On the heels of Tumblr’s decision to integrate with ActivityPub — the social protocol powering the open-source Twitter alternative Mastodon and others — it appears that photo-sharing site Flickr is now considering doing the same. Flickr CEO Don MacAskill today began to actively poll users about whether or not they’d like to see Flickr support the protocol, too. If it moved forward with this plan, Flickr would be the latest larger company to commit to joining the “fediverse” — the interconnected group of independent servers across the globe running free, open-source software that allows their users to communicate and connect with one another.
The concept presents a challenge to modern-day social networks controlled by corporations — or billionaires like Elon Musk.
ActivityPub is a key component to the fediverse, powering not only Mastodon, whose popularity has grown in the wake of Musk’s Twitter acquisition, but also other alternative social platforms including the