[johnonolan]

I think if you were to ask an ActivityPub absolutist about this (of which I am not one) the answer would be that you follow different things from different places, and it all balances out based on utility. So the idea is not that you have centralise all your following under a single account, but rather than you can follow anything, from anywhere. So maybe you follow video stuff from a Peertube instance, and you follow longform writing from a Ghost instance - but if every so often you want to mix and match... you can.

ActivityPub, like many of 'open social' web standards before it, suffers to some extent from being invented without clear enough usecases in mind. Much like WebMentions (which we also adopted) the answer to "what's it for?" - often seems to be "yes".

So you can either try to ship the spec and support everything, or you can try to build an end-user usecase that fits within the spec, and get more specific. We tend to lean toward the latter, and try to create something useful - which would still be useful even if nobody knew it was running on [whatever web standard].

Whether we can succeed with it or not, remains to be seen :)