On the heels of Tumblr integrating with ActivityPub, it appears that photo sharing site Flickr is also considering doing the same. Don MacAskill started asking users if they would like to see Flickr support the protocol as well. The fediverse is a group of independent server that run free, open source software that allows their users to communicate and connect with one another.
A challenge to modern-day social networks is presented by the concept.
Mastodon is powered by ActivityPub, as well as other alternative social platforms, such as PeerTube and the like. It would become a part of a larger web of social networks where users could find, follow and engage with one another across platforms without having to create separate accounts for each service they chose.
Before today, MacAskill had been thinking about the fediverse. Following the announcement of the ActivityPub support, the CEO of the company stated that his company had been discussing it as well.
Tumblr to add support for ActivityPub, the social protocol powering Mastodon and other apps
MacAskill said it could be right up their alley.
He warned that taking this path would mean having to deprioritize other projects that customers wanted. It makes sense that the executive would attempt to gauge consumer demand for the protocol before committing to it.
MacAskill said that there appears to be a lot of interest in the move to ActivityPub, but he wanted to gauge the type of interest more specifically.
The results of the poll he published seem to be positive. If it was free, 38.2% of respondents said yes to the idea of activitypub integration. 37.4% said yes and that they already pay for the service, while 15.4% said yes and that they would pay if the protocol was supported.
The interest in making the support a part of a free product is so high, at 45%, that MacAskill ran a poll on Mastodon, where 26% said yes, and 22% would consider doing so if ActivityPub was added.
According to its Jobs listings page, the site is used by more than 60 million people every month. If the company adds support for ActivityPub, there will be a lot of new people in the area.
There is a feature that could be used to encourage more customer engagement. Flickr was once a prominent company in the Web 2.0 era, but eventually lost out to other social photo-sharing platforms, like Facebook andInstagram.
In April of last year, the company reduced the limits for free usage, began threatening to remove non-paying users' photos, and urged users to help it find more paying subscribers to keep it afloat. The ability to upload nude photos to the site was paywalled earlier this year.
MacAskill has claimed that the company has established a nonprofit to preserve its images in the event that it falls into hard times. A representative later noted that MacAskill is a "wildly customer-centered leader and technologist with a long track record of successfully identifying meaningful innovations."
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It was updated on 11/28-22 at 5:19 p.m.
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