Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

[flagged]



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.


[flagged]


> You're frankly uninformed on many levels, and while I'd normally refrain from replying to someone so obviously delusional

This would be inappropriate even if you weren't factually wrong.


Webber personally refuted your claim in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21764564


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.


It's not better at all than reinventing the wheel. The wheel should be reinvented until someone makes one that isn't square.


From my viewpoint the problem with ActivityPub and Mastodon is that they copied twitters flaws: public by default.

There's a reason why people stick with Facebook, go to WhatsApp, Telegram and what not: most of us don't want to communicate publicly all the time.


Facebook Messenger, you mean ? I guess that most Facebook groups are public ?


Please elaborate.



Thanks! This, and a few your other posts on this topic gave me some interesting things to think about and links to read.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: