Do you want something that works well for millions of real users or do you want something that's simple to implement for hobbyist developers? I personally don't even think that ActivityPub is that difficult to implement, I've written a tutorial [1] on it, but it seems like a misguided goal to me to prefer simplicity over other factors like fitness for a particular purpose.
Hi Gargron, ideally I want both, obviously! I like Mastodon, as open source software that can federate with other instances, it's very neat. I'm just disappointed that the federation specification is too hard for me to get working, and that appears to be the case for other people as well, given how many fail to implement it.
I did follow your tutorials, by the way, but I got stuck on certain things (cryptographic signing being the main one I remember), couldn't test them easily with the test suite being down, and gave up eventually.
Am I too stupid? Probably. But I can imagine a spec that gives me practically everything I want in a decentralised Twitter replacement being almost as simple as RSS or JSONfeed for example, which took me a few hours to implement.
I don't think that's necessarily a real dichotomy. Lots of the issues around being able to implement AP are not "it has to be complicated", but "there is no consistent specification that matches what practical implementations do". It's fairly frustrating to implement something that looks ok and then have to go around and figure out what implicit assumptions Mastodon et al make that you didn't know about.
[1]: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/06/how-to-implement-a-bas... https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/07/how-to-make-friends-an...