@alda But in the end it's just another implementation, and you can ignore the arrogance of the lead developer as long as the software is good.

But it kept twisting and even breaking the protocol. Not implementing this thing, adding this incompatible thing, and worst of all, adding functionality that didn't degrade gracefully with the existing base, making it look like the rest of the network was breaking things. And the lead developer is still marketing it as the Mastodon network, and look at these other poor implementations, they're behind the times.

Still, it did bring people to the network, and generally GS people are happy about that, even though the subculture on many Masto instances may be very different from the subculture on some GS instances. And it's not the fault of the newcomers what the software looks like through which they happened to discover the network.

@alda So now ActivityPub comes along. The relation between the OStatus community and ActivityPub is complex already:

- identi.ca going to pump.io broke the old OStatus network in two, and many users left, never to come back to either network.
- pump.io has new features, but doesn't support everything that OStatus could do.
- The death, from an OStatus perspective, of identi.ca did create an exodus to other instances and helped contribute to the push that made the quitter.* instances blossom.
- Evan, who created OStatus, is also the creator of pump.io and the founder of the working group that created ActivityPub.

@alda When Mastodon starts looking at ActivityPub, depending on where people stand on Mastodon and on ActivityPub, there's a whole range of reactions:

- People who like AP and see it as the successor of OStatus were worried when Gargron was given influence over a new protocol. What would he do to it this time?
- The same people also worry that Mastodon will break the AP protocol, like it did OStatus. It already does, Follow activities are not handled in accordance with the spec.
- People who didn't like the newcomer implementation and didn't like the newcomer users just figure good riddance and hope Mastodon defederates from OStatus now.
- People who felt used by someone barging in on an existing network, profiting from the existing base without proper recognition, see it as confirmation that Mastodon was never about the OStatus community and now it's moving on to pillage the next one.
- People who welcomed the new users and the larger community are sad to see it split once again.
- People who want ActivityPub to be the great equalizer that joins the fragmented networks of OStatus, pump.io and perhaps even Diaspora, are happy that someone is at the forefront, seeding the new protocol. But at the same time they might worry that this means Mastodon will eventually turn off OStatus support and OStatus implementations won't follow, leading to Yet Another Incompatible Network.