I finally figured out that the people who say they're on board with the open social web understand that it isn't here yet. I thought they were saying it was here already. To be fair, their hype actually says it is here now, and it's centered on ActivityPub and AT Proto. But it is just hype, something the tech industry indulges in far too often. It's hype because:

• ActivityPub is far too complex and doesn't do enough. How do I know? For the first part, I can't find a place where it's all described in a simple spec. It includes so many other underspecified open standards, you have to go assemble the docs yourself? Well that can't work. Also there aren't any good Node.js packages that do it all for you, another sign that it's underspecified or too complex or I don't even know. I know people want it to be everything you need, but if it were why does Mastodon rely on their own API for much of its openness? Someone needs to get in there and hack it out, and give us a profile and an easy to deploy package for at least one of the popular server platforms, but until the imho, it doesn't have a chance imho. Prove me wrong. We're all scientists here I hope, drop the hype, roll up your sleeves, if you believe in ActivityPub, make it easy. 
• AT Proto is an API for a closed box known as Bluesky. Unlike Mastodon, if Bluesky went away, that would be the end of the network it defines. So please explain to me why it's more than an API, and do it in terminology that doesn't depend on people having figured out what all the names they've chosen mean in general terms. Too often you get explanations that say if you hook this thingamagig up to this magic box, and wait till Tuesday morning in some unspecified month you will have a little interop that shows where this could go someday. Maybe it's great, or maybe it's the same thing we had before with different names. I have implemented apps using their API, apps that are running that I use every day. And I found in the end that it does the same things as the Twitter API, so excuse me but why didn't they just use the freaking Twitter API? If they wanted a vibrant developer community instead of hype, that's exactly what they would have done. Or if they really had interop cojones, they would have used RSS and HTTP and the rocket ship would have launched two years ago, instead of maybe at some vague day in the future. They are selling snake oil. If you expect that to be the path to the open social web, it won't. People like Bluesky because it's just like Twitter, and a good part of the appeal of twitter came from the fact that it is not of th web, and not open, controlled by a single vendor.

If you want the open social web, we can have it, but we will lead it ourselves, it won't be made possible by Mastodon or Bluesky. The sooner you give up on that dream and work with each other, the sooner we can have an open social web.