re: this thread by @trwnh

[u2764@icosahedron.website]

re: this thread by @trwnh <https://mastodon.social/@trwnh/113193310287045255>

Point of agreement: ActivityStreams is a bad vocabulary which is aimed, primarily, at removing posts from social context so that they can be shuffled around between platforms without care to where they originally came from. It suffers from numerous flaws, both ontological and social. Its adoption was driven more by a desire to move away from the “pull”‐based model of Atom feeds and OStatus and towards a “push”‐based model built on Json than it was anything else.

There are other thoughts I have, for which it is less clear if they are disagreements or clarifications.

[u2764@icosahedron.website]

One thing I feel is worth emphasizing, which I didn’t see in that thread: The #fediverse, in its current iteration, is anti‐Web for the same reason that Facebook is anti‐Web: The major stakeholders want platform control. The reason why Mastodon uses its own API instead of ActivityStreams C2S isn’t because ActivityStreams C2S isn’t powerful enough, but because it is TOO powerful: It allows clients to create and publish objects which contain properties that the backend server does not, and does not need to, understand. With ActivityStreams C2S, clients could implement quote publishing today with no work or effort from the Mastodon backend. Mastodon doesn’t support this, and instead requires clients to use its own API, because it fundamentally does not want to enable clients to operate in ways which contradict its “vision”, and controlling the API is the most straightforward way of ensuring that vision remains intact.

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

@u2764 yeah i kind of wanted to get into that but didn’t know where to fit it in