| That's true of course, but seems a bit like "actually, it's GNU/Linux" to me. Mastodon currently is the "flagship" application of the Fediverse, especially as far as the current influx of new users is concerned. At least I think we can hope that people will start to discover all the other things that the Fediverse contains ince they are there and start to use it. Also, not sure if I'm correct, but from what I've read, the software seems to be quite influential in shaping the "de-facto standard" client/server API, at least for the "microblogging" part of the Fediverse? Like, in theory, ActivityPub both specifies server/server and client/server interactions - however, the client/server part appears to be "underspecified and barely used" [1, 2]. e.g., AP doesn't say anything about how clients are authenticated or even how they can get notified of incoming messages/activities short of polling. This stuff is all specified in the Mastodon API. So in practice, if I wanted to write a new client app for microblogging on the fediverse, my app would use the Mastodon API, not ActivityPub for reference. Is that correct? Of course in the interest of avoiding centralisation, I'd agree that that's not a good state of affairs. It would be better if there was a real, widely-used standard for client/server and not just what the Mastodon devs think is useful. Though at least they cannot simply make changes to the API without convincing the majority of server admins to adopt those changes. [1] https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/activitypub-client-to-... [2] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/10520 |