Steve

Why do we advocate for, and pour hours of development into, ActivityPub rather than building clients which add a social layer to existing content distribution and communication protocols?

If clients built their own social layer, those would be limited to users of that client. If they opened up the social layer with an interoperable protocol, now you just made ActivityPub again.

Yyeess! 🤘

Right now, it looks like the only way users on my instance will get to see content from other instances is if I manually search for just about everything they'll get to see.

They can do that themselves.

Not an article.
Try one of these instead.
If you don't like them, there are plenty more.

Not an actual article.
It's an uncited post on X.

I did find some similar speculative articles.

Agreed.
Until people started following hashtags. Then they were trying to be about more than just people, and doing it poorly. Kind of like wanting to subscribe to people on Lemmy. That's not what it's for, and just shouldn't be an option, so people know that.

They really aren't.
They're a user created workaround, attempting to fix the structure-less, findability problem. Twitter embraced and officially incorporated them, because they had no better solution that wasn't completely rebuilding the entire system. They rightly new everybody would hate that.

Yes exactly! It's just like Twitter or Blusky. It's 99.3% people just shouting into the void, without form or structure. You're not confused.

also if it uses a common input name (which it would because it’s the same Lemmy software) then your webbrowser would suggest/autocomplete it

That's exactly the local software I'm talking about! Now we're on the same page. Rather than being a form, the local software could just detect and do it all seamlessly.

The All feed is for All. If you don't want All don't use All.

It's designed as a White List system, with subscriptions. You pick the things you want to see.

You're asking for a Black List system, where you see everything accept what you don't want. That only works while things are small. As they grow, Black Lists become much larger, and more difficult to manage. When you get to the point where their are tens of thousands of communities, and hundreds of thousands of posts every second, they become useless.

You'd have manually enter your home instance on every site you visit. Super annoying. Not a solution.

That would require some kind of local client side software.
Some kind of browser extension.