Stephen Downes

This is an exceptionally interesting criticism of Mastodon and (implicitly) how ActivityPub handles social networking generally. It is at once a criticism of the concept of federation and also of decentralization. It is, in my view, half right and half wrong. On my reading, at the core of the objection is the problem of discoverability - for example, the posts from mas.to/@obsidian are available on mastodon.social only once someone on mastodon.social has begin following the account. There are other objections to smaller points - things like account migration (which is a fair point) and direct messaging. But the objection is mostly that people couldn't find a couple of bot accounts (announcing sunrise and sunset). But this is - to me - the whole point of decentralization and federation. I don't want random bot accounts popping up in my feed. Sure, this is what made Twitter (in the early days) "fun", but this only works if you have a small elite group of users; once 'discovery' is enabled worldwide, you get the cesspool that Twitter eventually became. Via Apostolos K.