This is why conflating #mastodon and the #fediverse is bad. People outside the fediverse just start thinking they're the same thing or that mastodon is social. I'm sure there mastodon team is fine with that, but it's not good for the fediverse. We've seen it more broadly on the web with IE, and more recently, Chrome. Open standards have to have a healthy ecosystem of implementations or they don't remain open.
And despite talking about new user experience a lot, the feedback from new users (which are pain points for existing users) is ignored. The main UI is complex, columns should flex, why can't I interact with public pages, etc.
0x1C3B00DA (0x1c3b00da@edolas.world)'s status on Monday, 09-Jul-2018 10:48:01 EDT
0x1C3B00DAI think #mastodon growing so quickly may have held back the #fediverse. It's considered a de facto reference implementation for #activitypub, but it's a limited implementation. It doesn't support most Actor and Object types, it's client and server are tightly coupled, and it was designed specifically for microblogging. ActivityPub was an afterthought for it and it doesn't use it anywhere near its full potential.
Now every new AP project is following suit, developing a client/sever combination specifically to handle a single Object type, any enabling federation support on a project by project basis. We need a full AP server that's not tied to a specific client. It should support AP C2S API so a user can login to any client using oauth and handle different types. A user could use one client to create events, one to manage photos, and another to write notes or articles, and they'd all be tied to the same account.
Hopefully, people will get past thinking of Mastodon, Pleroma, PixelFed, etc and just think of the ActivityPub network. I don't think the fediverse will continue to grow without this change in philosophy.
Another upcoming #activitypub project, #prismo, is a federated link aggregation app. This could replace Reddit, Hacker News, and Lobsters. Looking forward to this. @prismo
If you have microblogging (#mastodon, #pleroma), macroblogging (#plume), and event management (#gettogether) all federated and talking to each other, you don't really need a one-stop solution. There's no reason you couldn't have a platform that does it all, but for the small teams that are building these projects, maybe it makes sense to limit the focus of the project and rely on federation and other projects to fill in gaps.
The design could use some polish, but it's a great start. The articles federate and comments are working with external software. And it doesn't have any javascript!
Cool. There's a new #activitypub platform for blogging called #plume, meant to be an alternative to #medium. This could be a pretty big deal, because it means orgs can go all in on the #fediverse. They can have a #mastodon/#pleroma acct for quick communication and host their blog on plume instead of medium and all of it will federate, so users can choose how to follow and communicate with them.