Fediverse

While this is focused on Mastodon in particular, a lot of these criticisms are applicable to ActivityPub as a protocol in general. What's interesting is that you see similar, albeit quieter courtesy of voting options, behavior even around Lemmy when it comes to "complaints about noise in the feeds".

On Mastodon/microblogs, you could mute/block/filter accounts/content you find uninteresting, much like you can block with Lemmy, but instead some opt more often to write complaints, meanwhile with Lemmy more often the choice is downvote (sometimes coupled with writing complaints). As much as I get that curating one's feeds can get tiresome at times, it remains strange to me that given the tools people choose not to use them.

I wonder how much of that may be a carryover from the corporate enclosures conditioning people to not believe they'll work, given how little effect choosing, "See less often" seems to have in the enclosures.

All that said, I don't think the AT protocol has much of a better solution in regards to some of this. You may get all of your data by comparison, but without anywhere else to migrate it to, that doesn't do much. It may address discovery, but that's at the cost of distribution by relying on a central array of relay servers, which still largely mirror all the content.

They also talk about aspiring for "stackable moderation", but this amounts to trying to outsource moderation and pushing people to choose moderation (or labeling) services in echoes of choosing instances based on preferred moderation. This may mitigate some of the issues of binding moderation and service/platform, but as Bluesky itself demonstrates, some binding may be either inevitable or simply reemerge.