ActivityPub might be a transitional technology

https://kyefox.com/activitypub-might-be-a-transitional-technology/

by Kye • 2 years ago

41 13 2 years ago

palata2• 2 years ago

I honestly was biased against BlueSky when I first heard about it. But after a few years trying with Mastodon, I must say BlueSky immediately solved problems I had with Mastodon.

One of them being the feeds: it really does work well. On Mastodon I can follow people/hashtags or even multiple servers (e.g. with Fedilab), but they just don't get organized in feeds. And it turns out that I am more interested in feeds than in servers.

retox• 2 years ago

The Soapbox front end gives you what you're looking for unless I'm misunderstanding.

The default feed only shows people you follow, and if you 'bookmark' (can't remember the correct terminology) another server you get a feed that shows only that servers their timeline.

jszymborski• 2 years ago

but they just don't get organized in feeds.

That's not a protocol thing, though. Clients can display AP or Mastodon posts as feeds, much as e.g. Phanpy do.

Kye2• 2 years ago

It's 100% a protocol thing. There's no firehose with AP. You only get posts from instances you've subscribed to and only from people followed by someone on your instance, and only posts since federating.

Feeds are a fundamental part of AT and depend on relays. There's no equivalent in Mastodon. It has relays, but they're more niche and restrictive and there's no standard way to filter, select, order, etc incoming posts.

The firehose used to be easy to get to on Twitter until they realized people would pay for it, and then all the fun mashups went away. The firehose and feeds that filter it are a fundamental aspect on AT.

It makes more sense once you've tried it. What we're seeing with Bluesky feeds is what Twitter could have been if they hadn't tried to turn the firehose into a profit center. It's hard to explain because it sounds like tags or saved searches if you're trying to relate it to the more common model of social media.

bishbosh• 2 years ago

Most of the platforms have to play ball with quirks and self-interested decisions in Mastodon's implementation of ActivityPub.

Does anyone happen to have examples of things that mastodon chooses do that effect other platforms on the fediverse?

Betterbee• 2 years ago

I'm writing a little activitypub server and I often encounter little quirks that make coding your own server frustating.

For example (if I remember correctly) when someone is mentioned Mastodon will send you a Note with something like '@user@server' while with Pleroma sends '@<span>user</span>@<span>domain</span>'

Now this is a stupid example but I think this was what the author meant that platform have to play ball with Mastodon implementation of AP.

nikolay• 2 years ago

Sure, "might be", but "it isn't".

wmf• 2 years ago

It's sad to see so many people forming opinions based on shallow ad hominem "Jack Dorsey bad" thinking. Bluesky rejected his ideas from the beginning and people spent two years refusing to see it. Better late than never though.

palata2• 2 years ago

That was me, I'll admit it.

But I did not actively spend two years refusing to see it: it just took that time for BlueSky to open for the general public, and that's when I tried it.

navigate8310• 2 years ago

Competition is great. Can't have another monolithic social media.

ActivityPub might be a transitional technology

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