@dansup Talk to #Friendica devs. If Circles are meant to approximate #GPlus Circles and #Diaspora Aspects, they (and #Hubzilla's Mike) probably have more insight than everyone else.
@usbhump Evan P's Status\.Net startup lost its funding. Around the same time, he was trying to get the developers of the underlying protocols that compose #OStatus to agree to make changes to their protocols to enable enhanced privacy. Among the organizations he was trying to motivate was Google, which had recently introduced #GPlus and was no long interested in the open web.
In a hurry to cut costs, he developed the #Pump.io software and protocol to be simpler to develop and cheaper to operate, and to offer some additional privacy built into the protocol. And also to be independent of the progress some of these protocols.
Pump was built with the idea that most federated networks would switch protocols to be compatible. That did not happen. But the hope is that its descendant #ActivityPub will unite the disparate networks.
@gargron Don't oversell AP. If you start to sound like a used car salesperson, people will become suspicious of your motives and the veracity of your claims.
Based on what he said at the time, he felt that it was too difficult to evolve #OStatus's component specs (mostly designed & controlled by Google) once Google decided that #federation and interoperability in the social space was no longer desirable (coincides with the launch of #GPlus). On top of that, his company was losing money (at one point, it was ad-supported, but users rebelled against the most lucrative ad provider, Google), and most SN users relied upon him for zero-price hosting.