Exactly. I somehow doubt Dorsey doesn't know about ActivityPub - why not just endorse it publicly if he genuinely cared about decentralization?
Are there genuine technical shortcomings in the ActivityPub standard that Twitter's engineering team has identified? Why not talk about that and contribute improvements to the standard?
Are there shortcomings to being part of the standardization process in the W3C? Then talk about that and make the processes better.
Is it that he needs his name stamped on a new protocol? I'm not sure we can do much about the terminal egotism of the ultra wealthy and its pernicious effects on our society. Solving this will take a tremendous amount of collective effort.
> I somehow doubt Dorsey doesn't know about ActivityPub - why not just endorse it publicly if he genuinely cared about decentralization?
He doesn't care about decentralization. ActivityPub is impossible to directly control and it has no innate analytics, advertising or monetization layers. This makes it impossible for Twitter to utilize such a protocol.
If anything, Dorsey wants to embrace, extend, and extinguish AP by making an incompatible protocol that he can then pump VC money into in order to have it gain traction on Twitter's terms - with all the ads, spyware and analytics that Twitter desires.
Although knowing Mastodon doesn't mean you know ActivityPub. If I recall correctly, Mastodon didn't implement ActivityPub in the beginning but started recently (within last couple of years)
First of all, I literally read the spec (and related specs) last week in detail.
Secondly, there's a massive difference between decentralized and distributed systems (I build distributed systems for a living). Perhaps you're confused about that difference?
Thirdly, if you're going to knock a collective effort like ActivityPub by calling it a "horrible protocol" without genuine technical substantiation, you're effectively just trolling. Show us that you know what you're talking about by doing some in-depth analysis of the protocol and where its shortcomings are in terms of being decentralized.
I hate AP as a protocol, but also I'd still rather use it than try to invent a new one that wouldn't get a lot of traction (though I guess if you're a big corp, there will always be traction).
For two of the biggest uses of Twitter, privately-scoped posts and private messages, Twitter implementing ActivityPub would effectively make that information public. Not a good thing, and one that Twitter would get a lawsuit for. AP is broken for any use other than publicly-scoped posts, and given that Twitter is already a huge target, I think adding fuel to the fire would really be bad here.
Sorry for my ignorance but I don't understand how that's the case? As you've stated masterdon doesn't follow activitypub 100%, would would be stopping twitter from keeping their private chat between twitter users (or even adopting another open protocol such as matrix) whilst moving their public facing stuff to activitypub?
Twitter has "private accounts," which are accounts that have restricted followers, and only allow posting to followers. This is fine with Twitter's way of doing things, however breaks in a federated world.
Matrix is bad for many reasons, but it's not a direct fix over this problem more than a band-aid.
Keeping private stuff centralized would be reasonable, but they're not going to do it: expecting large entities to handle something like this with surgical precision rather than a sledgehammer is unrealistic.
It's certainly decentralized, just federated instead of distributed.
And yeah, it sucks as a protocol (but not that badly, the standard is just weak like everything else the w3c produces) but it's better than reinventing the wheel. Or letting twitter unilaterally dictate a standard.
And please stop spamming the same message down the page.
Are there genuine technical shortcomings in the ActivityPub standard that Twitter's engineering team has identified? Why not talk about that and contribute improvements to the standard?
Are there shortcomings to being part of the standardization process in the W3C? Then talk about that and make the processes better.
Is it that he needs his name stamped on a new protocol? I'm not sure we can do much about the terminal egotism of the ultra wealthy and its pernicious effects on our society. Solving this will take a tremendous amount of collective effort.