@evan @dansup @quillmatiq interest is great and all, but understanding the social and power dynamics at play is more important.
Every time some leader of an ActivityPub project goes on a tirade against another protocol or project, all it does is hurt the entire ecosystem. It prevents productive partnerships, it creates friction and fights.
We've seen this countless times, and meanwhile majority of ActivityPub applications are not striving for ActivityPub interoperability, but for Mastodon interoperability.
There is so much power centralization in ActivityPub it's not funny, let's not forget that the protocol was left to rot by the W3C for the longest time, when it could've continued on-wards. The amount of infighting and politics here drives people away.
I've talked with folks who have really great ideas, and I've been like "come bring this to a standards meeting, this is really cool" and the response time and again is "I don't want to be involved with those people", because they've seen countless negative interactions.
Meanwhile, in AT Protocol, it's extremely common place to get different application developers and organisations to come together to standardise things, the best example is https://standard.site — I'm also helping a few developers work on interoperability for other things within the Atmosphere, because they realise that they're stronger together.
In ActivityPub there's been constant division "this software is better than that software", and petty little fights about "this isn't really activitypub because it doesn't do what mastodon does, so it doesn't interoperate fully" — Dan was the target of one such hit piece.
The office hours that the bluesky team run every two weeks? They basically entirely focus on sharing and promoting the cool work by other people in the ecosystem, here's some notes from the latest: https://bsky.app/profile/thisismissem.social/post/3mere5l7knk2n
I've mentioned it before, but I've stopped actively contributing to Mastodon because the lack of respect that they show other contributors is so dire that it's not financially viable for me to contribute.
