“With targeted FEPs and pioneering implementations like Flowz, the Fediverse can break free of proprietary client APIs and monolithic client/server implementations and empower a new wave of social web innovation.”
This is such a valuable insight! There are 2 extremes in decentralised social app dev, one where an app is just a dumb terminal for a particular server, and then the inverse, pure P2P apps with no server. But there is a middle ground. Apps can be a focus of UX development, and access different servers as needed to provide functionality that’s impractical (if not impossible) to do with pure P2P networks.
Since @stevebate and I have butted heads here from time to time, I want to be crystal clear that this is not some kind of subtle ankle-tap, but genuine praise. Both for his experiments with Flows, and particularly the way the quoted piece expands on various issues with AP C2S.
Standard C2S API doesn't liberate clients from servers because everything is still tied to a single server. We may get more client diversity but not much more.
The middle ground between client-server model and P2P is FEP-ae97. It's C2S API combined with nomadic identity.
You seem to be conflating different topics here: client software versus actor identity mobility. The C2S API does not tie client software to a single server or a single server (instance or implementation) to a single client implementation.