Right… well clearly I have clicked all the links, and read all the things, and I still don’t understand it. “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

So assume in good faith, assume I have absolutely no idea what the problem even is due of my own stupidity. So ELI5 and give a synopsis of the problem.

Did you stop reading or are you intentionally trying to phrase it as if the universities won’t do anything? […]
It doesn’t seem like you’re even trying to make a good faith argument.

My first sentence and first 4 words are “So what’s stopping them?”. So did you stop reading before that - or what are you even arguing about, and where is your ‘good faith’? You’re arguing about meta-nonsense without answering

What’s stopping them? What do they even need from “federation” or “ActivityPub” to just build this?

So what’s stopping them? Universities have internship programs and internal projects. In a university team of 4 people doing projects, 63x4 252 students could be assigned to a project to build this.

But

The french open science committee (CoSO) is indeed interested in the ActivityPub implementation in GitLab

Good phrasing. They are “interested in the ActivityPub implementation” not “interested in the implementing ActivityPub” - so who gives a shit what a bunch of universities are interested in

Removed by mod

We have seen time and again, especially on Android, that whenever a moderately-popular app goes open-source, it is immediately picked up by unscrupulous developers. They download the source, add obnoxious ads […]. tracking code […]. Finally, they publish it to the Play Store

This is a pretty bad argument, especially when you’re specifically talking about Android. Android APKs are extremely easy to just download from closed-source, decompile them, and add new things or overwrite existing things.

The argument makes more sense for things that are harder to decompile and recompile

I would assume this just relies on the Discord API being read by the bot - and not on having a local discord installed…

You can use Tblock - Or you can check which router they have, and tell them to flash it with FreshTomato

Then their router can service as a raspi with a pihole: https://wiki.freshtomato.org/doku.php/advanced-adblock