Thanks @Bloonface for writing and sharing this. I think that it's fundamental to analyse what's happening with ActivityPub and the Fediverse. It's good to be here, it feels good to be freed of any disgusting CEO. But still I find it sane to ask ourselves about the quirks that should be addressed with the fediverse?
I have a few on the top of my mind:
instance ownership - admin labour and mental charge, moderation, cost of the server and financing transparency
privacy
activityPub energy efficiency - is it efficient or should I refrain from posting?
Not all instances are run as co-op. We rely on people who are doing a lot of work and paying server cost from their own pocket. Maybe they got funded by users, maybe not. It's not that transparent. And admin have some issues with each other, defederating, blocking instance for personal or non so personal reason. So at the end it's not a really sustainable way of building things in my opinion. Some instances are funded as co-op, but most are not. We are relying on individuals to keep things running. The mental charge is big.
We need transparency about instance ownership to be able to choose what model we want to support.
I'm also really interested on how the GDPR compliance will be enforced. Meta's threads couldn't launch in the EU, so I wonder about the status of Mastodon. Is it a work in progress situation or did the EU not reach out mastodon.social yet and wait for a bigger user base?
Regarding the efficiency of the protocol, I couldn't find any discussion about it. I was wondering if the cost of being federated, posts and media being pushed from server to sever will have a negative impact regarding energetic consumption. I've read that mastodon was quite "hungry". So I asked one of ActivityPub co author about it, if they accounted energetic consumption when designing the protocol. The answer was "No." And they blocked me.
Maybe it's not a big deal and the impact is not bad. But right now if have no idea. So I'm using a service without knowing the cost of it, the consequence, and this is not ok. And I find it really annoying that this topics is not being covered more and the discussion censored in a way.
It's not a matter of ruining the nice thing we have. It's more about transparency, let users know where we are now, so we can all decide where we would go next.