[barnabee]

As far as I can tell ActivityPub is (at least part of) the problem. If it’s not, then Mastodon is simply not trying to be a “Twitter replacement” or a useful global social network at all.

The only worse idea than Bluesky using ActivityPub would be to build something new making all the same design decisions.

Deciding “ActivityPub is the standard” (seriously?!) and demanding we give up already is the opposite of what we need.

I don’t know if AT is the best long term solution, but — and I’ve tried it multiple times — ActivityPub/Mastodon sure as hell isn’t. There’s no value in being interoperable with it that I can see, beyond the potential short term boost to vanity metrics on user numbers.

I absolutely want my identity to use public key cryptography, and I absolutely want to store all my emails, tweets (or whatever), and DMs locally first. I don’t like how accounts and servers work in Mastodon and the federation and global discovery approach sucks too.

The best thing we can do now is keep an open mind and try as many approaches as possible, because if something better than ActivityPub doesn’t come along society is stuck with centralised social media forever.

[vidarh]

Fediverse posts are signed with public key crypto (e.g. I'm looking at signatures for my post literally in the window next to my browser right now). It could use a multi-sig model so you'd be able to unilaterally prove claims about your posts, but that's not an ActivityPub limitation or issue. If you want to store it locally first, the only thing stopping you currently is that current servers are clunky, not the protocol. You don't give much detail of the specifics of why you think the protocol is the problem, so I can't address much more than that.

ActivityPub is very generic; it can accommodate all kinds of changes. E.g. if you want to introduce activity / object types that have improvements over what Mastodon supports, you can do so. If you want to introduce vocabulary within existing object types that Mastodon wouldn't understand, you can do so without breaking federation with Mastodon or other Fediverse servers. I'd be a lot more sympathetic to anyone who decided to extend ActivityPub.

The minimum viable subset of ActivityPub is largely: Provide an endpoint that returns an Actor with a list of the required endpoints (inbox, outbox, follower, following etc.) - the spec requires a list of them, but you don't even need all of them for basic interop - and handle POST's to your announced inbox, and GET requests to the outbox. Add unique URL's as "id" fields in the JSON, and support GET to them. Follow the format of the JSON to provide at least the minimum set of fields to address the activity, provide a type, and provide the minimum fields for the given type.

For interop w/Mastodon you'd want to support Webfinger to find the Actor. Nothing stops you from also supporting other mechanisms, like BlueSky's domain validation.

Nothing stops you from supporting additional federation mechanisms. Nothing stops you from providing additional fields. Nothing stops you from storing data locally. Nothing stops you from adding additional ways of signing claims about individual objects or a whole repository of objects. Nothing stops you from providing additional mechanisms for distributed lookup of objects by id. Many of those things would be welcome if people wanted to do it on top of ActivityPub.

[barnabee]

Sure nothing stops you doing those things, but also nothing makes them seem like a good idea.

Why bother with Mastodon interop? Why bother building on top of a standard that doesn’t do what you want if you don’t think being part of the “Fediverse” is particularly interesting or a goal of the platform you’re building?

Something new is a better bet at this point than being anchored to or seeming like part of Mastodon IMO.

[vidarh]

> Why bother with Mastodon interop? Why bother building on top of a standard that doesn’t do what you want if you don’t think being part of the “Fediverse” is particularly interesting or a goal of the platform you’re building?

Because they pretend to want to be open, and it's sending a very clear signal that is not their goal if they're not even trying to work with the existing ecosystem.

If they just want to be a silo, that's fine. But in that case be honest about it.

[Ar-Curunir]

Er why are you conflating “being open” with “being part of the Fediverse”? The Fediverse has no monopoly on that notion, and in fact shaming folks for not wanting to integrate with it is the opposite of open. It’s like saying “BSDs pretend to be open, but they’re not even trying to be compatible with Linux”.

[vidarh]

Making a conscious choice about differences is fine. The BSDs and Linux share many things, and not other, on the basis of different goals. They're not different for the sake of being different. The vibe I'm getting from the way AT is different is that they're different for the sake of being different.

[barnabee]

The “Fediverse” is not an existing ecosystem in any way that replaces Twitter or builds an interesting social network, from my perspective at least.

No matter how open I wanted to be, if I was setting out to build a social network, I’d please precisely zero value on being connected to that “existing network”.

It is irrelevant to me, despite what a vocal minority might want me to believe.

[vidarh]

It might not matter to you, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and choosing to ignore it is a clear signal.