ActivityPub might be a transitional technology
kyefox.com
kyefox.com
Does anyone happen to have examples of things that mastodon chooses do that effect other platforms on the fediverse?
For example (if I remember correctly) when someone is mentioned Mastodon will send you a Note with something like '@user@server' while with Pleroma sends '@<span>user</span>@<span>domain</span>'
Now this is a stupid example but I think this was what the author meant that platform have to play ball with Mastodon implementation of AP.
One of them being the feeds: it really does work well. On Mastodon I can follow people/hashtags or even multiple servers (e.g. with Fedilab), but they just don't get organized in feeds. And it turns out that I am more interested in feeds than in servers.
The default feed only shows people you follow, and if you 'bookmark' (can't remember the correct terminology) another server you get a feed that shows only that servers their timeline.
That's not a protocol thing, though. Clients can display AP or Mastodon posts as feeds, much as e.g. Phanpy do.
Feeds are a fundamental part of AT and depend on relays. There's no equivalent in Mastodon. It has relays, but they're more niche and restrictive and there's no standard way to filter, select, order, etc incoming posts.
The firehose used to be easy to get to on Twitter until they realized people would pay for it, and then all the fun mashups went away. The firehose and feeds that filter it are a fundamental aspect on AT.
It makes more sense once you've tried it. What we're seeing with Bluesky feeds is what Twitter could have been if they hadn't tried to turn the firehose into a profit center. It's hard to explain because it sounds like tags or saved searches if you're trying to relate it to the more common model of social media.
But I agree that there are limitations with using an instance centric approach and the benefits may not appeal to many people.
That's what I meant with:
>> "It's hard to explain because it sounds like tags or saved searches if you're trying to relate it to the more common model of social media."
For example: a feed that's something like a "For You" timeline without the commercial incentives to make it bad (it's empty without an account because it has nothing to work with): https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:tenurhgjptubkk5zf5qhi3og/fe...
It's not just blunt filtering. Feeds can (and do) apply machine learning, take input from your interactions, and generally do all the things a first-party timeline can do.
But I did not actively spend two years refusing to see it: it just took that time for BlueSky to open for the general public, and that's when I tried it.