At least they'd (Microsoft) have to make the changes publicly available, since it's AGPL. So they can't have secret shenanigans that others don't have.

Genuinely don’t understand. Is the ActivityPub protocol AGPL? Is there something stopping MS from just building their own server from scratch?

They would also make a Microsoft owned version of the protocol to support features only their client and server supported

Why wouldn't they just implement SOAP over JSON?

ActivityPup is an API.

APIs are not protected by copyright.

The AGPL only applies if they make it available externally though. If they have their own internal instance the AGPL only says that Microsoft employees must be able to access the source code.

Microsoft hosts teams for their customers. So if they modified the code all their customers users would be entitled to see it.

While I agree with this, I've interfaced with many lawyers that interpret AGPL differently mostly due to following license dependency trees. They nuked any project that went anywhere near AGPL even if the project was internal-only. This was not limited to places I worked either. There are others in my circle that had their projects shot down for using AGPL code. I do not fully grasp the logic the lawyers arrive at. Perhaps they are treating it the same way I treated PCI compliance, in that anything touching it gets infected by the zombie virus and must also be compliant.

https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ - It's not AGPL

This already existed. It was called Yammer, and nobody used it, and then Microsoft bought it anyway. Apparently it's rolled into Teams now, but since my last few companies were Slack shops I don't know how many people use the Teams-branded Yammer feature. Probably still nobody. Unlike chat, email and wiki, I don't think microblogging has ever proved to be useful in the workplace.

Yammer was pretty nice for what it did. It felt more structured and formal than Slack, but wasn't as painful to edit as wikis tend to be.

Teams is already more structured and formal than slack. And it's an absolute pain to send team messages.

Everyone always just starts a group chat instead, as the reply is always so small and hidden, and the card system makes it hard to manage more than one or two threads at a time.

Yammer is separate from Teams, still

> Apparently it's rolled into Teams now

Yes, and still nobody uses it

It is absolutely massive at my org.

The comms team religiously using it, and the ‘what’s happening’ digest being on by default meaning posts are surfaced in to people’s inboxes regularly until they unsubscribe means everyone knows about it.

Oddly, I know a few EVE Online corporations used it.

EVE Online has some of the most dedicated "fake companies in space" that I've seen - complete with accountants.

Eve Online fans literally cheer Microsoft Excel features at annual Fanfest - https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/05/eve-onlines-ms-excel-... /// https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31292593

> I don't know how many people use the Teams-branded Yammer feature.

So this has only gotten weirder recently. Microsoft decided to rename Yammer when inside of Teams to Viva Engage. Nothing about this branding decision makes sense. It's still Yammer if you open a link to the web version. It's still Yammer.com if you want to go to the public web version. It's just called Viva Engage inside of Teams and now Outlook. (To use an ancient dumb aphorism, apparently it is now called Yammer in the streets and Viva Engage in the sheets.)

On top of different brand name (for the same app!) there's also a different UI design. It's almost the most confusing you could possibly make it.

Whoever is at Microsoft in charge of these marketing decisions has either lost their mind or this is some sort of long con that doesn't make sense yet. (There's hints that Microsoft is trying to rename Cortana to Viva, and they did rename what used to be Cortana Insights emails to Viva Insights, all of which are also dumb brand names. This seems an effort play up that these various inside-Teams and inside-Outlook sub-services are some sort of "intelligent business assistant for business users only" to jettison the final remaining ties to consumer Cortana [RIP] and the fun gaming-originated name for something bland and soulless and not-fun capital-E Enterprise, sigh.)

Anecdotally, the rebrand so far seems to be diminishing use of Yammer inside of Teams at my employer. They had Yammer as a default app in the default sidebar of Teams but when the branding switched Viva Engage is no longer in the default list. There's still something of a "well, post it on Yammer" culture here and people don't even seem to realize they can do it directly in Teams anymore because Teams no longer has a "Yammer app" and no one knows to look for "Viva Engage".

This is all just really wild and feels a bit like Microsoft has lost some of its mind here.

For hypothetical grand plan, see: Loop

That don’t sound too bad. I would use it, if it meant avoiding the Teams client application.