@J12t And DSA compliance does make sense. I'd forgotten about that:
"The European Union is coming down hard on Meta, demanding all sorts of interoperability as part of its Digital Services Act. By implementing a bona-fide W3C interoperability standard as part of a new app, Meta can signal both cooperation with the EU authorities, while delaying opening its core business as long as possible."
@J12t A good post as always -- DSA compliance makes a lot of sense. Along similar lines, from a privacy perspective, Meta could potentially avoid legal liability by acting as a service provider to the instances they're federating with. Most US laws only apply to entities above a certain threshold, so it's possible that many medium-size instances could be essentially unregulated (not sure how this works under GDPR). 1/2
@J12t Big tech companies have been lobbying heavily to shape service provider language -- here's a good example from the #ADPPA consumer privacy legislation, where they successfully inserted some major loopholes. I doubt they were thinking specifically of ActivityPub federation when they were doing that but it certainly applies! At least potentially, we'd need to know more about their plans to know for sure 2/2
EDIT: oops, forgot the link https://www.protocol.com/newsletters/policy/cloud-enterprise-privacy
Tim Chambers
Jon (now at neuromatch.social)