> I was like "I'll just make a simple alternative to the BlueSky server in Elixir". But it CAN'T be a simple implementation like ActivityPub can be, because it

> I was like "I'll just make a simple alternative to the BlueSky server in Elixir". But it CAN'T be a simple implementation like ActivityPub can be, because it is extraordinarily complex and requires you to make guarantees about your storage and how your application works. You might suspect that OP has a familiarity bias here but actually there is objective evidence that ActivityPub based implementations are (relatively) simple: there are dozens of implementations of both servers and clients, will all sorts of functionality that is not emulating the "twitter/mastodon" experience. Heck, even a Wordpress plugin in the works. How well all these things will scale etc. is still somewhat of a question mark but this aspect feels important beyond specific details and choices. The simpler, more generic an approach, the more likely it is to find fertile ground and grow as a decentralized architecture. The original decentralized Web was simple and generic and this has been touted as key factor for its explosive adoption. In a sense this was also its ultimate downfall: it did not provide (out of the box) the tools to build the connectivity / social graph experience that was so enormously desirable (and was not provided e.g., by RSS). ActivityPub is somehow making up for that original gap. There might be other ways to do this. But unless there is a bigger agenda (commercialization, financialization), gratuitous complexity driven by not-invented-here or desire for centralized control is more likely to hinder than help.