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Top-level
 I wonder how Dennis Schubert feels about @mozilla starting up mozilla.social. He's a core diaspora* dev who works at @mozilla.social He wrote this very intense post about why diaspora* wasn't going to add ActivityPub, and it seems he wasn't very happy about Mastodon. https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/7422#issuecomment-451750994 28 comments
@maegul I think Dennis is looking for a uniform experience. However, the lack of uniformity is a feature to me, not a bug. It is nice that a microblogging platform talks to a video platform.  @atomicpoet @maegul @reiver I did not know that. It does sound interesting. Do you have a link?  @atomicpoet I think both have trade offs (uniformity/diversity). And by the same token, I’d wonder whether there’d be benefits to a more opinionated standard that is also sensible for creative diversity. ATM, it feels like a solid standard has been given up on, which might come back to but the fediverse? Otherwise, from a users perspective, I’ve seen the lack of uniformity amount to a lack of usability. #lemmy for instance “talks” to mastodon, but not usably.  @atomicpoet @maegul that's only if both sides agree on at least a minimum of sensible information to exchange so that there is something to show for it. Can Mastodon do anything with a Place object? An Event? A Tombstone? Heck, Mastodon doesn't even go out of its way to support Article objects sensibly. We can argue that this isn't AP's fault, like it's not HTTP's fault that not all UAs support all image formats, but it is a limitation. @atomicpoet @maegul and ultimately, this is a limitation that makes the platform more important than the protocol, because the platform is responsible for actually accepting the objects: you can't write a separate client that knows what to do with a Tombstone and have it display those objects that were sent to your Mastodon account. So platforms that want those Tombstones to be shown on Mastodon will end up sending Notes instead. @atomicpoet @maegul again, this might not be considered an AP limitation, but in this sense, Mastodon's dominance is actually destroying that same flexibility of the protocol. @oblomov @atomicpoet yep, it’s an interesting question to consider … at some point, will Mastodon need to die or diminish for the fediverse to thrive? @atomicpoet @maegul by the time Mastodon dominance will have waned, the damage to the Fediverse diversity will already have been done. @atomicpoet @maegul IE “validated” the web, but also set back its development for over a decade, wasting inordinate amounts of developer time trying to work around its limitations and preventing some useful ideas from reaching any kind of popularity. @atomicpoet @maegul I should be able to read an Article from my Fediverse client regardless of what my server platform thinks about it. I should likewise be able to receive (and see) any kind of object sent by people I subscribe to regardless of my server platform capability to handle it. AP servers shouldn't be the ones responsible for deciding which object types and attributes the user has access to. That should be the client's responsibility.  @atomicpoet@mastodon.social @oblomov@sociale.network @maegul@hachyderm.io mastodon right now is used both a server-only for separate (mostly mobile) clients, and a server+client web app. Historically it has mostly been the second. The growth right now is in the first. It will have to decide which one it wants to be growing up, because I don’t think it can excel at both. @atomicpoet @maegul @oblomov @atomicpoet @maegul Naturally, said the architect. And then we have software in the real world :-) Mastodon was written as a plain normal rails web app, and that, I believe, was the right and perhaps only way that could have gotten us to the good place where we all find ourselves today. The question is where it wants to go. (I’m going to take the liberty of cc’ing @Gargron just in case…) @J12t @oblomov @maegul @Gargron People have been trying to make decentralized social media happen for nearly 20 years now. We can all talk about how Mastodon could be better till we're blue in the face. The fact is that Mastodon has created a halo effect on other server software too. In other words, Mastodon's growth is Friendica's growth too. For real. Look at this chart. In September, Friendica was little more than 250 nodes. Now it's nearing 400. @J12t @oblomov @maegul @Gargron For the sake of comparison, let's look at diaspora's growth. It went from 115 nodes in September to 117 nodes in September. Now imagine how much more growth it could have if it simply integrated ActivityPub. So again, while diaspora's devs bemoaned lack of uniformity and usability, few people are using it -- and it can't speak to the rest of the Fediverse. There's a reason why we're here and not there.  @atomicpoet @mozilla @mozilla.social when I was running a diasp* pod, there were arguments about pod portability with the emphasis if "someone wants to write it" they'd consider. ActivityPub was anathema. I'll skip the bit about how their privacy decisions have repeatedly bitten them in that ass @atomicpoet @mozilla I had a hundred or so (bobspora), lack of moderation tools and iffy signups did me in. My amigos that ran the 10k+ Pluspora pod, there was the tools problem, the mistake on insufficient moderators + what they had to see (read: phone number for a FBI agent) and some personal stuff Part of why if I do something (more than family) again there will be several admins and a small team of moderators. that more should agree on more serious moderation  @atomicpoet @mozilla @mozilla.social I'll definitely be following this, but I'm not up to speed enough to comment as of yet... and that will probably be a while. @atomicpoet @mozilla @mozilla.social I can see his point, that he wants a fixed standard that everyone can work to. Unfortunately that leads to stagnation and no experimentation or growth. The ActivityPub spec seems to be actively forward compatible, requiring implementations to deal gracefully with things they’ve never seen before. Social pressure would then work to create compatibility with popular new features. And the Fediverse advances. |
Gregory's Server
@atomicpoet @mozilla @mozilla.social So, as a layperson on AP, I’ve more or less thought the same as this blog post just by being underwhelmed by the quality of the internet-platform integration in the fediverse over AP. It seems a tad over-hyped because of what Dennis outlines. It isn’t opinionated, so every interface between any two platforms requires its own additional layer.
TBH, I’d like to read a serious reply to this in support of AP.