> This is so dramatic it's hard to recover the original complaint.
I'm curious if this message is new to many here?
What makes it feel "dramatic"? I get the impression people say something is "dramatic" when it doesn't really land or connect? Because when something punches me in the gut, I don't say "that was dramatic", I say "that was compelling".
I'm over 40, and these kinds of concerns (technology serving people's deeper needs rather than serving them up fleeting entertainment) has been on my radar for 15+ years. Back then, I was expecting to go into public administration, policy analysis, or "technology for good" to use what might be a naive phrase.
I've noticed a funny tendency among some Fediverse passionates to have strong feelings about how others should be using it. Author says "We could not both be right," but that's rather antithetical to the value proposition of decentralized social media, IMO.
A healthy user-empowered ecosystem naturally has some fragmentation; that's a sign it's working as it should to accommodate different tastes and visions. You can't use the same metrics for judging monolothic systems driven by a central authority as decentralized ones.
I share many of the author's opinions on communication vs entertainment, but the framing around an intentionally open and flexible system like ActivityPub leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
The gist of it is if Google decides to build GMail but Gmail silently deleted emails that it did not find entertaining enough so you didn’t even know they were ever sent to you.
The article is saying some people see ActivityPub as a communication protocol like Gmail where you expect all messages to be delivered, while others see it as an entertainment protocol where the goal is to entertain the user.
It's more like Usenet users complaining that NZB downloaders don't let their users read text posts. Nobody using an NZB downloader gives a fuck about text posts. They're not there to chat with their fellow humans, they're there to download files. Both the text posts and binary files are transmitted by the same substrate, NNTP, but the protocol clearly has multiple groups of people using it for very different purposes.
Comparing it to email is inappropriate, because email is addressed to you, and you get upset if email servers/clients drop emails. But newsfeeds are not addressed to you. Neither is RSS/Atom. ActivityPub, generally speaking, isn't either. How you choose to experience messages coming your way is up to you. This whole article is making the assumption that if you want something more different, e.g. Pixelfed, PeerTube, Lemmy (Fediverse Instagram/YouTube/Reddit), it basically must also be Mastodon/Pleroma (Fediverse Twitter). Why must it?
In the article the author mentioned that it's possible to message him over several protocols, but that only one of them will actually deliver the message?
It's on the author to advertise how they'd like communicated with.
A phone number != an email address != a WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram account != a Twitter/Facebook/Mastodon/etc. handle != a specific handle on a specific Discord/Slack/IRC service != "I go to the Lamb and Flag in Punterby on Wednesdays, maybe see me there"
It's irrelevant whether a low level protocol or its clients deliver everything or not. What matters is human A reaching human B. If human B wants to be reached, they will tell people in advance what their communication preferences are. And they will recognise that not all communication methods are fungible nor want to be or can be made to be. You can't expect ActivityPub to have the same behaviour as SMTP any more than you could IRC.
The app is not showing posts that don't contain a picture, but shows posts that do. So if you browse someone Mastodon account on Pixelfed, you will see just fraction of their posts.
I don't think it's important at all because nobody really uses Mastodon anyway; but it shows that doing decentralised software is hard, because each actor can just do whatever they want.
Meanwhile this is the normal, expected, and well-received behavior on ATproto. Every platform defines its own lexicon and can optionally support others. It wouldn't make sense for a blogging platform like (for example) Leaflet to show Bluesky posts the same way it shows blog posts. And apps can be selective too: Skylight only shows video posts. It's exactly how it should be for a video app.
The "account" then is just the data on your PDS with as many views into it as someone wants to develop. If I'm browsing (viewing) an account (subset of data) through a platform or app devoted to one type of content (data), I only want to see that kind of content in the main timeline. I can always pull out something like ATExplore or PDSls if I want to see everything.
The complaint only makes sense for a protocol that expects you to make a new account for a new platform and has limited portability. It doesn't make sense when an "account" is just a view into data, no more morally compromised than an SQL query. I'm skeptical the movement to revive the dead half of ActivityPub that could enable similar functionality will go anywhere, but I am rooting for the folks behind it.
> I don't think it's important at all because nobody really uses Mastodon anyway;
Me and all the (real human) people I follow on Mastodon disagree. Many well known people are on Mastodon. A lot of folks I used to follow on RSS are on Mastodon. For me, Mastodon is what killed RSS.[1]
[1] RSS was well and alive long after Google Reader shut down.
Dansup has built a photo-sharing app on top of ActivityPub, and we humans are a lost cause because the app doesn't also do text-only messages?
Is that the gist of it?