@manton @danielpunkass – i’m listening to your podcast.

i think it is likely that the fediverse will become works-with-mastodon.

if you want activitypub to have a chance, vs the mastodon api, it’s got to be easier for apps to jump on activitypub. right now everyone has to go through the same very difficult learning curve.

i’m sure it can be made much simpler. since you’re betting on AP over the MAPI, you have an incentive to help that along imho.

@dave Yeah, ActivityPub isn’t well-documented and even it was, it’s quite complicated. It’s going to be a challenge for adoption for anyone coming from outside the Mastodon world.

@manton – let me try again – i was suggesting this because it gets you visibilitiy in a world you want visibility in (I listened to what you and Daniel were saying). And it could help build your $5 a month user base. You’ve got a great chance to grow the space you cover.

You invested wisely in the last few years, but as you notice this is the moment when that investment could lead to growth, and the moment is likely to pass as big companies view this space as a good place to grow themselves. Not the million-user growth which you can’t handle, but a steady growth of people like yourself who are looking to make a difference and have a good lifestyle. I’ve been where you are, and am where you are. I’m trying to help Manton. Anyway you gotta give me an E for effort. ;-)

BTW, I know Matt, and I don’t think you have anything to fear of WordPress or Tumblr hijacking compatibility. In fact he’s done the opposite in my experience. When Google approached them to support their notification system for feeds, he also got in touch with me and we worked together to get rssCloud into WordPress and they helped make it real. He didn’t have to do that, but they felt that Google was too big to be given exclusive control of such an important bit of functionality. I agreed of course.

On the other hand I would definitely be concerned if Google decided to offer a Mastodon-compatible system. I would hate to see that myself. I hear that they’re adding a simple RSS reader to Chrome and that gets me really frosted. We’re still cleaning up their last mess.

I’m rambling as I seem to do here. Have a nice day one and all.

@dave Agreed, I’ve never met Matt but I trust his judgement. Google would be a concern. If there was “the Gmail of Mastodon”, and most people used a single instance run by Google, that would help new users but create long-term problems.

@manton @dave Bigger picture, you think AP and MAPI will even go somewhere, let’s say medium term? —I’m really astounded how complex, computationally and bandwith expensive, etc. this whole ecosystem is. When I send a post to 100 ppl on 3 servers, I have to create 100 jobs. Not 3

@manton @dave On the Mastodon Github, you read stuff like “On a small instance with 30 users who follow some big accounts, I’m seeing about 1.5GB of daily server-to-server traffic.”

1,5 GIGABYTE? To show a few “toots”?!

@moritz Isn’t that a detail of Mastodon’s implementation? The ActivityPub spec supports a “sharedInbox” concept which describes itself specifically as being used for “wide delivery of publicly addressed activities and activities sent to followers” that seems like it would specifically address this. I don’t know if Mastodon is using it (correctly), but it seems like it would explicitly allow you to create a job for each server a message is going to, not each individual user.

@moritz – i know almost nothing about activitypub. very new to this stuff.

@dave Me too, but just from reading the spec I was constantly thinking “how is this in any way better than a rss feed with RFC822 content inside”, and the more I learn about how it works in the real world… puh.

@dave Don’t get me wrong, all power to those who build and it’s inspiring to see all the momentum right now but… Like, it feels like a protocol designed by programmers who grew up in a big tech world, if that makes sense (“ah, we scale it by clicking another AWS instance”)

@chipotle Afaik, the shared inbox thing was tacked on quite late in the AP spec process, so it was a bit rushed and is not without its caveats. I try to find the source where I read that.

@moritz That does seem like a lot. Wonder if they need to dial back how Mastodon (I think) tries to download all media to each instance when a post is received.

@dave – twitter.com/davewiner…