As someone who has tried to implement ActivityPub (for my personal site), I think the negativity is largely justified.
In my opinion, ActivityPub is way too complicated, and federating is just too hard to do for smaller projects. You mention that there are many new projects – this has been the case for a while. Last time I looked, nearly all of them had failed/stopped/paused before actually getting federation working. The test suite is down, and has been for at least a year:
https://test.activitypub.rocks
I think that ActivityPub should have started out far simpler, and it should have been in reach of hobbyist developers. Something probably closer to RSS, with verify-from-source rather than cryptographically signed posts.
Just my experience, obviously. I would love to be able to write and run my own little Twitter-like instance that people can subscribe to, but I can't because ActivityPub was too difficult for me to get working.
In my opinion, ActivityPub is way too complicated, and federating is just too hard to do for smaller projects. You mention that there are many new projects – this has been the case for a while. Last time I looked, nearly all of them had failed/stopped/paused before actually getting federation working. The test suite is down, and has been for at least a year:
https://test.activitypub.rocks
I think that ActivityPub should have started out far simpler, and it should have been in reach of hobbyist developers. Something probably closer to RSS, with verify-from-source rather than cryptographically signed posts.
Just my experience, obviously. I would love to be able to write and run my own little Twitter-like instance that people can subscribe to, but I can't because ActivityPub was too difficult for me to get working.