Meta’s adoption of ActivityPub wasn’t about embracing open web standards or ideals. It was purely defensive.

On one hand, they needed to compete with Twitter. To do that, they wanted to leverage Instagram’s existing social graph. But if they had done this in isolation, it could have raised significant red flags with regulators.

There’s another reason behind Meta’s adoption of ActivityPub, and it’s tied to news. In multiple jurisdictions, including Canada, Facebook has refused to share news, as this would make them liable for millions of dollars in payments to journalists and media companies.

ActivityPub provides a convenient loophole. News organizations can broadcast content to Threads without Meta actually hosting it. When governments ask why news is showing up on Threads, Meta can say, “We don’t control that. Media companies are broadcasting it, and users are opting in to receive it.”

A final reason, unsurprising to anyone, is that Meta aimed to stifle Mastodon and other Fediverse services. To some extent, it worked. Once Threads joined the Fediverse—though “joined” is a loose term given Meta’s slow and selective adoption of ActivityPub—many users left Mastodon. These users were never interested in the Mastodon way of doing things. What they wanted was a corporate platform that appeared to play nice with open standards.

But let’s talk about what Meta will likely never implement: account migration. On most Fediverse servers, users can move their accounts to a new server if they’re unhappy with their current one, or even run their own server and migrate their data there. Meta, with its hundreds of millions of Threads accounts, will almost certainly never allow this. Why? Because it would mean risking even a fraction of their user base migrating to Mastodon or other services.

Here’s the catch: Meta can’t kill ActivityPub’s momentum. The protocol’s value extends beyond Meta’s narrow, Twitter-like view of it. Other applications, like PixelFed (an Instagram competitor), are gaining traction. Unlike centralized competitors that die when their funding runs out, decentralized platforms like PixelFed can’t be easily killed. Even if the most popular PixelFed server shuts down, hundreds of others remain.

This is a nightmare for Meta. It’s like the rise of Linux all over again. Microsoft once tried to stifle Linux with underhanded tactics, but now Linux powers almost everything—servers, car dashboards, video game consoles—because it’s decentralized and adaptable. The same applies to ActivityPub. There are tens of thousands of ActivityPub servers online, and anyone with an idea can create a new social network, tapping into the Fediverse’s massive network effect.

When Meta announced its integration with ActivityPub two years ago, I called it a bad idea. Meta likely thought it could co-opt the Fediverse to its advantage. This is a classic “scorpion and the frog” scenario—but with a twist. You’d think Meta is the scorpion in this story, but it’s actually the frog, unaware of its vulnerability. The Fediverse is the scorpion, and it’s in its nature to sting centralized systems.

Meta might think, “If you sting me, we both drown.” But the Fediverse doesn’t care. Its decentralized nature ensures it will thrive, even at the expense of centralized platforms like Threads. The open web is resilient, and Meta’s attempt to dominate it may ultimately backfire.

There’s many Fediverse servers out there—“scorpions,” if you will—and Meta is but one frog.