Yeah, it’s an unfortunate reality that the ecosystem just isn’t very mature yet. Like technically it’s got all the power to run a social media site, but all the onboarding processes and little conveniences that would make it a pleasant move aren’t there.

One thing activitypub is missing right now is a built-in way to discover the network, discover instances and understand the shape of the network in terms of federation status. Right now there are outside tools you can discover and peer in from the outside, but they’re clunky, break intermittently, and they’re not easy to find.

Activitypub only does one half of its job right now: making posts happen. Because it is built on federation it needs to also intrinsically allow users to discover and learn about that process of federation. That’s not something any other social media platform has ever had to do, so it’s understandable that it was missed, but I think it’s key to both differentiating itself from those other networks and becoming more legible.

With centralisation, the posts, networks, onboarding, discovery, all of it is handled by one actor, so they can do all of that however they want.