Well, not quite. They're definitely an improvement to centralized silos, and there's a prominent place for AP in the future of the web. But a big problem with the spec IMO is that it relies on domain names to identify servers.
To really rake things to the next step, we need public key addressing. Ubiquitous adoption of IPv6 would suffice, but public key addressing would be better. Either way, using a domain as a permanent identifier is a fragile and brittle.
Another big problem with AP is that the spec is extensible in ill defined ways while being designed with current social UX in mind, thus counterintuitively making it needlessly restrictive. So there are interoperation problems with different server software that implement the spec differently (look at federating servers like peertube, Lemmy and mastodon, while possible, it is clanky), meanwhile it has to be modified to support ForgeFed (which is what gitea will be using to federate forges).
how is ipv6 addressing not worse than DNSes? Like you move to a different house and suddenly your ipv6 address gets lost?
Perhaps your argument is around DNS spoofing or something but domain names feel pretty non-controversial for most usecases, especially for the fediverse, which is about federation. There's an expectation of multiple multi-user services being the norm!
Domain names are very, very useful. But with regard to activitypub, if a server wants to change its name the federation and social graph is broken entirely. Even if your server goes down and needs to be rebuilt, federation gets broken due to this design decision, because other servers don't know you're offline and new status messages get lost.
I guess “domain name change” seems like a much more manageable thing than “IP address change” (I don’t believe IP addresses are portable between hosts?)
I think I understand better what you’re saying though
Well so if servers were able to identify themselves to each other using a public key, they could change domains whenever they wanted and just update the others with a signed message. You'd still use DNS to navigate, for user identifiers, but a change wouldn't break federation. Unfortunately this is not in the spec and it is a bit involved to do.
To really rake things to the next step, we need public key addressing. Ubiquitous adoption of IPv6 would suffice, but public key addressing would be better. Either way, using a domain as a permanent identifier is a fragile and brittle.
Another big problem with AP is that the spec is extensible in ill defined ways while being designed with current social UX in mind, thus counterintuitively making it needlessly restrictive. So there are interoperation problems with different server software that implement the spec differently (look at federating servers like peertube, Lemmy and mastodon, while possible, it is clanky), meanwhile it has to be modified to support ForgeFed (which is what gitea will be using to federate forges).