>Most of the platforms have to play ball with quirks and self-interested decisions in Mastodon's implementation of ActivityPub.

Does anyone happen to have examples of things that mastodon chooses do that effect other platforms on the fediverse?

I'm writing a little activitypub server and I often encounter little quirks that make coding your own server frustating.

For example (if I remember correctly) when someone is mentioned Mastodon will send you a Note with something like '@user@server' while with Pleroma sends '@<span>user</span>@<span>domain</span>'

Now this is a stupid example but I think this was what the author meant that platform have to play ball with Mastodon implementation of AP.

I honestly was biased against BlueSky when I first heard about it. But after a few years trying with Mastodon, I must say BlueSky immediately solved problems I had with Mastodon.

One of them being the feeds: it really does work well. On Mastodon I can follow people/hashtags or even multiple servers (e.g. with Fedilab), but they just don't get organized in feeds. And it turns out that I am more interested in feeds than in servers.

> but they just don't get organized in feeds.

That's not a protocol thing, though. Clients can display AP or Mastodon posts as feeds, much as e.g. Phanpy do.

It's 100% a protocol thing. There's no firehose with AP. You only get posts from instances you've subscribed to and only from people followed by someone on your instance, and only posts since federating.

Feeds are a fundamental part of AT and depend on relays. There's no equivalent in Mastodon. It has relays, but they're more niche and restrictive and there's no standard way to filter, select, order, etc incoming posts.

The firehose used to be easy to get to on Twitter until they realized people would pay for it, and then all the fun mashups went away. The firehose and feeds that filter it are a fundamental aspect on AT.

It makes more sense once you've tried it. What we're seeing with Bluesky feeds is what Twitter could have been if they hadn't tried to turn the firehose into a profit center. It's hard to explain because it sounds like tags or saved searches if you're trying to relate it to the more common model of social media.

The *keys and derivative services have "antennas" that are the feeds you're looking for use an instance that use a good relay and you have what you're after.

But I agree that there are limitations with using an instance centric approach and the benefits may not appeal to many people.

These seem to only filter by tags/keywords. Feeds are a lot more powerful than that.

That's what I meant with:

>> "It's hard to explain because it sounds like tags or saved searches if you're trying to relate it to the more common model of social media."

For example: a feed that's something like a "For You" timeline without the commercial incentives to make it bad (it's empty without an account because it has nothing to work with): https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:tenurhgjptubkk5zf5qhi3og/fe...

It's not just blunt filtering. Feeds can (and do) apply machine learning, take input from your interactions, and generally do all the things a first-party timeline can do.

so, a non-black box algorithmic feed?

The Soapbox front end gives you what you're looking for unless I'm misunderstanding.

The default feed only shows people you follow, and if you 'bookmark' (can't remember the correct terminology) another server you get a feed that shows only that servers their timeline.

It's sad to see so many people forming opinions based on shallow ad hominem "Jack Dorsey bad" thinking. Bluesky rejected his ideas from the beginning and people spent two years refusing to see it. Better late than never though.

That was me, I'll admit it.

But I did not actively spend two years refusing to see it: it just took that time for BlueSky to open for the general public, and that's when I tried it.

Competition is great. Can't have another monolithic social media.

Sure, "might be", but "it isn't".