Good people don't much like those who tread a different path.
-- Georges Brassens
ActivityPub (and all the other standards created by the SocialWG) had zero input from social media corporations. This is extremely non-standard practice. On the Internet, standards are fundamentally important. Every connection between a computer and the vast network of billions of computers on the Internet is governed by standards. Email is governed by SMTP....
Above all, the biggest contrasts the 2022 Twitter wave revealed between Mastodon and Twitter/X are the contrasts between individualism versus social groups and centralization versus noncentralization. This chapter began with a common approach to talking about social media: focus on central sites, or better yet, central figures....
Hometown isn’t the only Mastodon fork. There are others, such as Glitch, which includes experimental features. Forks are a major part of FOSS development. Sometimes, features implemented on forks are integrated back into the mainline Mastodon code....
Denying the Dogmas of Free Speech Absolutism and Individualism...
The most important factor, however, was governance. People didn’t just contribute code to Mastodon, but ideas on how the Mastodon project should govern itself....
Yet the story of Musk’s Twitter and Mastodon is actually an inversion: instead of it being a story of the one great man and the big single corporate site, it’s a story of heterogeneous networks of people and machines....
The other half of the ActivityPub specification discusses client-to-server. This is what is largely ignored, and developers ignore it in large part because of Mastodon. Even though Mastodon adopted ActivityPub and ultimately saved ActivityPub from the oblivion of being a mere W3C note, Mastodon’s popularity has also had a negative effect on the protocol....