lumpen 🍉 III (@scrum)

@jdp23 @cyrus

this is all very fascinating thank you. API's are the devil lol

I know there are many cool technical aspects of AT, but my position on it is strictly political and not technical: we can just make ActivityPub better or utilize another protocol like Zot in conjunction with AP, instead of encouraging developers to spend their valuable time working to improve Bluesky for free. I"m not against bridges and crossposting but beyond that, BS should pay devs if they want broad adoption.

I'm gonna spare you my conspiracy theories, but i'm convinced that Mastodon is by their actions, unnecessarily limiting the potential of what can be achieved by the fediverse (broadly speaking) in a way that benefits corporate platforms like threads and bluesky, i know the feature creature needs to be tamed so as not to derail the project but the fact Mastodon lags behind every other AP based platform feature-wise despite getting far more funding speaks volumes

The main reason i don't even use mastodon anymore is one minor feature: vanilla mast doesn't have any kind of custom markup, whereas missky variants have MFM, pleroma varients allow standard Markdown, BBCode and MFM, i'm not particularly good at programming but even I have written a regex based Mardown Parser, it's not hard, i just want to italicize text sometimes and embed links

Why limit ourselves to this Twitter clone model? Friendica, Hubzilla and Streams iirc all support location sharing, this has incredible potential, for example, it could provide a private alternative to dating app spyware, or create an alternative to Facebook Marketplace, imagine federated Craigslist, or even provide a means for local Taxi Drivers to compete with Uber/Lyft, it could also be used to organize protests in a private way, so many possibilities which lead to positive real world changes.

I think Streams has a lot of potential but certainly needs some polishing in terms of frontend, my ideal would be an interface similar to misskey (their webdav based user "drive" should be a standard feature) , but with Zot backend that is also compatible with Lemmy forums. I can dream at least 🙏