Comment by dchnshA | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dchnshA | Hacker News Reader

Nah thanks, I'll stick with ActivityPub.

The fact they even felt the need to create another protocol instead of using, improving and contributing to ActivityPub makes me think they want to bake a busines modell for themselves into the technology and they can't do that if they don't have full control over the spec.

ActivityPub is organically grown from a community to serve that community. Bluesky is created to combine making the profits of a commercial centralized social network + profiting from the investment from crypto bros.

ActivityPub is not perfect and nobody is pretending like it is (there is a big blog post from the co-author about what retrospectively they should have done differently, sadly I couldn't find the link), but a specification is not static ! If you have a suggestion to improve it you can propose changes and a lot of things are left to the implementation, so you can just do things differently than other ActivityPub application currently do.

In fact there are people building the future of the ActivityPub ecosystem right now: https://spritely.institute/

There is no need to create yet another specification. The only feature this claims to have, that all ActivityPub implementations currently don't have is identity portability and that can actually be implemented without changes to the ActivityPub spec, just no ActivityPub Application has implemented it yet.

'The specification may be terrible, and everything good about it may be implementation-specific, and every touted feature you're looking for may be missing from the only implementations anyone uses, but you can always just break compatibility from all the de facto standards, and so that's no reason to come up with your own base standard' seems flatly wrong, and that actually is a pretty great reason to come up with your own base standard. IRC beat the 'the standard is just fine as it is' drum for many years, and they were so amazingly correct that basically all IRC communities jumped ship to Discord within the span of a few years.

Not to mention nobody uses Mastodon either. Who should Jack be trying to placate, exactly? The extremely few people who were so fed up with Twitter that they left for Mastodon, are they eager to finally start federating with Twitter?

except nobody moved from irc to discord because of the protocol. and all discord does can be implemented on top of it. nobody cares.

irc died and discord boomed because there was a user generation change. an explosion of new users eclipsed the few irc old timers.

discord is garbage any way you look at it. dont try to sell it as fixing irc. lol.

the gp is not saying discord is a better protocol, they’re saying 1) no one cares about activitypub as a protocol because it has one de facto implementation that deviates from the protocol and 2) making something new is easier when the goal is making something people actually use

The choices aren't "just break compatibility with all de facto standards" and "come up with your own base standard". You can work on an extension to the protocol that everyone can adopt and move to if it's really an improvement.

> The extremely few people who were so fed up with Twitter that they left for Mastodon, are they eager to finally start federating with Twitter?

I never was on Twitter, but I am a Mastodon and Pixelfed user. I have zero interest in the cesspool that is Twitter joining the Fediverse and if they did I would probably instance block them.

This is about standards and my suspicion, that they want to keep all the control and profits, but now want to call it federated.

> The specification may be terrible

Have you read it ? I haven't, but it is working pretty well for the Fediverse. And once again: Standards aren't static, if you actually have a concrete problem with the standard instead of a gut feeling, that "it just sucks, don't ask about the details", then formulate it and bring it up to the creators of the spec or try to fix it yourself.

> IRC beat the 'the standard is just fine as it is' drum for many years

Well maybe that is the difference between IRC and ActivityPub. Nobody on the ActivityPub side is delusional enough to think the standard is perfect. There can pretty much by definition never be a perfect standard. There will always be use-cases that were not thought of during the creation. The solution is not to create one standard after the next, it is to improve existing ones. 1000 Standards are as useful as no standard.

Well there is an IRCv3, so it is evolving. And honestly Slack/Discord don't bring that much IMO, at least for the cost of running on a damn ElectronJS app in a proprietary system. All that for what? Reactions to messages?

The fact is that average users don't make any considerations about privacy/freedom/technical merit: they just jump on whatever is used by their own contacts. Nobody is using Mastodon because nobody is using Mastodon. It feels like one solution to that would be marketing. And given who is behind ATProto, they may have a shot at convincing many people to use their new shiny app.

necessary context:

https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/10-18-2022-the-at-protocol

the appropriate place to develop protocols is within IETF, W3C, or other open groups which I'm absolutely sure Twitter could have played a role within.

Kind of discouraging to see this PBLLC doing things their own way.

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