as a programmer, if you try to read the technical documentation for the Fediverse/Mastodon (the ActivityPub protocol), you can stare at it for quite a long time and still not quite understand it.

it's got a bit of a barrier of entry.

by contrast, it only took me a few minutes to understand the documentation for Nostr - a social medium that has similarities to Mastodon. Jack Dorsey - the former Twitter CEO - is the person who got it off the ground.

as a programmer, i find it very easy to get started with, and fun to play with. ActivityPub feels a bit more bureaucratic by comparison.