Comment by nyx_land
4 years ago
ActivityPub is so poorly/vaguely specified that basically every real world implementation follows what Mastodon does, so good luck with trying to get what you're after without being at least indirectly dependent on the decisions of yet another Twitter clone.
> good luck with trying to get what you're after without being at least indirectly dependent on the decisions of yet another Twitter clone
Not what I meant. The correct way to read what I wrote is with emphasis on "another Twitter-but-reinvented".
We already have have a Twitter-but-reinvented (Mastodon, and Mastodon-interoperable ActivityPub clients/servers). And people actually use it—which is the hard part of working on any kind of "social" gewgaw.
To think that we should throw that out and use twtxt or something like it would be to screw up bad. ActivityPub is better at being RSS-/Atom-like in its ability to convey structure than twtxt is, anyway. What's left is slicing it up, fusing the gaps and some now-necessary pieces with epoxy, and saying, "Here's the 'static' profile; you can look forward to support for this in Mastodon 4.0 [and everything else that tries to be interoperable]."
Yep. It was the same before Mastodon, with the predecessor of ActivityPub, et al. People had to "do whatever StatusNet/GNUSocial is doing". Even the code examples in the specs themselves were unable to interoperate with any instance whatsoever.