Comment by kick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kick | Hacker News Reader

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Webber's trashed it (the initial author), the biggest piece of software claiming to implement it doesn't even implement it (Mastodon), the only piece of software that stays semi-faithful is full of devs who hate it (look on their Pleroma profiles, there's a _bunch_ of bitching about AP).

You're frankly uninformed on many levels, and while I'd normally refrain from replying to someone so obviously delusional, let's give a tiny peek at the problems:

AP is completely broken for anything but publicly-scoped content, relying on a lot of trust for every party involved. This gets broken frequently, and has had consequences so far on networks implementing it.

The specification itself is far too ambiguous. If you've got a lick of sense, you'd know this. But here's a post by a maintainer of Diaspora explaining this part further: https://schub.io/blog/2018/02/01/activitypub-one-protocol-to...

So let's assume you can get Twitter to implement ActivityPub perfectly to-spec. Great! It doesn't work with literally any pre-existing ActivityPub software, and users' DMs and are more or less public, with users' private accounts literally being public.

> 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.

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