Comment by danpalmer

> Treat claims of "Mastodon is ActivityPub" the same as you treat claims of "Bluesky is decentralised."

Not sure if you meant this in the way I read it, but I believe that Bluesky is pretty much decentralised and tidying up the last bits of that, and I also believe that Mastodon is functionally ActivityPub and probably mopping up the last bits where the open spec meant anything.

The problem with ActivityPub is that it was missing at least half of what would be necessary to do anything with it, maybe more. You certainly can't create clients with it, it doesn't define anything about writing, etc. It's good that it's an open spec, but I see it as closer to Open Graph tags on web pages than it is to a social network foundation. That's fine... but we treat "Mastodon" as open because of ActivityPub, when in reality almost the entire system is defined by a Rails API implementation and its idiosyncrasies. I see it as a problem that you can't participate in the network without implementing an API with one implementation, rather than by implementing to a spec.