Mastodon's Mastodon'ts.
There are a few fundamentally broken things about how Mastodon posts work that are terrible vectors for abuse, as well as being bad for basic usability. Maybe they are fixable, I don't know. To be clear: I am a fan of Mastodon....
https://jwz.org/b/ykC_
@jupiter_rowland
So what?
Are you seriously saying: fixing these serious abuse and usability problems would make more work for a handful of programmers, so let's not do it?
@jupiter_rowland So tl;dr "yes"
In a certain way I think you have it backwards.
ActivityPub provides this metadata that Mastodon is currently ignoring and its user experience.
So in a way it’s not becoming incompatible but rather becoming more compatible, as it would be doing a better job of presenting the Fediverse stream information to its users.
But really, I don’t think any of that matters, I just think Mastodon should have the better experience for its users regardless of anything else, so when you talk about being incompatible, I’m okay with that, so long as it is being the best for its users and let other apps catch up if they need to.
I think you are looking at it backwards, though.
Each UI participating in Fediverse can do its own thing. Each UI does what it needs to do for its users and its goals regardless of anything else.
So if one client does things different from another that doesn’t create a rift that is simply the way this works, with different clients displaying things differently according to different goals.
It’s not a rift. It is an entirely expected difference of application.
I honestly don’t know what you are saying here because it sounds like you are proving my point.
It sounds like you are saying that I don’t recognize the diversity of interfaces and then you went on to talk at length about the diversity of interfaces.
If that's the case, then everything in the Fediverse that's based on ActivityPub is doing it wrong. And not because everyone's aping Mastodon. Pleroma is based on ActivityPub, too, Pleroma is 3½ weeks older than Mastodon (I'm not even kidding), and AFAIK, Pleroma doesn't make comments metadata either.
But if Mastodon did that switch, it'd create a rift through the Fediverse. First, Mastodon itself would be split in two, in instances that run the new version with the new threads and those that have yet to upgrade. At least mutual comments wouldn't work.
Once Mastodon has largely been upgraded, the Fediverse would be split into Mastodon and everything else. Some users wouldn't even notice that their comments don't leave Mastodon. Others might wish that Mastodon finally took the step and became so incompatible that the Fediverse would finally be Mastodon only. That'd also solve the "issue" with quotes and full-text search available just about everywhere else and all those non-Mastodon projects "spamming" Mastodon timelines with posts over 500 characters.
Which of the other projects would follow suit, I don't know.