this post was submitted on 01 May 2024
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Nice demonstration of why mastodon's dominance is problematic (hachyderm.io)
submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Nice demonstration of why mastodon's dominance is problematic

See the conversions here:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4628
and
https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/federating-the-content-of-posts-note-articles-and-character-limits/4087

AFAICT, mastodon's decisions, which are arguably problematic (on which see: https://lemmy.ml/post/14973403) are literally trickling down to other platforms and infecting how they federate with each other as they dance around mastodon's quirks in different ways.

It seems like masto is ruining "the standard" with its gravity.

#fediverse #mastodon
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[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

From the PR:

Note that this behaviour is configurable. It's default is a 500 char limit because that is the Mastodon default.

That's a shit default, and a shitty way to treat a standard that is meant for all sorts of communication. ActivityPub is not Twitter, and it is not just for short-form communication. In fact, a majority of the web is longer-form communication that isn't a mere 500 characters long.

Retorting with "this behaviour is configurable" is dancing around the issue. Good, sane defaults mean everything in programming.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

@p03locke

Yep, yep and ... yep!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Maybe I'm just not awake enough but I'm not entirely following exactly what's going on. Can you give me a quick summary?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago (1 children)

@Trainguyrom

Ha
AFAIU, two platforms other than mastodon (lemmy and discourse) have issues federating because at least one of them is trying federate well with mastodon (for obvious reasons). The mastodon quirk causing issues is, AFAIU, the way it kinda mangles articles and pages (long form formats in ActivityPub), which are appropriate for forums and link-aggregators like lemmy and discourse. So someone hints been done to work well with mastodon’s mangling, which hurts lemmy-discourse interop

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

Oh so it's a compatibility triangle of C being compatible with A makes it incompatible with B? Sounds like a mess for sure

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Isn't there a group of people now that's working to improve the ActivityPub spec and actually define things so applications don't implement it differently?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

None of that matters if Mastodon doesnt implement these suggestions or standards. And from past experience its extremely unlikely that they will. Thats why I think its best to ignore what Mastodon does, its not our concern how they decide to render things.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

That's kind of what I meant too, if there's a standardised and correct way to implement things, that's how projects should implement it instead of trying to do it the "Mastodon" way

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

It's a W3C managed standard, but there are tons of behavior not spelled out in the specification that platforms can choose to impose.

The standard doesn't impose a 500 character limit, but there's nothing that says there can't be a limit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

That's not what I meant. I read at some point that there's a group of people trying to build a wiki or something, so others, who want to make fediverse software, can look up best-practices and the like. They also wanted to make demo software to test the federation against, so Mastodon doesn't have to be used for that.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

For me mastodon was worst experience from side of admin of instance and from user experience too. Thinking it's a little bit overcomplicated and limited. On the other hand hosting services like Lemmy and PeerTube are just breez :)