BTW: There is work in progress to decentralize modern git based workflows by https://nlnet.nl/project/ForgeFed/ (paid for by the European Union), by decentralizing git not at the client level (which it obv. already has, but most people only use one origin), but also on the code forge level.
> they dont try just creating a mastodon instance but that would too cheap
Nothing there states it will NOT be a Mastodon or rather Fediverse/ActivityPub server. A likely outcome of this is, that their online video platforms will get ActivityPub support as explained here by Leonhard Dobusch, a member of the ZDF Board of Directors that approved this: https://chaos.social/@leonido/109829771565248856 (german)
But you cant start a project to explore Open Protocol options and pre-empt the outcome. The working group on this will figure out the best plan and it will likely be ActivityPub, because what else is there ?
> What a waste of public money.
You have very strong feelings about something you don't seem to know much about.
> Public media in Germany also has a very strong left bias.
*Educated people have a strong left bias.
Also your first link bases this on a poll of "Volontariat" journalist, meaning journalists in the beginning of their career, meaning young people. Congratulations for proving: Young people tend to be leftists. Applause for this groundbreaking discovery.
> The end result seems like it will be no different than Mastodon and email protocol, where a few central players own the majority of the namespace and network effects prevent most users from having full custody & portability of their accounts.
You are correct about Email, but Mastodon ? Instance diversity is alive and well.
People don't choose Mastodon servers by the number of users that are already on it, but by what domain name they would like to have in their identity name.
People join the community they identify with ignoring "network effects".
> The extremely few people who were so fed up with Twitter that they left for Mastodon, are they eager to finally start federating with Twitter?
I never was on Twitter, but I am a Mastodon and Pixelfed user. I have zero interest in the cesspool that is Twitter joining the Fediverse and if they did I would probably instance block them.
This is about standards and my suspicion, that they want to keep all the control and profits, but now want to call it federated.
> The specification may be terrible
Have you read it ? I haven't, but it is working pretty well for the Fediverse.
And once again: Standards aren't static, if you actually have a concrete problem with the standard instead of a gut feeling, that "it just sucks, don't ask about the details", then formulate it and bring it up to the creators of the spec or try to fix it yourself.
> IRC beat the 'the standard is just fine as it is' drum for many years
Well maybe that is the difference between IRC and ActivityPub. Nobody on the ActivityPub side is delusional enough to think the standard is perfect.
There can pretty much by definition never be a perfect standard. There will always be use-cases that were not thought of during the creation. The solution is not to create one standard after the next, it is to improve existing ones. 1000 Standards are as useful as no standard.
The fact they even felt the need to create another protocol instead of using, improving and contributing to ActivityPub makes me think they want to bake a busines modell for themselves into the technology and they can't do that if they don't have full control over the spec.
ActivityPub is organically grown from a community to serve that community.
Bluesky is created to combine making the profits of a commercial centralized social network + profiting from the investment from crypto bros.
ActivityPub is not perfect and nobody is pretending like it is (there is a big blog post from the co-author about what retrospectively they should have done differently, sadly I couldn't find the link), but a specification is not static !
If you have a suggestion to improve it you can propose changes and a lot of things are left to the implementation, so you can just do things differently than other ActivityPub application currently do.
In fact there are people building the future of the ActivityPub ecosystem right now: https://spritely.institute/
There is no need to create yet another specification.
The only feature this claims to have, that all ActivityPub implementations currently don't have is identity portability and that can actually be implemented without changes to the ActivityPub spec, just no ActivityPub Application has implemented it yet.
Cars are plain worse. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-transport-mode
> anti car bias on HN
I more worry worried about the anti smashing your fingers with a hammer bias on HN
> It's an empathy gap
It is an infrastructure spending gap.