@
Laxystem One developer has actually taken this into consideration: @
Mike Macgirvin 🖥️, creator of
Friendica (2010),
the Red Matrix (2012, officially discontinued in 2015) and
Hubzilla (2015) and creator and maintainer of
the streams repository.
(streams), as what comes out of this repository is colloquially called while actually being intentionally nameless, has a vastly different conversation model than Mastodon. It has inherited it from Hubzilla which has inherited it from Friendica which, in turn, was inspired by Facebook rather than by Twitter. All three define conversations as one (1) post plus many comments firmly attached to that post whereas Mastodon defines them as a bunch of posts loosely tied together.
Also, all three have always had support for groups/forums which are nothing but user accounts/
channels with specific permission settings plus automatic forwarding of incoming posts under certain circumstances. And they've got means of moderation that go beyond what everything else in the Fediverse has to offer and
way beyond what Mastodon has.
At least on Hubzilla and (streams), maybe also on Friendica, if you post something, you're the moderator of your own comments thread. You can decide who gets to comment and who doesn't, and you can delete comments. That's because it's you who owns the comments and not whoever writes them.
As Mike has found out, all this can be done in standard ActivityPub, not only to the extents like on Friendica which has successfully switched from its own DFRN to ActivityPub, but even on (streams) which goes the farthest of the three.
However, this still won't work with Mastodon. For starters, Mastodon doesn't know groups, so it doesn't understand groups. This goes to the point where Mastodon users interact with e.g. the Friendica forum
Fediverse News, thinking they're interacting with a single Mastodon user who manually boosts everything that comes from there. User-moderated content is even more alien to Mastodon.
Mike is currently reworking (streams)' conversation model into containers that work with the ActivityPub standard without requiring any hacks, also to increase (streams)' compatibility with ActivityPub. But
he recently complained how making it more compatible with standard ActivityPub would make it even less compatible with Mastodon which doesn't even support these parts of ActivityPub because it hasn't implemented them itself.
So he had the choice. Either he'd include a bunch of nasty hacks so that Mastodon understands it. Or he flips Mastodon the bird and sticks to the ActivityPub spec.
Practically all Hubzilla and (streams) users who commented on this encouraged him to do the latter. It might mean that (streams) will appear "broken" to Mastodon users, most of whom think that Mastodon = the standard. But precious few Mastodon users use groups in the first place anyway.
Mike himself reconsidered and
made (streams) groups compatible with Mastodon because Mastodon needs groups after almost eight years of not having any.
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