Post by @cwebber@social.coop

2026-06-20 11:23 UTC

There are no instances in ActivityPub either. There's only actors. The instance'ification came outside of the work on the spec, though it did start with the particular shape of how sharedInbox was defined. I wish I had pushed harder for sharedInbox to retain the actor-like properties I believed were important, rather than the implicit-routing that Mastodon pushed for. My biggest regret. Nonetheless, even then, there's still no "instance" in AP, in terms of the spec. In terms of the fediverse, the way it became, that's a different story.

Replies (1)

@smallcircles@social.coop 2026-06-22 08:49

@cwebber@social.coop I mentioned often how the way we accepted the fediverse to evolve, via post-facto interoperability, continually introduces protocol decay. Resulting in an app-centric fedi that represents more of a universal microblogging environment, with a range of abstractions being introduced besides the instance. As you say, there's only actors. My observation is that fediverse-we-have side-tracked from ActivityPub, losing much of its versatility and power, and that a course correction is in order for current fedi to be on track again towards becoming the Future of Social networking. > My biggest regret This is not a past station. A proper grassroots standardization process should be able to guide evolution in healthy direction. My conclusion is that fedi is currently at an inflection point where it chooses its future: back to original power, or a glorified distributed microblog. I put my concerns, thoughts on solutions, and a brainstorm in a lengthy article: https://coding.social/blog/grassroots-evolution

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