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I really by and large have mostly lost faith that anything short of a miracle will get #ActivityPub to where I would like it to be, and the forces working against success here are just hard to even look at
I support the groups that are trying to define a way forward, and I suspect in many, many ways the battle is lost until and unless one of those efforts succeeds well enough to define a better way forward, and there's no way to know what that would look like or if it is even possible.
1/
There are several people doing very good work in this field still and they may get us there either in part or in whole... eventually, dragging everyone kicking and screaming into a better model of development and of thinking. #Letterbook comes to mind as an example.
But as a vision or as a community I don't have much hope unless something dramatic changes.
That makes me sad and I've lost more and more hope the more I've dealt with it or the more I've seen.
2/
Not because, as one person put it, I "don't know social networking software" but because I _do_ understand distributed systems software, protocols, and APIs.
Sure sure, I don't think anything is dying tomorrow, and I do prefer it here to elsewhere, but it doesn't seem to be sustainable.
That just makes me sad every time I go back to hammering out the details in my own projects.
Maybe someone will pull off a miracle, godspeed to those fighting that fight, I hope you prove me wrong.
3/3
@hrefna welp. that's quite distressing to hear. we've heard you talk about it before but we'd very much like to hear more about your conclusions.
@hrefna@hachyderm.io it's sad and frustrating. Are you still working on FeatherPub?
@jdp23 Yes, but slowly. Reevaluating my approach right now on it and how I want to manage it going forward. Which may be more public and more aggressive or it may be a completely different direction, or it may be just focusing on my own project first and worrying about the compatibility layer later.
@hrefna@hachyderm.io There's a lot to be said for worrying about the compatibility layer later. It's such a bizarre situation ... the 2022/2023 adoption had so many people with deep distributed systems experience, and while there are some very encouraging projects (Letterbook for example, and the data portability stuff Lisa Dussault has been working on) the overall ActivityPub ecosystem has really failed to capitalize.
@hrefna@hachyderm.io ActivityPub does seem to have found a niche in tying together large existing commercial social media: Flipboard, Wordpress, Threads, Medium, Ghost, etc. Useful but does not fully realize the transformational "alternate to Big Tech / surveillance capitalism" or "queer trans and non-binary-centric" aspects of the fediverse.
At this point ATProto seems to me like a better platform for creating a public conversation-focused social network. The broader ATmosphere is still at an early stage and there isn't really an interop story yet. I should probably do a post on "What Bluesky and the ATmosphere can learn from Mastodon and the Fediverse" -- for example it's very likely to go down the path of Bluesky being the de facto standard, hmm sounds familiar.
@hrefna if it makes you feel any better, I felt that way just about 14 years ago. A previous iteration of the protocols, a different social landscape, but your sentiments feel very familiar. There's been a LOT of progress, though, and I have more hope than I did even at my most optimistic in the past. I share a lot of your concerns, but have hope that sooner or later we'll get there. All the work is important, even if it feels a bit futile in the moment. 
@hrefna Hopefully soon to be published O'Reilly book will shine some light on ActivityPub's idiosyncrasies...