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Reply to @phnt@fluffytail.org
Jupiter Rowland@jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu (2026-06-11 03:39:59)
@Phantasm The protocol is described as a social networking protocol in its abstract. That people managed to bolt on forums and marketplaces on top of it is more of a testament to its stupid levels of extensibility.
Where do you think ActivityPub came from?

It wasn't Eugen Rochko who invented it.

It was invented by @Erin Kissane and @Evan Prodromou. The same Evan Prodromou who started the Fediverse as early as 2008 with the microblogging website Identi.ca, the software Laconi.ca which it is based on and the server application StatusNet based on Laconi.ca. And I know from personal, first-hand experience that StatusNet had groups.

Also, the very first server application that implemented ActivityPub was Hubzilla in July, 2017, two months before Mastodon which started out on the same protocol as StatusNet. And Hubzilla's forums very much support ActivityPub, just like Hubzilla has full support for other ActivityPub-based groups.

The reason why Mastodon doesn't have groups isn't because ActivityPub doesn't really support them. It's because Twitter has never had groups.

And to me social media qualifies as anything that isn't a blog that allows comments. Since that is its dictionary definition more or less. AIM was social media, Twitter is social media, Fediverse is social media. They are all medias that allow social interactions.
Still, there's a big difference between how Twitter, Mastodon, Pleroma and Mitra work and how Facebook, Friendica, Hubzilla and its descendants work. And how Reddit, Hacker News, Lemmy and Mbin work.

In stark contrast what many believe, ActivityPub was never meant to be a pure microblogging protocol.

>It would have allowed for discussions with restricted permissions, made absolutely impenetrable even for Mastodon users. It would even have allowed for discussion groups which would have been both fully private and hidden from all directories. Most importantly, it would have empowered its users to moderate their own streams themselves with a w
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Phantasm@phnt@fluffytail.org (2026-06-11 04:45:43)
@jupiter_rowland @evan @kissane @sendpaws 

Where do you think ActivityPub came from? It wasn't Eugen Rochko who invented it.

I know the history, don't worry.

Also, the very first server application that implemented ActivityPub was Hubzilla in July, 2017, two months before Mastodon which started out on the same protocol as StatusNet.

Yet Mastodon is basically the reason why ActivityPub became a W3C recommendation after 2 (I think) deadline extensions. Without Mastodon ActivityPub probably would never become a W3C recommendation. And since then, they've been going on their quest of hijacking the specification and/or forcing their ideas on the network. One that happened quite early on was Mastodon's hijack of the summary field for content warnings which wasn't used for that previously. Now their "hijacks" are more on the side of centralizing moderation and overall working on features that aim to reduce the social aspect of the network and increase witch hunting. Like the new "follow packs" or whatever they called them which will definitely never turn into "block packs" that will inevitably end up maintained by heavily opinionated people like on BlueSky.

The reason why Mastodon doesn't have groups isn't because ActivityPub doesn't really support them. It's because Twitter has never had groups.

They way public groups work currently is very non-ideal and prone to spam, since it's just an account that auto-repeats all posts mentioning it. I have some ideas on how to fix groups and make them actually usable, but making the different implementations interoperable and achieve consensus won't be easy.

picrel

Except for the thermonuclear option, Forte (https://codeberg.org/fortified/forte) does literally all of this with ActivityPub Don't mix up ActivityPub and Mastodon.

But does it work outside of the few Forte instances and the few servers supporting the so-called Threadiverse? If those posts with those permissions federate as normal posts, have a public post represe
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Jupiter Rowland@jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu (2026-06-11 06:16:34)
@Phantasm One that happened quite early on was Mastodon's hijack of the
summary
field for content warnings which wasn't used for that previously.
And everyone on Mastodon believes that Eugen Rochko has invented this field from scratch as a CW field. It's deeply engrained into Mastodon's culture now. It got to the point at which non-Mastodon users use the summary field as such, and they're attacked by Mastodon users for allegedly misusing the CW field.

Worse yet: Friendica has had a much more elegant way of handling content warnings since its inception, about seven years before Mastodon introduced the CW field: Have them created by a keyword filter on the reader's side. The advantage is that you have your own individual CWs, and other users who don't need these specific CWs don't have them. All its descendants have inherited it. But if you add the appropriate keywords as hashtags, Mastodon users might scold and/or mute/block you for hashtag spam.

Even worse: Mastodon itself has introduced essentially the same functionality with version 4.0 in October, 2022, just shortly before Elon Musk took over Twitter. But this has never entered Mastodon's culture which is mostly built around Mastodon 3.x. Or maybe it's because filters are the one thing where Friendica and its family are much easier to handle than Mastodon. Or it's simply because Mastodon users were promised to be babied and pampered and coddled all over, so they don't want to take care of their own CWs.

Now their "hijacks" are more on the side of centralizing moderation and overall working on features that aim to reduce the social aspect of the network and increase witch hunting. Like the new "follow packs" or whatever they called them which will definitely never turn into "block packs" that will inevitably end up maintained by heavily opinionated people like on BlueSky.
Mastodon already relies heavily on importing or subscribing to automatically generated filter lists. For some admins, the filter lists can't