eugen Rochko, the founder and CEO of Mastodon, is a German programmer. According to data he shared, the number of active Mastodon users increased by 294,000 this weekend, and the amount of activity posted doubled.

It is worth mentioning that Phil Daian, a member of the Ethereum Foundation, operates an encrypted community called cryptodon.lol on Mastodon, and Vitalik has joined it.

At the same time, many people do not think highly of Mastodon, believing that Mastodon is a good product, but the product itself cannot represent the future of social networks. ActivityPub protocol can represent the future of this race.

Back to our topic, both Threads and Mastodon are using and based on the ActivityPub protocol. What is special about it?

Let users travel between different islands

In the social future outlined by traditional social media giants, our Twitter account data is controlled by Twitter, Instagram account data is controlled by Instagram, and Youtube account data is controlled by Youtube. Each social media company is an island, and each social media platform requires a separate account registration. Social media companies cannot exchange account data.

The idea behind ActivityPub to solve this problem is simple: each server (instance) is similar to an email server, helping users send and receive messages and hosting identities. It standardizes communication between servers, allowing freely joined servers to communicate with each other, and it also standardizes communication between clients and servers, allowing users to access different servers on the same app. This provides great freedom for server operators and users.

Thus, social networks using the ActivityPub protocol can allow users to travel between different islands.

Looking back at the many years since the birth of social networks, there have been a series of social network protocols that emphasize openness: OStatus, pump.io, Open Social, Pubsubhubbub, WebFinger, ActivityStreams, XMPP, RSS, OpenID, etc., and most of them are not well known to people. At certain times, even some technology giants supported these protocols.

Each emerging protocol hopes to create its own open protocol to lead the social track. But why did Threads, which came from the Web2 giants, choose the ActivityPub protocol?

The first thing that comes to mind is that adopting ActivityPub, especially the communication standard between servers, can expand the original Meta social network, help communicate with other servers, and enable users to reach more people.

Liu Guo, co-founder of Matters-lab, agrees with this view. In his view, ActivityPub is currently the most mature and widely used decentralized social protocol. As a newcomer, Threads can use ActivityPub to leverage its original network effects.

In a conversation with BlockBeats, Liu Guo said: “Compared with several other similar decentralized protocols, such as Nostr and AT Protocol. ActivityPub is mainly mature, and it is also a W3C recommended standard. ActivityPub has many clients and a very complete vocabulary, which can be used to define almost all product logic, and the mental model is also very simple (actor model). Compared with other ActivityPub clients, Mastodon’s UI/UX is slightly better, and the other protocols are integrated in an appropriate way (such as web finger).”

In addition, what other reasons make Threads, which comes from Web2 giants, choose ActivityPub? Liu Guo believes that Meta also realizes that users care about privacy and data ownership, especially after Twitter was acquired, so it chooses to use a decentralized social protocol.

So, what does Threads’ choice of ActivityPub mean for decentralized social protocols or web3 protocols?

Liu Guo believes that this is a good reminder to return to the essence. It seems that Meta is very clear about what users need. Users need a good user experience and a social protocol that can communicate with multiple clients, and these do not require blockchain. The blockchain can provide a good identity system, but it needs to be linked with the off-chain social protocol to be useful to users, and the latter is already a relatively mature field and idea.

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