I have been working lately on self-hosting my own mastodon instance (it's up already, follow me on @root@lr0.org). I was wondering why not so many social media sites implement AP, knowing it will definitely increase engagement and make generally everything more accessible (apparently many of the dead social media projects that GNU implemented back in the day are doing that).
A developer from blusky gave an interesting reasoning:
We looked quite closely at ActivityPub. Here's why we didn't go with it:
- AP doesn't have the facilities for global aggregation which can power search, discovery, algorithms, and metrics. The user community has been very clear that they do not want it to be introduced. We felt the connectivity of a shared global network was extremely important to the UX, but we felt it would be wrong to fly in the face of the AP world's established norms & wishes.
- We felt that strong account portability was an extremely important feature of the system, to ensure that users don't get locked into a specific host. AP's redirection model of account migration concerned us.
- We're concerned about the cost structure of AP. We're concerned that self-hosters are going to pay a prohibitively high price for virality. This is why we designed the network to avoid placing heavy load on PDS. I know that the AP world is frustrated with the competition between the protocols and suspicious of how we've chosen to do things. It's a shame because I think we're after similar things, and hold similar values. We didn't set out to sabotage the AP world; we just felt like there were important changes that needed to happen for this mission to work.
Note, however: Our software is not proprietary. It's open-source. The specs are open. The network firehose is open. We're working on getting every piece of the infrastructure into good governance and straightforward self-hosting. It just takes time.
I think the first point is a fair one. I find it frustrating too how the fediverse community is extremely anti-search relating to concerns of data-harvesting, but I think this still can happen anyway if someone wants it, especially with a accessible and open protocol like the ActivityPub (maybe less possible in instances that restrict new logins). I disagree with 2 and 3 too. blusky could definitely have allowed AP engagement, but with keeping it discouraged or not very obvious through UI/UX. #Programming