I’m a fan of the Fediverse, but what are the major issues we faced right now because of the limitations of the #ActivityPub protocol? Recently, decentralize social networks are at their peak, big players are trying to be part of it, and is constantly in the news.
I have been on the Fediverse for quite a few years, and since alternatives were popping up I tried to learn how they work (it’s not like I’m an expert, but I have a general idea), with #BlueSky opening up federation and alternatives like #nostr for what I’ve read, they are strong in what ActivityPub still lacks.
One thing that comes to my mind right now is how your identity is tied to the instance you are, thus making portability harder. In nostr for example, your identity is not tied to any relay, and Bluesky has domain names as username, which is pretty cool, and for what I read from Bluesky blog, it seems like portability works great since all your posts will still be in your profile. In ActivityPub (or at least in mastodon) moving an account actually means only your followers, and your handle has the instance on it, tying your account to the instance. How could this be handled? I mean, if you are self-hosting your own instance, there is no problem, but the mast majority of people do not host their own instance.
Another thing may be, quote posts. I read from one of the mastodon team they are trying to make it to the protocol instead of the “weird” implementation each software does with the URL at the end, which is a good thing since I feel like every software kind of have their own way of doing things instead of trying to make it to the protocol.
Anyway, want to listen what are your proposal to these problems and what other things you think we could learn from these other protocols. If you spot any mistake, feel free to correct me.
The account ownership one is definitely my first thought too. Using keypairs to identify accounts controlled by the user would be great. You can hide it behind a normal looking username with your (or a third party’s) domain on both Nostr and AT (though AT’s not fully developed, but it’s totally in control of the user and doing that with activity pub could hand the metaphorical keys of your account to you instead of the server. Another way would be to allow users to use their own domain with an existing third party server, or use something similar to Zot’s (Hubzilla) “Nomadic Identities” that let you mirror your account on another server.
Implementing quote posts is a little above my pay grade, but I actually think that the link option might be a great idea. Nostr does quote posts by just embedding the post into your post where the nevent is pasted in, making both regular quote posts and the general ability to embed any post anywhere in your post. That sort of functionality, just using links to posts instead of nevents could be neat to standardize into activity pub as well, especially if all the other activity pub software already is doing that. Though again, not exactly a dev, so who knows if that’d break things.