At the heart of the issue in the complexity of these protocols is that we want to both broadcast widely and address someone specifically. This is a quandary intrinsic to discussion forums, chat rooms and social media.

And the default is to mash both of them together and make it public. Unsurprisingly, it's a source of toxicity and needs intensive moderation, because a broadcasted address is mostly employed in a narrative sense, with the person at the other end reduced to a character in the story. A timeline creates a space, but in a shared timeline, whether it's a Twitter hashtag or a comments section on a small blog, the space is made by spamming your narrative more often.

With a decentralized, privacy-enabled solution like ActivityPub, there are many tools to reshape the extent of the narrative so that you always own your own space, but the tools themselves are quite complex and pressure our engineering and UX capabilities.

And yet - broadcast by itself is not hard, if done in pull-orientation like RSS. And secure messaging is challenging but mostly solved. I have some unfinished thoughts that perhaps simpler is possible by changing the system's orientation further, because I don't think the current designs are quite it.