ActivityPub

Raised as a usability problem by 9 people on Hacker News over 5 years (2021–2025), in 9 threads.

People raised many different problems with ActivityPub, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 10 complaints

Visiting a repo redirects to instance sign-in, then shows same repo confusingly2025-08-14
Protocol is messy and hard for developers to build on without insider knowledge2024-01-07
ActivityPub client and server UX is abysmal compared with centralised services2024-01-05
Commenter had to read the W3C spec to implement ActivityPub on their website2023-10-15
The protocol specification is confusing to understand2023-07-09
Spec is a tangle of cross-referenced documents, unclear which to read or in what order2023-07-09
Protocol documentation is so poor that developers must read Mastodon's source code instead2022-05-01
C2S protocol is cumbersome and shifts too much work onto clients2022-04-28
Identity isn't portable between instances and there's no easy way to link multiple identities2022-04-06
Client must fetch from many domains and cache heavily, hurting feed performance2021-03-05