[zdunn]

> I am not sure why the ecosystem went this way

Because when activitypub was still getting off the ground, mastodon built their own client api. A lot of excited people built apps for mastodon so pleroma, and then others, started building Masto API support so that their instances could use mastodon clients. Now the Masto API is the de facto client api.

I super agree with you, using the client-to-server protocol so that we could have one account would be the best situation. I've been arguing that on the fediverse for a while, but all the developers in the space seem to think the client-to-server protocol isn't useful enough so you would have to fallback to a custom API for the missing pieces anyway so you might as well use the API everyone's already using.