then you lose half the users and perhaps half the communities

As a thought, do you really lose them?

For example the “Television” community previously existed on the lemm.ee instance. The lemm.ee instance is scheduled for shutdown. The “Television” community is now hosted on the piefed.social instance.

It has the same users and has the same topics of discussion. Were the users really lost? Did the community really go away?

Let’s pretend Reddit decided it would no longer allow discussion on “Television”. What if BlueSky no longer allowed discussion on “Television”. You’d have to leave those platforms completely. You really would lose those communities. Those users (at least in part) really would be gone.

Is Lemmy.World a big instance? Sure. Would the users and communities really be lost if it went away? I don’t think so.

I’m not surprised, but I agree with the hot take, so maybe it’s only warm.

I think they keep interest in ActivityPub in order to keep regulators concerned with Antitrust at bay. The Fediverse isn’t a real threat in Meta’s view and keeping an engineer or two on it in order to stay invested is worth the cost.

Threads can say they are making an honest effort to work with the larger open source community and open federated internet. As an added bonus, it isn’t actually a lie. Now the effort they’re putting in is the absolute minimum, but it’s there.

Now I still do think this is a positive. While most people on Threads will probably never leave, it does introduce them to the wider Fediverse. It makes the Fediverse a less scary thing.

Linux has two ways of drawing pictures, the old way (Xorg) and the new way (Wayland).

The old way is like a giant box of crayons with the crayon sharpener built in. The box is all marked up, the sharpener is full of gunk, and a few crayons are melted together. Nobody really wants to touch the old box of crayons, although it does work for the most part, it’s a familiar box.

The new way is like a smaller box of crayons. The clean sharpener isn’t built in but it is available nearby, although some people say it doesn’t work as good. A few crayons are missing, but are available in most cases, they’re just not in the box. Most people are working to improve the new box.

If you’re using Linux, the new box of crayons is generally the better choice. It’s ok to stop using the old box.

“the annoying webp” AFAIK is the same problem as JPEG XL, apps just didn’t implement it.

It is supported in browsers, which is good, but not in third party apps. AVIF or whatever is going to have the same problem.