Toward a common posting API manton.org
@pratik I can only guess that it wasn't on their radar, and creating a proprietary API is the default for most people. Microsub also followed a little later, maybe a year after Mastodon was created.
@pratik people pretend Mastodon was some kind of standards first thing, but it wasn’t. It was standards also or standards inspired, largely.
@manton I just think people confused “federated” and “decentralized” with standards. Mastodon has had standards compliance as a “maybe” from the beginning as far as I can tell— and not necessarily for bad.
@jsonbecker Got it. BTW this reply doesn’t show up on Mastodon in the thread for Manton’s post. I see my Micro.blog reply on there though.
@pratik remember when App.Net got a different version of Tweetbot and how Ivory isn’t tweetbot? And how Tapestry is a from scratch app? Changing APIs or supporting more than one is possible, but cohabitating in one app creates a lot of complexity. It’s less about the API calls for functions that do match, it’s all the things one does the other cannot.
@pratik They totally can. But it’s sometimes hard for developers to justify the time if they mostly only care about the biggest platform.
@jsonbecker Yeah, API differences make things harder. You basically need some lowest common denominator features like posting and basic viewing, with more advanced stuff on top.
@pratik Mastodon isn’t the Indieweb in any sense. It’s also not a standards based service. It’s a non-profit supported, open source, federated Twitter clone. It’s just like any other application that made its own api that uses partially some existing standards sometimes.
@pratik it is a group of people who have been experimenting with implementations for how you connect your own website with other websites in a social-media like matter. How do we replace the elements of social web platforms with standard communications between sites? People try things, implement on their site, bring to the community, and eventually propose standards. Some of these standards have been adopted. Mastodon is an unrelated project that can be considered someone saying “screw the website part, let’s build a web app experience like social media with the main difference being its federated versus a single centralize application.” They looked to some of the standards that some of the indieweb people were working on in the early days and piggy backed and expanded and diverged as needed to build their own service.
Indieweb is inherently about building functionality for websites. Mastodon is an application and service. That’s why they talk about Fediverse and not Indieweb. Federation is not the same and Mastodon’s tech is only loosely coupled with some things Indieweb does and was doing.
People mix up all of these things because they were happen in near each other and in conversation with each other but they’re very much not the same.
@pratik glad it’s not just me .. I sometimes feel like a yo-yo .. but @jsonbecker ‘s explanation is great and put me back into a ‘yo’ state