Having spent a fair amount of time developing for all of them, my experience has been that most proprietary social network (“silo”) APIs are on the easy/low effort end of the spectrum, followed closely by the Bluesky API, webmention + microformats2, and Nostr, then a big jump up to ActivityPub at above average, then AT Protocol at the high end.
They all differ in many important ways beyond development effort, of course. Personally, I’m most excited about webmention + mf2, ATProto, and then ActivityPub, for all the obvious reasons. Still though.
(If not for all the NIPs, Nostr would be the easiest of all. Developing for Nostr is pretty simple, but the NIPs are so loose and terse and spread out that ramping up on them and grokking how they all fit together can feel chaotic, at least at first.)
@snarfed.org I’d note that Mastodon has an API that’s on par with your average #normieMedia site. No ActivityPub needed; it’s just OAuth and JSON.
Definitely! I’m familiar, I’ve spent a bunch of time developing against that API too.
The one unusual quirk there is registering OAuth clients programmatically, per instance. After that, agreed, it’s standard OAuth + REST JSON.
@snarfed.org how do #NIPs fit together? Does a #Nostr implementation need to support a certain set of them?
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