> We sign the records so that authenticity can be determined without polling the home server, and we use a repository structure rather than signing individual records so that we can establish whether a record has been deleted (signature revocation).
Why do you need an entirely separate protocol to do this? Email had this exact same problem, yet was able to build protocols on top of it in order to fix the authenticity problem. This is the issue: instead of using ActivityPub, which is simpler to implement, more generic, and significantly easier for developers to understand, you invented an overly-complex alternative that doesn't work with the rest of the federated Internet.
> The schema is a well-defined machine language which translates to static types and runtime validation through code generation. It helps us maintain correctness when coordinating across multiple servers that span orgs, and any protocol that doesn't have one is informally speccing its logic across multiple codebases and non-machine-readable specs.
OpenAPI specs already exist and do the same job. They support much more tooling and are much easier for developers to understand. There is objectively no reason why you could not have used them, you are literally just making GET and POST requests with XRPC. If you really wanted to you could've used GraphQL.
There are plenty of protocols which do not include machine-readable specs (including TCP, IP, and HTTP) that are incredibly reliable and work just fine. If you make the protocol simple to understand and easy to implement, you really don't need this (watch Simple Made Easy by Rich Hickey).
> The DID system uses the recovery key to move from one server to another without coordinating with the server (ie because it suddenly disappeared).
Why is this necessary? The likelihood of a server just randomly disappearing is incredibly low. There are community standards and things like the Mastodon Server Covenant that make this essentially a non-issue. You're storing all of a user's post history on their own device in the case of an immediate outage. That's equivalent to Gmail storing all of your emails on your device in case you want to immediately pack up and move to another email provider. That is an extremely high cost (I have 55k tweets, that would be a nightmare to host locally) for an outcome that is very unlikely.
> It supports key rotations and it enables very low friction moves between servers without any loss of past activity or data.
This forces community servers to store even more data, data that may not even be relevant or useful. Folks might have gigabytes of attachments and hundreds of thousands of tweets. That is not a fast or easy thing to import if you're hosting a community server. This stacks the decks against community servers.
Most people want some of their content archived, not all, and there is no reason why archival can be separate from where content is posted. Those can be two separate problems.
> That design is why we felt comfortable just defaulting to our hosting service; because we made it easy to switch off after the fact if/when you learn there's a better option. Given that the number one gripe about activitypub's onboarding is server selection, I think we made the right call.
Mastodon is able to do this on top of ActivityPub. Pleroma works with it. Akkoma works with it. There's already a standard for this. Why are you inventing an unnecessary one?
Mastodon also changed their app to use Mastodon.Social as the default server, so this is a non-issue.