i would maybe be fine with the complexity if it was actually useful or necessary complexity, but it is not

we're adding the complexity in all the wrong areas

@trwnh do you have something particular in mind?

@karadoc it's just a lot of stuff recently that i have a hard time picking something specific. the overall legibility of this ecosystem is trending downwards though, and we're not even getting any user benefits out of it

@trwnh mandatory BITE activities support in all software

@karadoc i guess one thing that got to me recently was the idea that an Article should have a `preview` that is a Note, because some softwares like mastodon use a fallback repr for Article that plucks name/summary/url and converts that to a status. the idea of what to actually put in that preview? ...name, summary, and url, but preformatted inside `preview.content`. never mind that AS2-Core recommends using name/summary/content as fallback text repr for unknown objects... which is what we do now

@karadoc but not only is preview unnecessary, it's also not even the correct semantic relation... you are fundamentally dealing with alternate representations of the same resource. whether you describe it as an Article or a Note is not the issue.

a proper use of `preview` would be to provide an actual preview of the Article... but that doesn't seem to be the intent or the use case. this is being framed as a way to get around mastodon special-casing Articles by... special-casing preview?

@gabboman that would be an easy change that provides user value, so not what i'm talking about :3

@karadoc there's some other stuff that came up recently that i've noticed as being logically inconsistent, perhaps subtly so, but arguing for it to be changed would be unproductive because people wouldn't listen to me or understand what's wrong about it. i'm not really sure what the best path forward is on any of this, because fedi seems to be fine with things not making sense and hostile to correctness-related concerns.

@trwnh @gabboman said the person without any plans to support biting smh my head /j /lh

@karadoc compare and contrast to how discussions go around things like custom audiences or subscribing to a subset of activities... seemingly no appetite to ever discuss those things. but we can talk about whether it makes sense to have a LikeRequest, ShareRequest, ReplyRequest activity instead of what we currently have which is simply Like, Announce, Follow... we don't call them FollowRequest activities, and i don't see why we should. yet we end up with QuoteRequest instead of Quote.

@alexia @gabboman atm i have no plans to ever interop with fedi myself because i don't see the point in it and i could do without the insanity for no real gain whatsoever

just gonna tend to my website in private and maybe have something public by end of year

@alexia @trwnh I dont think that "im gona make an ap software from scratch" is a good aproach. Ive seen people a lot more clever and more motivated than me fail.

Instead, make a janky social media from scratch that is "just what you want", conect it to fedi and or bluesky, and make everyone else life's harder by adding new features

@gabboman @alexia that's what i'm saying, i don't wanna connect to fedi or bluesky when all it does is make my thing unreasonably complicated. if i wanted to talk to people on fedi or bluesky i'd just use the already existing unreasonably complicated thing

@trwnh Yeah ok. I haven't been watching this kind of stuff unfold, but what you are describing does sound like people are faffing around with bits and pieces of stuff, with unclear and possibly inconsistent goals.

It reminds me of some discussion ages ago about 'starter packs'. The gist was that Mastodon should have 'starter packs', because they were very popular on Blue Sky, but with a more features... Like, there would be requests sent to the people on the starter packs, asking if they were ok with being on the list - and that then the list would have 'approved / denied / pending' status for each list item; and users would have special profile setting to auto-approve / auto-deny... etc.

To me that sounded overly complex. There are threads posted every day where users recommend their favourite people to follow; and that certainly doesn't go through any vetting process for approvals. We can already make 'lists', so surely just sharing one of those is enough.

And do starter packs exist yet? I haven't heard anything about it for several months. I guess that train lost momentum.

@karadoc not *quite* that, per se... the thing that bothers me the most is logical inconsistency and things not making sense. i wish any of this was provably correct. other protocols don't have it this bad. i guess part of the problem is the refusal to recognize actual protocols on fedi, because it's more politically expedient to pretend we're all following the same protocol? not sure