Figure I should post this here as well.
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bryan newboldreplied to Evan Prodromou last edited by
@evan @mmasnick when you raised patent concerns to me in person on March 2024, I took them very seriously! which is why I reached out and had a direct call with you about your concerns that same month.
"Right now, you're putting everyone in the space at risk" is a strong statement and accusation of wrong doing on our behalf.
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@evan To what degree is AT Proto proprietary? They provide specs and SDKs on their site, with reasonably good documentation. Anyone can theoretically build their own implementation. Their SDKs are dual-licensed Apache and MIT.
Is this predicated on the idea that it’s being actively developed by a corporation, and takes a cathedral rather than bazaar approach to development?
I am genuinely curious as to what you mean here, as you are the only person I’ve come across making this claim.
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Evan Prodromoureplied to bryan newbold last edited by
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@evan Regardless of other people for the moment, let’s face the facts.
You are a prominent and central figure in this space. Your influence and position cannot be understated. As it stands today, you are the most prominent person capable of making meaningful change. Heck, you even started a foundation that aims to tackle some long-standing problems.
What you say, how you say it, and who you say it to matter. You’re at the top of this pyramid whether you like it or not, and your words and actions affect the community.
My comments are not an effort to reframe history or erase other people. It’s just that, for the sake of this conversation, we’re talking about you.
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bryan newboldreplied to Evan Prodromou last edited by
@evan @mmasnick I would be more than happy to talk with folks from SWF or W3C if they share this specific concern about Bluesky exploiting patents on social web technology, and what we can do to allay those concerns.
The norm in this space is to participate in a standards body, and it remains our intention to do so.
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@jens @evan @mmasnick Listen, I’m constantly beating the drum about how important the FEP work is. It’s one thing I can point to that has the most substantial amount of development and evolution.
The problem I have is that the protocol is nearly a decade old, and has yet to incorporate substantial changes derived from the lessons learned over the years.
The problem with FEPs is that they are extensions, and effectively route around shortcomings within the spec. This is fine in practice, but there’s no real incentive to bring substantial improvements into the protocol spec itself.
Ignoring the fact that there is no true “ActivityPub” implementation, we’re all speaking a bastardized version of Mastodon-ActivityPub with vocabulary extensions and FEPs, I feel like there’s a wide gap between ActivityPub as a spec, and what we actually use in practice. How do we reconcile this?
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@evan You say things like “they plan to enclose the commons” and “serving goals at the expense of the rest of the Internet”, but those are massive claims. Do you have anything to back those claims up?
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@deadsuperhero @evan not to be taking sides here, Evan, but you did literally describe yourself as the "father of the Fediverse", which is really really weird language, and I've heard from multiple people that this language was unsettling to them & felt like it erased others contributions to making the Fediverse what it is today.
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@thisismissem @evan Full disclosure: I have literally called him that in the past. Not because the network necessarily has a singular parent or lineage, but because of what kicked off with Laconia and StatusNet.
History is obviously more complicated, but I thought it was a neat way to describe him at the time.
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Evan Prodromoureplied to bryan newbold last edited by
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@evan As an aside, the statement “I appreciate your friendly advice about conveying the message. I want to let you know that I’ve heard it, thought about it, and probably will not follow it.” is legitimately hilarious.
Listen: despite this being a heated conversation, I don’t harbor ill will. It is important to me to call these interactions out, because your influence and position matter a lot. I feel like this is heading down a path that is unnecessarily exclusionary and hostile towards outsiders, and will ultimately put off a lot of people that might otherwise be interested in ActivityPub. That is the last thing we need right now.
I want to see you succeed and ActivityPub succeed, but I don’t want to see you or the wider community lean into bad instincts when kindness, empathy, and a cool head are so crucial.
That’s all I have to say on the matter.
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jack o lantern 🎃replied to Evan Prodromou last edited by
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@deadsuperhero @evan So, at risk of splitting the solomonic baby, I will say as someone who's worked on a lot of open-source governance and legal issues that patents and licensing are two totally orthogonal enclosure vectors, and honestly the biggest threat to BS later merging with other efforts isn't BS LLC but A.) a vulture fund buying it to strip mine it after the company dies, or B.) a patent *by a loadbearing service provider in the space* over which BS has no control but can't afford
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@deadsuperhero @evan to stop using years from now (I'm particularly worried about this in the context of composable moderation, which @mmasnick rightly points out as a key innovation that might find its way onto other protocols over time... by which time patent-holding AI SPs might have a lock on the market). Patent pledges are a historic remedy/downpayment against that vector, which Evan is right to point out is perhaps the most serious here, and Bryan is right to say it's early to make one!
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@deadsuperhero @evan @mmasnick There's no right answers here, it's all tradeoffs and risks. I personally would welcome and support a patent pledge, and would advise if they want free (not-really-professional) advice on the matter for whatever strange reason, but I also understand if it feels like overkill or an expensive pre-commitment to make at this exact point in the evolution of their company. We shouldn't dismiss this as an academic concern, tho-- it's a real concern in FOSSprotocolherstory
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@deadsuperhero @evan @mmasnick > I don’t want to think of my 15 years in the space as a waste,
Sidenote, Sean, please don't talk like that, you are a saint and your 15 years have made a measurable, recognized, valuable difference no matter who you beef with "on social media." Even if you some day block me for some stupid shit i post on here, promise me you won't belittle your important work or ragequit. you're prolly just a touch emotionally overinvested
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Evan Prodromoureplied to jack o lantern 🎃 last edited by
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@deadsuperhero it's a protocol created, implemented and controlled by a single company, which hasn't been through an open standards process.
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@deadsuperhero thanks for the kind words. I put in the time on ActivityPub because I want us to have a great Social Web. I believe that the Social Web will be healthier and more resilient if it's based on open standards. This how most Internet protocols work.
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@evan @deadsuperhero an open standards process doesn't necessarily mean we reach a good standard, it just means we reach a standard that satisfies enough people working on it.
