Yes but it unfortunatly completly ignores the topic of spam and moderation. So we will have another 10 years of experimenting at the expense of the users and the standard. And we may end up with some centralisation again like with email.
Still a great tech though. I just wish the authors would think about IRL and not just assume a perfect sphere in a frictionless vaccum.
Not really. Moderation is a local matter, something you sort out with the moderators of the instance you're on. Instances that don't moderate well are blacklisted. It's not like there haven't been trolls before. In practice the system works fine.
If HN did implement this then would they have to blacklist bad instances? What is to stop people from spinning up bad instances faster than HN could blacklist? So we'd surely end up with a whitelist which isn't very social.
I think it's coming at the problem from the wrong direction to take an existing community like HN and make it federate. It's already too big. ActivityPub services work best with a lot of small actors, not a few big ones.
And for the record, Mastodon's scale is pretty damn big, considerably bigger than HN. There are millions of users.
Still a great tech though. I just wish the authors would think about IRL and not just assume a perfect sphere in a frictionless vaccum.