fedi is dead, long live fedi

%at=2025-07-26T02:59:11.069Z

last updated %at=2025-07-26T05:59:47.176Z

#author_luna #activitypub #fediverse #rant

am I chasing the new shiny thing? is this burnout?

this is a continuation of the bsky article here: atproto pds migration IN ANGER

in it, I cite something really specific:

as someone that was dealing with activitypub and the non-cooperation of Mastodon on various issues has burned me on federated systems. it's all a breath of fresh air

I think I can go into a tad bit more detail with this.

fedi is dead #

I've been on the AP-verse since ~2018 (6 years ago), I do not remember how I joined. something about exploring alternative social media with a friend, and I really really liked it. the experience was cozy, I had a lot of fun fucking around with people in the instance, my admin at the time, etc. and wanted to learn more about how it works, the underlying protocol, the people and software making everything work, etc.

it has been a wild ride, and I can't put the entire history of it into words. most of it either stays in memory lane, or in the actual years-long relationships I built with people I met from it. but I can talk about my current feelings on the overall system.

generally, at least right now in 2025, the ActivityPub Fediverse in general feels (to me!) wrong. as if there's an air of staleness around it all. I believe there's something akin to burnout in that type of feeling, it's as if nothing really happens on the network anymore. one socialhub post here, another mastodon feature there... what else?

the fediverse is largely composed of migratory waves when a large social media platform fucks up, and I don't remember if I was or was not part of a wave. don't care though, back then there was a lot of discussion around protocol internals, a lot of critique, lots of people trying to explore the new thing and finding all of the rough edges.

and nothing really happened, the rough edges still exist to this day:

• instances disappear taking people's identity with them (because account migration is a cooperative protocol)
  • I don't think you can fix this with AP as it is right now
• the timelines are all reverse chronological with basically no filtering (due to a hard denial of "malicious algorithmic feeds" and what not). as the network grew over the years if you try to hook yourself up to a public realtime feed it is impossible to understand anything. there is no signal anymore, it's all Eternal September
  • the most we got nowadays is Mastodon recommended users
  • and FASPs, which feel like bluesky's XRPCs for custom content (like custom feeds) except it took me ages to even learn they exist. is anyone even implementing those?
• Mastodon remains the de-facto implementation of the protocol. effectively all AP implementation and documents on AP encourage monolithic applications that require you (the user) to keep 30 accounts with different passwords. back then i heard "nomadic identity" and felt it was so cool as a concept, but that never materialized.
  • Mastodon has Misskey checks
  • Pleroma has Mastodon and Misskey checks
  • Misskey I don't think has any checks because they just did their own thing. based, imo.
  • you can say that AP isn't really all that much in terms of protocol. to actually build Mastodon you need at least 5 other standards to make yourself compatible with Mastodon, so at this rate, "AP" is "The Mastodon Protocol". there's a lot of AP's history and context that I'm bulldozing because this is more of a rant than anything else.
• moderation remains an instance operator concern, #fediblock remains as "the" way for instance admins to respond to each other, there's no way to audit the decisions done on that hashtag. if someone puts you on #fediblock and people just drink it up you're now closed from a large part of the network, with no recourse.

I know the history of fedi, I know that the things I'm asking aren't easy, and I know I would be asking random people that aren't properly remunerated to do things for my own personal gain.

long live fedi #

who cares, though? in a way, fedi will never die. at least for the microblogging space (composed of Mastodon, Misskey, Pleroma)

the AP-verse has proven that power is not centralized anymore. mastodon.social still is the largest instance but I don't depend on it anymore like I felt I had. my instance can keep going forever and I would still be able to talk to someone in the network, since there's no central point of failure for two instances to talk to each other.

if you are extremely careful into curating your digital garden (and that includes your instance operator being careful), you can have a nice social experience (but if you don't, then you're fucked).

so why do I feel so shit on it? and why do I not feel the same thing around atproto? it has been years of my life on AP and I couldn't develop one single thing on it with my own name on it, while AT has received hundreds of my own development hours on it, on at least 4 different projects all with MY name because I'm proud of them.

is it the monolithic nature of AP? I know that for anything I would want to start I need to either hack an existing AP codebase or build one from the ground up (or use a library, if that exists, etc), hope it doesn't have vulnerabilities around json-ld parsing and whatnot.

I know that the AT protocol hasn't proved itself on the decentralization I so highly value. that is something that Bluesky PBLLC can't do by themselves, it requires cooperation from non-bsky entities to actually buy into the protocol. I know AP can't meaningfully have an age verification system. I can keep going, and I don't think I'm being stupid on making my statements on AP.

I do not know what should be done or what even can be done on AP anymore. I'll continue making things that make me feel happy, and sadly AP development isn't happy to me anymore, hasn't been for years. I'll however absolutely keep my account because AT feels like a downgrade in many other ways (e.g private audiences, dms centralized, etc), I'll try to show my stuff on AP because it is still a place there's people that are only there. I'm also very tired of "AT vs AP" discussions as well, both protocols have their compromises and it's on people to choose the set of compromises they're happier with.

also important to keep in mind is that my experience is highly subjective, reliant on the experiences and people that I was with at my time. your opinions, experience etc can be WILDLY different from mine. I don't think this article should invalidate them (though I don't think you can just deny that there are unadressed issues at the protocol level).

not a happy conclusion, but I felt like it is right to air my grievances with the protocol.

changelog #

• update "Mastodon remains the de-facto implementation" section:
  • swap "AP creates" to "AP encourages", as I can't really assign blame to AP designers or AP the protocol
  • add "The Mastodon Protocol" as a concept