Scott M. Stolz

It is not made up. Read about Stalin. A lot of things happened when he was in power. And a lot of things changed after he was no longer in power.

I agree that there needs to be some more “killer apps” for the fediverse for it to really take off. Luckily there are some people working on that. Loops and Pixelfed seem to be some recent highlights and are growing fast. And there are other apps that are being worked on that could change things.

One of the problems is that ActivityPub is somewhat limited to what Mastodon has implemented. A lot of other platforms want to implement some cool features, but none of those are supported by Mastodon. This limits the rest of the fediverse since they have to cater to the lowest common denominator.

It is one of the main reasons why Hubzilla still uses Zot6 as its primary protocol, and uses ActivityPub to communicate with everyone else. Hubzilla has features that the rest of the fediverse does not support, such as nomadic identity, privacy, and access control. And related to that, Bluesky also has features that ActivityPub does not support, or if ActivityPub does support it, is not implemented by the larger platforms.

I think this is the primary reason why the fediverse is falling behind. People look at what Mastodon has implemented and think that ActivityPub is weak compared to Zot6 or AT Protocol.

The biggest issue is economies of scale. Browser engines generally require a lot more coding and maintenance than social media software does (unless you are engineering to be the next Twitter will millions of users). This means more people involved and more organization is required than your typical ActivityPub-related project.

There actually have been many alternate browsers proposed and built, but they usually wind up being abandoned because of the lack of adoption and the amount of work it takes.

And, depending on the type of changes you are making, sometimes it is better to just use what someone else has built and modify it. That is why we have Waterfox, Opera, Brave, and numerous other browsers that use Chromium or Firefox as the base. Why build an entire car, when you can repaint it, change out the seats, add a quality sound system, and swap out the wheels for something nicer?

I do think that there needs to be more choices for browser engines, but I am not sure decentralization is the right word. What we need is more competition, or put another way, more players. The standards are open, so anyone with resources can build a browser. It is a matter of whether people will use the new browsers.

@NigelFrobisher There actually are a bunch of competing fediverse platforms that use entirely different codebases. Some are actually older than Mastodon.

For example, I am posting from Hubzilla, not Mastodon. Hubzilla has an entirely different codebase and an entirely different feature set.

#^[1](https://hubzilla.network/page/info/compare)

Hubzilla has built-in cloud storage, where you can host anything you want, and you can even determine who can see it. Images, videos, documents, binary files, whatever.

@jas0n All instances of Mastodon run the same source code, unless it is one of the many forks, like Hometown. But none of the other fediverse server software out there uses Mastodon code. They are completely different projects with completely different codebases. What they have in common is that they speak ActivityPub.