Jeremy @jdormit@mastodon.technology

for what it’s worth, I mostly agree with @denschub about his post. especially acknowledging that litepub has had a lot of difficulty gaining traction, but some good has come out of it.

a large part of why litepub failed to gain traction is because it didn’t go far enough, but it is still an activitypub dialect, and is probably the most widely deployed one verses the mastodon dialect. and, for the most part, these are cross-compatible.

i am probably going to write some response to his blog at some point, but i need to think about what i want to say about it.

what i will say is this: of all the AP implementations, I think Pleroma and some of the smaller implementations like Kroeg are the only ones that are seriously trying to deliver a universal experience. in my opinion, Mastodon and many other implementations either drop or degrade non-native content to the point that they have less functionality than RSS readers.

in particular, i don’t understand how the Mastodon developers can say:

The social network that is Mastodon isn’t really Mastodon. It’s bigger. It’s any piece of software that implements ActivityPub. That software can be wildly different in how it looks and what it does! But the social graph–what we call the people and their connections–is the same.

… when rich media objects (or hell, even Article objects) are degraded into Note objects. after all, what good is a social graph if you can’t fully interact with all of the nodes in it?

i will also say that Pleroma hasn’t been out there promising the entire world the moon. we have not been saying “yeah, implement ActivityPub and then you will automatically interoperate with us in a nice way,” because it simply isn’t true.

the main problem with ActivityPub and ActivityStreams is that the designers failed to observe or at least mention that the interpretation of objects induces side effects: each implementation has to know what a Video or an Article or a Page object are in order to be able to present them in a useful way to the user. there’s a couple of approaches that can be used to do this, you can degrade the unknown objects to an object type you understand and hope for the best, or you can define a way to present the object that makes sense. Mastodon does the former, and Pleroma does the latter.

ask yourself: who should be the ones actually pushing projects to link into the fediverse? the ones implementing a project that degrades everything to a Note, or the ones implementing a project that tries to be a universal client of everything the fediverse has to offer?

the implementations which are working hard to provide a rich experience are staying quiet about ActivityPub, and the implementations which degrade the experience are talking up a serious game about ActivityPub. i think that speaks for itself.

anyway, you should definitely read dennis’s blog. i’ll expand on this some point later.

https://schub.io/blog/2019/01/13/activitypub-final-thoughts-one-year-later.html

@announcements @ashfurrow I really do hope I don't see that day any time soon. Ash is a pretty swell guy and this instance is super nice. Keep up the good work man. 👍

If you were ever bullied; thank you for existing. If you ever felt like an outsider; thank you. If you ever felt like the only one in the world who cared about you was you; thank you. If you aren't afraid of seeing reality for what it is and not what society thinks it is; thank you. If you ever questioned authority; thank you. If you ever stuck up for someone; thank you. If you ever befriended someone specifically because you knew they had no one else; thank you. If you ever felt persecuted for existing; thank you. If you ever lost your temper and apologized heartfeltfully; thank you. If you ever did a kind act for strangers without being asked to; thank you. If you ever cried yourself to sleep at night; thank you. If you ever cried alone in the bathroom; thank you.

Knowing there is someone out there who can relate to my worst moments and desiring to find and connect with them has carried me through most hardships. So thank you for being here, on Earth, at the same time as me.

commission me for drawing pixel shrooms, fruits and crystals #portfolioday #pixelart #crativetoots #mastoart

i have a cantankerous position towards government in general, much less ours.

but i want to send some love and compassion out to my brothers and sisters who are being impacted by the shutdown.

whether you are missing a pay check or a vital service, i hope you are safe and well.

Question: Who is the male and who is the female in a relationship?

Proper Answer:

"You dont go to a chinese resteraunt and ask which chopstick is the knife and which one is the fork."

laughed hard on that when i first heard it :D

Three years since the beginning of my Ubuntu Animal Illustration Series. Everything started with the first Ubuntu release (20. October 2004), Warty Warthog. Since then I've illustrated all Ubuntu releases, 29 artworks so far.

Thank you, #Ubuntu for being awesome.

#art #illustration #mastoart

(3/3)

She ripped off her sleeves and the humble wrappings on her feet and they saw not a girl with chickenfeet but a harpy as beautiful and terrible as a falcon.

She flexed the wings she had been trained to hide and the talons she had been told to hate as her cry went on and tears came to her eyes.

'Please stop,' they begged her.

And as the shriek died in her throat, she realised that her difference was power and that she should never have given in to silence.

Her reign began that day.

ActivityPub: Good Enough for Jazz https://jeremydormitzer.com/blog/activitypub-good-enough-for-jazz/

@sean @kaniini @jalcine AP is popular because it's simple and it works. I absolutely agree the design isn't perfect because it does have some gaping holes, but as a protocol framework, it's really solid.

I say we build on that rather than lamenting the fact an imperfect idea is getting traction.

With all of these big brains floating around the fediverse, I know we can do better than 'this is bad, but I don't know the answer'.

This is such an opportunity to set a positive tone moving forward.

@mmn That and not everyone can just pick up stuff and just self host software. We as people who can gotta make it easier for others and that costs money, resources and time @Are0h

@jdormit Great post - and I agree with the sentiment. The “switching costs” are perhaps the most challenging- people have built their whole connected network of people within the walled gardens of mainstream social networks. Rebuilding that elsewhere is a large amount of effort - that many (most?) people simply have no desire to do yet. It may be that we need to continue to chip away at barriers so that as more people have the desire, the path is easier for them to move.