I considered installing the ActivityPub plugin to my WordPress instance, but decided against setting up that integration until I know more about what data could be exchanged [1]. A lot of interest in ActivityPub has been building as Threads by Instagram has been launched. Maybe the social web will continue to fall apart or maybe some type of interaction system will be built out of the current ActivityPub standard or whatever comes next from that potential setup. Yesterday, my interest in the Threads application peaked. It was sort of fun to install the application and to see something new. For me the feed experience was just not very good. It was a lot of brands and social influencers trying to engage with me and that is a far cry from the mix of academic Twitter that I interact with mixed with a lot of machine learning and AI related researchers. 

My Twitter experience has always been pretty good in terms of those academic and research based connections. I’m not in the market for any advertisements of social influencers. My path is pretty clear and my work plan exists and won’t change all that much during the course of my 5 year writing plan. I’m really curious to see what happens with the most active users. All those really active users are going to end up going somewhere and they will build a critical mass. In my estimation it would be unlikely that the mass of the most active users would end up fragmented or broken apart. That need to get to a point of critical mass to allow the social network to be in the end the most social it can be will probably win out over time.

Footnotes:
[1] https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/