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@deadsuperhero it had *several* killer features actually!
- circles: copied from diaspora* aspects, you get to decide who can see your posts
- collections: categorize your posts
- you could like ("+1") anything on the web, not just google+ posts
- communities
- hangouts
- photos
the actual reason it failed is because of the forced youtube integration and the nymwars bullshit.
@codl here's a cat you can post
@codl sends you a pic of any cat bc as we all know cats own themselves
@julian @deadsuperhero it's amazing how far you can get if you punt on all the hard problems
(atproto is a really good way to build centralized apps with bring-your-own storage because in the typical case it uses centralized identity and centralized schemas. it's the equivalent of having a github account with specifically-named repositories expected to contain a certain file layout)
thing i noticed on @tootapp and now cannot unsee: notifications use square avatars but grouped notifications use circle avatars
@deadsuperhero being rudderless might be preferable than steering the ship toward certain destinations. i think my "worst possible outcome" is looking around and realizing that the fediverse has replicated the exact same things i ran away from.
@deadsuperhero ah, one of my biggest critiques of fedi vs web
@julian @deadsuperhero this is basically email for me. my email account is already that dashboard.
@alice thank you for your service
@davidbisset it told me my fish wasn't fishy enough 
@quillmatiq put simply, i am far more affected by mastodon's decision to be inspired by twitter and build a twitterlike system. i believe this decision is holding the entire activitypub ecosystem back, because prospective new implementers want to be compatible with mastodon so they can talk to mastodon's users. in doing so, they neglect to handle the more general use cases that activitypub and activitystreams were designed for.
@quillmatiq sure, but other non-mastodon softwares (misskey in particular) have had what you would call "quote posts" for years. they just don't render with a preview in mastodon. the ux impact of "i saw a post and had to click a link" is far lower than the ux impact of "i am banned in turkey".
if there's anything to be said about the impact of mastodon's decisions, the default 500 character limit is a way bigger deal. or lack of support for object types besides Person Create Note.
@thisismissem @quillmatiq ironically, bluesky's interaction gating only works because they are the single entity that controls the primary appview. it would be trivial for someone to set up an appview that didn't respect interaction gates, but the only reason no one has done this yet is because it's simply not worthwhile to do so.
@quillmatiq no, a moderation decision would be like banning your account or making it invisible. mastodon users can still click a link even if it doesn't have a preview.
@quillmatiq there is a world of difference between "moderation decisions" and "how quote posts work". quote posts are just links that might have a preview. this is far from "the broadest impact on the fediverse experience" -- i am overwhelmingly more impacted by the moderation decisions of my server than i am by how one software chooses to approach a feature i don't use. the comparison falls flat because bsky is a single entity, but there are tens of thousands of mastodon servers alone.
@hazelnoot @kopper it feels like mastodon has recently become a bit more comfy with "next masto version supports consuming this new thing, next+1 masto version supports producing this thing" and letting everyone else figure out their own plans, so it depends on whether everyone else follows along or not (assuming they want masto compat)
(as someone who doesn't want masto compat, i'm more willing to make breaking changes for my personal website if it makes sense to do so)
@hazelnoot @kopper yeah, you'd need buy-in from existing softwares to implement some kind of transition period, but outside of mastodon recently i don't think anyone wants to charge ahead with new stuff. but mastodon doesnt want the responsibility of stewarding their own protocol, so it's convenient to paint it as a common approach to avoid concerns of "mastodon EEE" or whatever people are going to say when any attempt at progress is led by mastodon
@kopper @hazelnoot @erincandescent the exact method doesnt matter as long as both sides agree on it
it's just that none of the methods are currently fully defined or negotiable, everyone just assumes everyone else supports the exact same scheme
and they do have some different qualities. an authorization token doesnt imply any authentication, for example, but a signed statement that you are authenticating as a certain identity clearly does
@hazelnoot @kopper if i had to guess at what's leading to stalling, it's probably more that some aspects of the specs were not fully developed in time, and fedi made some choices based on incomplete guidance that resulted in tech debt, and now some factions want to fix the problems, while other factions want to ratify the problems. i guess you could chalk this up to "difference in goals" but there's also a certain amount of resistance to paying that tech debt.
@kopper @hazelnoot @erincandescent there are a few diff ways to do that i think:
- sign your http GET
- or, obtain an oauth token and use it for GET
- or, start a session directly on the target site, using credentials or OIDC or some kind of federated identity
this is where i was talking about auth-schemes and WWW-Authenticate earlier, it would be nice to know which schemes were supported for viewing private resources