Notices by Julien Genestoux (julien51@mastodon.cloud)

Another reason federation is not good enough is visible in emails. The email protocols are federated (and ActivityPub is very much like email).

In practice, federation means that all clients have to agree on the smallest possible common denominator for it to work, otherwise the content will just look weird to many.

Have you ever received calendar invites as emails from a 3rd party email provider? They look strange (and realistically there are only 3 calendar providers sending these).

And that reason is that federation is not good enough.

I would argue that for some people it may even be worse because the rules for a given server may be a lot more arbitrary than the ones on Twitter for example. We also must be real and see that most people will *not* run their own servers.

I am trying to gather my thoughts on why federation is not good enough for decentralized social networking.

It might be surprising to a lot of you given the work I have done over the last 15+ years now, but I also think there is a reason why we needed someone to *destroy* Twitter (or its experience for us) for many of us to look at Mastodon seriously even though it has been here for a LONG time.

@bobwyman @evan @atomicpoet

PubSubHubbub/Websub still "works" (like HTTP or ActivityPub works :) Any live implementation would be working!

The hubs hosted by Superfeedr are still up and running and I think the Google one is still and running.

Now I don't know if any Mastodon instance actually pushes content to them!