Meanwhile I was expecting a Linus rant about a kernel merge for it

And it's awkward to write code for and the people who inhabit it range from right-wing reactionaries to, as was so effectively put, the homeowners' association. Turns out that people don't care about "open source" unless it's easy to work with and people especially don't care about "open source" when they want to talk and shitpost with their extended friend group. (Which no, Mastodon doesn't do a good job of! Even setting aside that quote-toots are Good, Actually, Mastodon doesn't let me see replies to a toot unless I go digging so I don't know if I'm just being one of another set of replies that might already have said what I was going to say, so why post at all?)

I tend to think that the Bluesky crowd seems like they have their shit together as well as having a small beta explode can allow it (the web app is literally at `staging.bsky.app`, come on) and I think the AT Protocol docs identify real and probably intractable shortcomings in ActivityPub. But it doesn't somehow render ActivityPub moot if you want to use it. Go for it. It's still there.

Except that they are objectively wrong about nearly everything they talk about with regard to ActivityPub. Quoting from the FAQ:

> Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol.

There is a widely-accepted account portability protocol built on top of ActivityPub that multiple servers, including Mastodon and Pleroma, all support.

> We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements.

There is nothing inherent about their protocol that solves this. The app on iOS (the Bluesky app) solves this by downloading all tweets locally, which is incredibly space-inefficient and keeps the server from... doing the job of a server (storing that data for you). Additionally, user data is still accessible and downloadable after a suspension on Mastodon and Pleroma.

> Our solution for portability requires both signed data repositories and DIDs, neither of which are easy to retrofit into ActivityPub.

There is quite literally no need for this and they absolutely could have built something that addresses these issues on top of ActivityPub. We're talking about the people who couldn't use OpenAPI, but instead built a shittier version of GraphQL while bold-faced saying 'there was no alternative'.

> a preference for domain usernames over AP’s double-@ email usernames

No need to build a separate protocol for this.

> and the goal of having large scale search and discovery (rather than the hashtag style of discovery that ActivityPub favors).

Nothing about ActivityPub, Mastodon, or the general Fediverse prohibits you from scraping it to make this happen. There are services that do this right now. Mastodon has discovery built into it, this literally completely ignores that.

ActivityPub is the standard for federation on the internet, and for allowing interoperation between social networks. That is the key here. I don't give a shit if people use Mastodon. I myself probably wouldn't use it if I wasn't running a Mastodon server.

What I do care about is whether a service is built on ActivityPub. Even if my friends want to use another social media service (maybe they're on PixelFed or whatever it's called), I can still follow them and interact with them over there while using Mastodon. You cannot do that with Bluesky.

The problems that Bluesky identified with ActivityPub objectively could've been solved by building something on top of ActivityPub, retaining the 'interoperable social network' quality of it. Email had the same problems, and instead of throwing out the email protocol, we built DMARC and co on top of it.

So no, I don't want people to use Mastodon, I don't give a shit about people using Mastodon. I literally criticized Mastodon later on in the thread. What I care about is interoperability, ease of use, and open standards, and AtProto is objectively not that.

The only thing missing there to make this better - and this is not an ActivityPub thing - is including those JSON-LD signatures in more contexts, so that you don't need to rely on the export functionality (of Mastodon) to get an archive, allowing clients to choose to keep a local copy (or nominate someone to back it up for them), and providing an upload functionality for posts (Mastodon doesn't do this, but that's also a Mastodon thing, not an ActivityPub thing).

I wouldn't have had an issue if they added extensions to ActivityPub. There are even things Mastodon refuses to add that I'd applaud people for forcing the issue on by adding extensions to support. But their choice to reinvent everything puts me off.