A Short Ramble About Welcoming Meta to the Open Social Web

I welcome Meta/Instagram to the open social web (Fediverse). There’s a 0% chance I could get my parents, my sisters, or even my wife to sign up for Mastodon or Micro.blog, so they have a far more limited look into my life than when I was posting to Facebook. Even Instagram posts are a rarity from me these days. But I love writing for my blog and microblog, and I wish they could get updates from there alongside the rest of their social media.

If Instagram’s ActivityPub project (Threads?) comes to fruition, that reality would be one step closer. Part of the beauty of the social web is having more personal control over who you do and do not interact with online — control that I’m less than comfortable with the hosting platform using too heavy a hand on.

Preemptively blocking a Meta property from integrating with the open social web is over the line. And I think it would lead toward more of the status quo, rather than a more interoperable web.

So, yeah, I’m with Manton and Gruber on this one.

Update 2023-07-01: And here’s the chaser.