this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
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I think having many clients is a good thing. The reddit API debacle was the straw that broke the camel's back for me, and got me to move away from centralised services.
I can see how some people would prefer that, but Nostr also has a solution to this need. Not as good an experience as AP, if that's specifically what you're looking for, but nonetheless. If you want a curated, modded and filtered experience, you can just connect on to nostr nodes that filter heavily.
I thought this when I came to AP at first too, but it's been a W3C standard for a long time, and is still very niche.
Is it really? I mean there are already many completely independent platforms built on it (Lemmy, Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfed... To only name a few)
Plus recently existing platforms changing to use AP like Flipboard for example or threads (even if nobody is happy about the last 😅)
Additionally AP protocol can be adapted and extended over time if it's really needed. That would also be an option in the long run.
I meant niche in terms of amount of users, not implementations.
But amount of users is actually more a product of marketing than any technical protocol so I don't really see that point either. Also I don't see that being true, especially if you count in all the threads users.
My point of it being a W3C standard is more that it is a protocol that is in somewhat responsible hands. When using a protocol that was developed by and only for one (commercial) application in minds other players are always one step behind.
Mastodon (or threads) as the main platforms that implement AP don't have any more influence on the protocol than any other platform as well.
I wrote a long answer to this, but forgot to post and lost it :(. But here's what I wanted to say:
I forgot about Threads, that's indeed a big user base.
Just because the standard is managed by the W3C doesn't mean they'll do a good job of managing it, but it's probably more positive than negative.
I don't know enough about how the W3C is organised and accepts contributions, but wasn't one of the concerns of many AP users when threads announced their AP integration, that threads would immediately become a big player and essentially EEE AP? Tbh, I still fear that.
I'm enjoying this conversation, it's brought my hopes for AP a bit higher, I hope I've managed to convince you that nostr is something to keep an eye on.
Yes this EEE fear exists but I think it's unreasonable in my eyes. AP being managed by W3C is one reason for it.
Sure Meta will probably extend AP for their own use but it's not that they can simply decide that the new feature that they introduced and is at first only working on their platform is the standard from now.
I definitely agree that Nostr is something to keep an eye on but for me that's more about to see if there is stuff that works and can be introduced in AP as well. Because of all the arguments above I don't think we should all switch to Nostr now.
Maybe not formally, but it might not matter. Looking at how google implemented XMPP, then slightly changed their implemetentaion until it was incompatible, and clients tried to keep up with changes, makes me fear meta will do something similar.
Yes they probably will.
But my point would be that with AP being W3C and not management by meta or a different company the ecosystem of it can survive.
And too be fair until recently I still used XMPP so it was never dead. I think it was just that almost no one ever heard about it before Google used it and also almost no one really cared about it while Google used it. So the resulting consequence was that once Google dropped off completely it went back to no one really using it (like it was before).
AP already having a decent user base (some million active users, official accounts and instances of big institutions like the EU commission e.g.) even without threads and a big eco system(very diverse platforms and projects), there is no need for any platform to adapt to anything coming from meta. Things are good (enough) how they are currently.
It's not that we need to compete or couldn't exist without Meta.
Yeah, I thought of these points too, my fear is that it won't matter that it isn't managed by meta and people will go along with whatever meta does.
Though to be completely fair, I have the exact same fear for other decentralised protocols, including nostr. Perhaps the only one I think is resilient to this situation is bitcoin, for better or for worse.