alt Hacker NewsThis is so dramatic it's hard to recover the original complaint.
Dansup has built a photo-sharing app on top of ActivityPub, and we humans are a lost cause because the app doesn't also do text-only messages?
Is that the gist of it?
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The app is not showing posts that don't contain a picture, but shows posts that do. So if you browse someone Mastodon account on Pixelfed, you will see just fraction of their posts.
https://ploum.net/2025-12-04-pixelfed-against-fediverse.html
I don't think it's important at all because nobody really uses Mastodon anyway; but it shows that doing decentralised software is hard, because each actor can just do whatever they want.
Not really.
The gist of it is if Google decides to build GMail but Gmail silently deleted emails that it did not find entertaining enough so you didn’t even know they were ever sent to you.
The article is saying some people see ActivityPub as a communication protocol like Gmail where you expect all messages to be delivered, while others see it as an entertainment protocol where the goal is to entertain the user.
> This is so dramatic it's hard to recover the original complaint.
I'm curious if this message is new to many here?
What makes it feel "dramatic"? I get the impression people say something is "dramatic" when it doesn't really land or connect? Because when something punches me in the gut, I don't say "that was dramatic", I say "that was compelling".
I'm over 40, and these kinds of concerns (technology serving people's deeper needs rather than serving them up fleeting entertainment) has been on my radar for 15+ years. Back then, I was expecting to go into public administration, policy analysis, or "technology for good" to use what might be a naive phrase.
I've noticed a funny tendency among some Fediverse passionates to have strong feelings about how others should be using it. Author says "We could not both be right," but that's rather antithetical to the value proposition of decentralized social media, IMO.
A healthy user-empowered ecosystem naturally has some fragmentation; that's a sign it's working as it should to accommodate different tastes and visions. You can't use the same metrics for judging monolothic systems driven by a central authority as decentralized ones.
I share many of the author's opinions on communication vs entertainment, but the framing around an intentionally open and flexible system like ActivityPub leaves a bad taste in my mouth.