Following Tumblr’s decision to integrate with ActivityPub – the social protocol that powers the open-source Twitter alternative Mastodon, among others – it seems that photo-sharing site Flickr is now considering doing the same. Flickr CEO Don MacAskill began actively polling users today about whether they’d like to see Flickr support the protocol as well. If it goes through with this plan, Flickr would be the last major company to commit to joining the “fediverse” — the interconnected group of independent servers around the world that run free, open-source software that their users being able to communicate and connect with one another.
The concept poses a challenge to modern social networks controlled by corporations — or billionaires like Elon Musk.
ActivityPub is an important part of the fediversum, fueling not only Mastodon, whose popularity has grown in the wake of Musk’s takeover of Twitter, but other alternative social platforms, including the Instagram-like Pixelfed, video streaming service PeerTube, and others. If Flickr added support for ActivityPub, it would no longer function just as a photo-sharing site, but would become part of a larger web of social networks where users can find, follow, and interact with each other across platforms. can get in touch without having to create separate accounts for each service they want to use.
MacAskill had already considered Flickr’s direction regarding the fediverse before today. Last week, after Tumblr’s announcement, Flickr’s CEO tweeted that his company had also discussed ActivityPub support internally.
“It might be for us,” MacAskill said at the time.
But in a later tweet, he warned that going down this road would mean that other projects on the Flickr roadmap would have to lose priority — including those customers said they wanted. Therefore, it makes sense that the executive would try to gauge consumer demand for protocol approval before actually making a commitment.
MacAskill today noted that there “appears to be a lot of interest” in seeing Flickr move forward with ActivityPub, but he wanted to gauge the type of interest more specifically first.
So far, the results of a bearing which he published on Twitter seem promising. At the time of writing, only 8.9% of respondents said “no” to the idea of ActivityPub integration.
38.2% said yes, but only if it was free. Meanwhile, two other groups indicated that ActivityPub support could become something that encourages them to pay for Flickr, as 37.4% said yes and said they already pay for Flickr, while 15.4% said yes and said they might pay for Flickr if the protocol was supported.
MacAskill conducted the same poll on Mastodon, where interest in making the support part of a free product is even higher so far, at 47%. 26% and 22% said yes and they are already paying for Flickr or would consider doing so if ActivityPub were added respectively.
Although it’s an older site, Flickr today claims it’s used by more than 60 million people per month, according to its job listings page. That would bring a significant number of new people to fediverse, if the company chooses to add support for ActivityPub.
Of course, Flickr could use a feature that encouraged more customer engagement and adoption. Once a leading company in the Web 2.0 era, Flickr eventually lost out to other social photo-sharing platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, as well as more utilitarian photo hosting services, such as Google Photos and iCloud.
In April 2018, Flickr sold to SmugMug, and soon the company lowered limits on free use, began threatening to remove photos from non-paying users, and urged users to help it find more paying subscribers to keep it running. to keep. Earlier this year, Flickr also began paying for the ability to upload NSFW photos to its site.
In more recent days, MacAskill claimed Flickr is “healthy and growing again,” noting that it’s established a nonprofit to preserve its image in case the company gets into trouble again.
