@simon@simonwillison.net writes that mastodon is just blogs and sets up a clear analogy for those who remember that era: Posts are posts, ActivityPub provides the publishing equivalent of RSS, and Mastodon-the-interface is a Google Reader analog for reading, subscribing, and commenting on posts. A helpful framing, especially that most fediverse instances are multi-author blog hosts, with a set of moderation and visibility tools we mostly just wished for in the prior era.

The larger fediverse

I'm writing this in writefreely, which further sharpens the image: a blog host that publishes to the fediverse and so can be followed in your Mastodon account, but is not otherwise aware of the Reader side of the -verse.

I use a handful of other non-Mastodon fediverse sites, such as Bookwyrm that has its own interfaces for reading, subscribing, and commenting, but can be subscribed to and replied to in Mastodon and the rest of the fediverse.

A Reader client?

I look forward to the development of more clients ala Google Reader, that emphasize reading, organizing, and managing a larger and more varied universe of neo-blogs – the twitter stream of lightly-differentiated posts, threads, link shares, and replies is only one approach for presentation, though I appreciate its emphasis on discussion and community.

This blog can be followed @luke@li.mnino.us although I don't believe it can receive replies, I can also be found @luke@social.coop for discussion. (Apparently these mentions here will also alert these federated accounts, if so nice.)

Can we categorize fediverse applications and actors according to the subset of participation behaviors it supports? How will a Reader client deal with acting-as your other identities for discussion? It seems likely that the first solid Reader app will integrate as a presentation for your Mastodon account of subscriptions and replies, although that also seems like it will perhaps overwhelm the stream presentation's usefulness. Or perhaps creating a Reader client is a larger featureset than it initially feels.