I think a major source of disillusionment that I’m dealing with involves coming to terms with the shortcomings of #ActivityPub, especially as most of the network implements a Mastodon-centric version of the spec.

Sean Tilley

To be clear, I think the hackers building the cool, innovative, bleeding-edge stuff with it will be fine, will continue to develop, and will ultimately be the ones to move things forward in the long term.

However, I make no illusions about the protocol itself, The Social Web Foundation, or any of the working groups involved with it. To me, these are slow-moving, incapable of examining the true faults of the spec, and unwilling to accept hard criticisms. We have floating proposals for encrypted messaging, some half-baked concept for migrating identities around (LOLA), and maybe some vague promises about making the process of onboarding and building more palatable for corporations and businesses.

To me, this is a categorical failure at the highest levels. It has almost completely demoralized me from reporting on or participating in this space. I don’t think Evan is particularly suited to building a community or evolving the spec or even acting as an advocate. His repeated interactions over the last few months have done more harm than good.

Do you know what it’s like to be an advocate and a champion of a space for 15 years, to see upward mobility and evolution, to watch adoption hit a peak, and watch everybody in positions of authority just absolutely squander it over and over again, because they can’t see past their own myopic views?

Sean Tilley

I didn’t join this space 15 years ago because I was interested in “us vs them” rhetoric or secretarian bullshit. I joined this space because I saw a vision of what the Web could be, what amazing things we could build together, and how this could empower billions of people around the world.

I still believe in the overall vision and the mission. But, I’m not convinced that ActivityPub is actually the future. Right now, Bluesky is beating the pants off of us just by sheer adoption, cohesion, and availability of features. Nostr is beating the pants off of us because of its focus on resiliency, censorship resistance, peer-to-peer concepts, and doing wild stuff out in the open.

This isn’t to say that we’re lacking in the innovation department. But, it’s all at the grassroots level, or at the fringes of the network. The W3C / SocialCG / protocol development side of the house is stagnant, and ostensibly operated by people whose only concept of advocacy is half-baked promises and ridiculing anybody who isn’t building on the thing they’re advocating for. There’s no future in that.

João Pinheiro

@deadsuperhero Hi Sean! It's interesting that I was thinking about saying something like "in the 6 years that have gone by since I joined the Fediverse I've been watching less and less people talking about it's improvement and more and more people coming and going and trying harder to make it a clone of the bird site". I'm not an IT person, just a regular user, but I've been noticing that those who work the magic of the inner cogs of the Fediverse appear less and less, and the "bad users" more and more. By "bad users" I mean all those that don't give a damn about the spirit of the Fediverse and only want to find a place to vent their hatred against everyone.

Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 🙄

@deadsuperhero Ever since @fediverse went silent, I haven't had any idea of what's going on with growth.

Ideally I'd want to see fedi keep at slow growth, not giant silo hockey-stick shit under Dorsey again, and sure not Zuck. But some people have got used to "everyone is on one network, and it's owned by an evil billionaire" (redundant).

And mastofe sucks and gets suckier all the time, Eugen's certainly gone way past his Peter Principle level of incompetence.

nigel

As soon as I saw normie uptake in 2022 from twitter migrants and how we had to deal with it, I knew that AP was not the all-encompassing future, and I'd just have to wait around for "the next big thing

". It just is not ideal and needs to be iterated on either through changes or a complete new protocol/next generation type thing.

I was hoping Spritely/Goblins or whatever it is was it, but it seems to not be the direction that I thought it was.

I'd love to help progress this area but alas I must simply complain from the sideline due it not being my skillset. And generally these days I just quietly observe, hoping something better that isn't crypto bullshit pops up that I can check out.

And I agree re Evan. Evan appears to be all about progressing Evan's career in this area and that's it - not what is best for users/community.

So yeah, I really feel these posts hard @[email protected]

Sean Tilley

@joaopinheiro part of this is due to the fact that developing a federated social platform can be incredibly difficult to master. Even on a good day, software development can be really hard. There are people in this space building amazing breathtaking things, and they’ve gotten this far in spite of a long road of difficulties.

Regarding building a Twitter clone, I have mixed opinions. The network has historically built clones of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc, since the very early days of the network. Prior to Mastodon, there was even a custom theme for GNU Social called Quitter that more or less looks like 2010-era Twitter.

I think that focusing on designs with good usability is important, even when they’re sometimes derivative of existing things. Some of the underlying concepts of how this place works are not readily apparent to newcomers, despite thousands of attempts to write good guides and provide easy resources.

That said, I do think we limit ourselves by imitating what already exists, rather than trying to design something new and unique. That is much harder, and is often the product of years and years of work by designers and UX experts to figure out how to make the big ideas click. It’s extremely valuable, but often misunderstood. Twitter didn’t emerge fully-formed, it took like two decades to produce what most people remember of it. People just assume when they write an app that this part is easy.

Sean Tilley

@mdhughes Yeah, I think slow and steady growth is generally fine, especially when it comes to long-term adoption.

However, there are aspects of the core experience of Mastodon that absolutely suck, and are not easily fixed. The fact that the whole network built against this, and then ended up building full-stack platforms instead of ActivityPub C2S clients, have put us between a rock and a hard place.

Also, for the record, Dorsey has been out of the Bluesky picture for a long time now, and spends most of his time funding various Nostr / Bitcoin projects through grants. I have my own nitpicks with both networks, but neither of them are quite the picture of Musk / Zuckerberg that you’re describing.

Sean Tilley

@nigel Spritely is super interesting, I kind of view it as the Plan9 to ActivityPub’s Unix. Faulty analogy, I know, but there’s a lot of really forward-thinking stuff in Spritely. It’s just, y’know, high-level abstract things written in Scheme, and possibly above the comprehension of 99% of human beings.

I actually think that normie adoption is to some degree good, in terms of being a healthy indicator for the ecosystem. The problem is that even the biggest projects in the space are pretty much just scraping by, and a lot of major development just kind of…grinded to a halt. The protocol itself is almost a decade old, and has yet to see a major addendum or overhaul.

Mastodon seems to have hit some kind of maturation 2-3 years ago, with incremental adjustments added ever since. I don’t completely blame the project, they’ve gotta find a way to do major development with what they’ve got, while also supporting thousands of servers running their software. That shit is hard.

nigel

Yep completely agree on all points. Mastodon isn't doing anything "wrong", but it's just the nature of the beast now that large changes are not going to be easy, or even happen at all.

Which is why I am thinking that AP (in it's current form anyway) has basically matured and done it's dash (at least from the interacting with Mastodon view), and now we need to work on the next iteration with all of those lessons taken on board. Which realistically is a good 5+ years away anyway, and by then AP will be very stale.

Dunno, been something I've been thinking about but I have no way to effect change so

Sean Tilley

@nigel It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot, too. I think FEPs are our best bet for the time being.

I’ve been interested in building my own platform for the longest time. I absolutely suck at coding in JavaScript, but would be motivated to learn and git gud if it meant building towards the big ideas I’ve been dreaming about over the years.