i don't want follower and block lists to follow me to every corner of a federated internet. i don't want a single unified profile everywhere. that sounds fuckin terrible to me actually.
but they seem so into it! they seem to think this will fix all the issues with things like twitter and meta! i do not understand why they seem to think this
but cant you have more than one profile/account/identity/(page as per cohost lingo)?
well, maybe. i'm just describing the future pitched by the article i read. they seemed to think having everything unified under one name/branding WAS the main benefit of the interoperability
I feel like on the flip side a surprising number of people are confused that you have to log in to the mastodon instance your account is on so at least currently it doesn't even do the universal account thing in an accessible way either
it is easier to intentionally have separate accounts on a system that has a method for synchronization than it is to bash synchronization into a system that isn't designed for it. i can't register the hierarchon username at Every Single Website Ever, but i know that there's only one hierarchon@inherently.digital in activitypub. conversely, i could easily also be rock_enjoyer@rocks.cool and nobody would know.
Some days, I feel like there's a contingent of tech writers who look at every new-to-them thing and say "oh, it must be like Bitcoin; I got this," and then pitch some dystopian fairy tale as both vaguely real and somehow beneficial. Because I see exactly this a lot, and it never bears any resemblance to what they think they're talking about, and also seems actively corrosive to a lot of the world...
i'm not the first to say this but mastodon is like twitter but you can Move To Canada if you hate the mods. personally think that smaller, interest based communities are a better model but that makes it harder to be an influencer so v0v
you're right, it's arse. they say they made it do some shit and that it will eventually do some other shit, but the shit it does it does poorly and with numerous caveats and there is no route for it to eventually do the other shit they talk about. it just cannot ever work. it's not getting better from here, it would literally be easier to reinvent it from the ground up. activitypub is a low effort unscalable MVP that escaped into the wild and got baked into a dozen terrible implementations; it's too late.
