4 ms·

I'm kind of tired of social networks in general, but this is attractive to me just because of that. I like Mastodon, but the underlying ActivityPub protocol was

I'm kind of tired of social networks in general, but this is attractive to me just because of that. I like Mastodon, but the underlying ActivityPub protocol was rather underwhelming.

sangnoir 3y ago
Is the AT protocol is superior in your opinion?
- unshavedyak 3y ago
  I don't know enough about it to give feedback. However Martin Kleppmann's[1] involvement is a huge selling point to me. It's also, seemingly, good enough that they're building very useful things on top of it like PDS, migrating users, etc. ActivityPub (AP) felt a bit like "good enough to get something done", which is amazing on one hand - people can do a lot with it. But it also means some harder problems are totally ignored[2], so the landscape between instances felt rocky to me. I also heavily disliked how federation worked in AP, ie how the protocol felt like it favored centralized instances because small instances were less likely to be pinged, were lower priority, in general was very spammy, etc. Not that the AP proto did anything to cause that.. it just didn't do anything to address it in my view, it was just data. Does AT fix my concerns over AP? No idea. But i appreciate a proto that had a bit more time in the oven and being used to (maybe) solve the harder problems that i experienced with AP. [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03239 https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03239 [2]: These are only my opinions from a very brief stint in trying to write an AP client to federate with Mastodon, Lemmy and Kbin. I did not dive deep into AP, so please don't judge it from my experience.
  - pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
    > I don't know enough about it to give feedback. However Martin Kleppmann's[1] involvement is a huge selling point to me. Oh, so it's just hype.
    - unshavedyak 3y ago
      It's interest, yes. Notably because the existing solution (AP) has been a negative to me. Not sure how you call that hype. Is everything hype until you understand it well to you?
mariusor 3y ago
Rather underwhelming from which point of view?
- unshavedyak 3y ago
  From the point of view of a small federated client developer, exploring the ActivityPub protocol. Far from thorough or objective.
  - mariusor 3y ago
    There is barely any project that supports client to server ActivityPub protocol, so from that point of view is underwhelming, yes. If you tried to implement a Mastodon compatible client, that's a different thing though.
treyd 3y ago
What's nice about the architecture most fedi software including Mastodon follow is that if a better protocol than ActivityPub comes along (like perhaps, Spritely) they can add support for it and concurrently federate with both protocols. Mastodon used to do this with OStatus.

I'm kind of tired of social networks in general, but this is attractive to me just because of that. I like Mastodon, but the underlying ActivityPub protocol was rather underwhelming.

sangnoir 3y ago

Is the AT protocol is superior in your opinion?

unshavedyak 3y ago
I don't know enough about it to give feedback. However Martin Kleppmann's[1] involvement is a huge selling point to me. It's also, seemingly, good enough that they're building very useful things on top of it like PDS, migrating users, etc. ActivityPub (AP) felt a bit like "good enough to get something done", which is amazing on one hand - people can do a lot with it. But it also means some harder problems are totally ignored[2], so the landscape between instances felt rocky to me. I also heavily disliked how federation worked in AP, ie how the protocol felt like it favored centralized instances because small instances were less likely to be pinged, were lower priority, in general was very spammy, etc. Not that the AP proto did anything to cause that.. it just didn't do anything to address it in my view, it was just data. Does AT fix my concerns over AP? No idea. But i appreciate a proto that had a bit more time in the oven and being used to (maybe) solve the harder problems that i experienced with AP. [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03239 https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03239 [2]: These are only my opinions from a very brief stint in trying to write an AP client to federate with Mastodon, Lemmy and Kbin. I did not dive deep into AP, so please don't judge it from my experience.
- pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
  > I don't know enough about it to give feedback. However Martin Kleppmann's[1] involvement is a huge selling point to me. Oh, so it's just hype.
  - unshavedyak 3y ago
    It's interest, yes. Notably because the existing solution (AP) has been a negative to me. Not sure how you call that hype. Is everything hype until you understand it well to you?

mariusor 3y ago

Rather underwhelming from which point of view?

unshavedyak 3y ago
From the point of view of a small federated client developer, exploring the ActivityPub protocol. Far from thorough or objective.
- mariusor 3y ago
  There is barely any project that supports client to server ActivityPub protocol, so from that point of view is underwhelming, yes. If you tried to implement a Mastodon compatible client, that's a different thing though.

treyd 3y ago

What's nice about the architecture most fedi software including Mastodon follow is that if a better protocol than ActivityPub comes along (like perhaps, Spritely) they can add support for it and concurrently federate with both protocols. Mastodon used to do this with OStatus.