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@cwebber i haven't finished it yet because I have a headache now and good god is it dense and long. is this how other people see my writing? no wonder nobody ever reads it. anyway.but I still do think it was one of the things that lead AP to be successful.ActivityPub is only successful because Mastodon made an incompatible profile of it to solve problems that weren't foreseen when AP was made. Nobody actually implements ActivityPub. I don't remember whether Evan or Christine said that, but one of them did, I'm sure.

To address the broader section that quote was in: I think they've failed at a few of those goals, but that's because of the Mastodon profile. I'd vote that it doesn't meet "Flexible and extensible," because extensions break compatibility, and while there's quite a lot defined in AS2, that's really all you have to work with. Or you start a brand-new type, and Mastodon doesn't understand it so for most developers, that's a non-starter. JSON-LD turned out to be a poor choice. That ended up making AP damn near impossible for anyone to implement. I tried, and I gave up. The entire C2S is really just a relic. Unless you're self-hosting, "User control of personal data" also falls completely flat: you're completely at the whims of your server administrator. (For Bluesky: they own the PDS keys by default, but you can currently take them back to move to a different PDS. This can be mitigated at sign-up but isn't for anyone except PDS self-hosters, because it's a bit complicated for the average person.) Also, "Embedded Experiences"????

It HAS achieved "Cross-Organization Ad-hoc Federation," "Feasible to self-host without relying on big players," and "Social network domain agnosticism" though. Those are pretty good, and definitely important.However, the credibility of that exit currently predicates on another organization of the same cost and complexity of Bluesky standing in if-or-when Bluesky ends up becoming unsatisfying to its users.🎯🎯🎯

NOW I've reached the end. Wow that was a doozy