This is an interesting (pronounced like "frustrating") thread.

Matthew Lyon

@jenniferplusplus There’s this recurring idea that somehow if we can just make our data formats extensive enough we’ll eventually end up with “the everything format” and we won’t need any other type of data and any app can read any file. I remember XML promising this in the 90s.

mx alex tax1a - 2020 (4)

@jenniferplusplus one time we had someone respond to our issues with activitypub to snitch-tag us in with cwebber and be like "why don't you bring this up with her, she's even trans!!" as if her gender had any bearing on the situation. cwebber blocked us, we ended up blocking the rando

Jenniferplusplus

Standards and specifications are supposed to facilitate interoperability, by pre-doing a bunch of coordination work for future participants. But ActivityPub is this partially defined rdf vocabulary wrapped in a little bit of prose, and nothing more. It completely punts on all of the coordination that standards are supposed to provide

Now we're left to do it ad-hoc, except activitypub and the w3c are now actively standing in the way, and sucking up all the oxygen for organizing that

Which sucks

Sam Sethi :pc2red: ⁂

@thisismissem @jenniferplusplus @julian again 100% agree, otherwise we can end up overloading people who follow us. Filters by verbs in clients is critical. We are testing this now in TrueFans.social so if you want to follow what I publish from TrueFans you can limit what you receive. So in my TrueFans.fm settings I choose what activity verbs I want to publish to my public Activitystream - https://truefans.social/samsethi - but we want to offer you the option to apply a filter so you can choose.

Jenniferplusplus

@atax1a I have a lot of sympathy for most of the people involved with the original process. They had impossible requirements, no time, and no support.

But the end result is that we still have this not-spec that people keep assuming will let them interoperate. Like some open pit that people keep falling into.

Matthew Lyon

@jenniferplusplus I remember reading an argument for this, which pointed to the newfound success of the web and said “imagine the interoperability of the web but for EVERYTHING” and the site had a “best viewed in Netscape Navigator 3.0” badge on it and I remember thinking “one of these things is not like the other”

Emelia 👸🏻

@samsethi @jenniferplusplus @julian

I think it'd be neat to see a FEP for follow-time activity selection.

mx alex tax1a - 2020 (4)

@jenniferplusplus we're mutuals with one of the other people involved with the original spec, and they've had good humor about our criticism

and also yeah, you've seen us in full-on "yelling about oauth2" mode

Jenniferplusplus

@samsethi @julian
And there are solutions to that. But they take real work and coordination. We should have schemas. We should have a schema registry. We should have defined fallback mechanisms. We should have conformance profiles.

But none of these things exist, and it's killing us.

Jenniferplusplus

@mattly There is something happening that induces some deeply rooted and powerful magical thinking around this concept. But I have not figured out what it is or how to disrupt it.

Matthew Lyon

@jenniferplusplus I’ve been victim to it once before; I think it’s a thing that happens when one gets too into the abstract realm, and doesn’t do any actual implementing. It’s easy to forget the real world exists and has constraints when you don’t work in it.

hidden

@jenniferplusplus @julian If we'd remove Mastodon from the picture would the problem go away?

If we had 100% compliant ActivityPub app, whatever that means, would it work with another 100% compliant one? Say podcasting app, badge app, events app and blogging app...

The problem seems to be the undefined or open to interpretation protocol...

Overriding AS object to do something else because your app won't use it doesn't help either...

Noah Kennedy

@jenniferplusplus my hot take: AP is another example of how the W3C really isn't super useful as a standards body and tends to be actually counterproductive

having been involved with IETF standards processes before, there's such a big difference between a standards effort led by actual stakeholders which requires a diverse set of implementations to be accepted and what happens at the W3C with AP, JSON-LD, and RDF.

this is just laughably bad standards work

julian

@[email protected] @[email protected] that's exactly it.

I'm not going to go as far as using ivory tower imagery, but sometimes I've seen discussion occur around issues so abstract and theoretical that there is practically no way for me to implement it without having to throw everything away and start from scratch.

The real world is far messier, and the fact that we're able to talk to each other at all over ActivityPub is frankly a miracle... but that's actually par for the course if you look at practically any other protocol.

Email? Good god yes. DNS? Yup.

Jenniferplusplus

@hidden @julian
No. Mastodon is the worst offender, but the problem is that ActivityPub doesn't produce interoperability. There's no such thing as being AP compliant. That's not even a concept that makes sense. So we'd be right back here in a year or two, complaining about whatever other app ascended to popularity.

Hrefna (DHC)

@noah

One observation I've had previously is that:

W3C creates standards to solve problems that may or may not exist in reality. They charter groups to come together and solve problems in a way that aligns with their other standards, trying to get a consensus solution to a hypothetical (or niche) problems using consensus solutions to other hypothetical problems.

You can see this in the history of RDF, then in the history of JSON-LD, then in the history of AP.

@jenniferplusplus

Noah Kennedy

@hrefna @jenniferplusplus that is an incredibly good way of putting it

Michael T. Bacon, Ph.D.

@jenniferplusplus

Ooft, yeah. I've been doing a bunch with RDF and JSON-LD recently in non-AP contexts, and there's a huge amount of power there but HOLY PEAS it is NOT an interoperability standard, nor could it ever be one, I think. They are ontological data format and linking standards that REQUIRE a strong defining model for interop.

I'm a fossil from the old days of the IMAP and friends IETF standards. AP is so freakin' wobbly compared to those.

Hrefna (DHC)

@noah

Sometimes they hit on a core concern or problem, but then they keep asking "but what if" until people ignore 90% of the spec (XML I'm looking at you) and/or it gets applied to other specs that then get ignored (how many XML specs are there?). Many times the spec seems so abstract as to be unimplementable in a useful form (DIDs! you're up!)

But there's now a spec!

…that no one uses or can use. But it exists!

Specs for the sake of having specs.

@jenniferplusplus

Greg

@jenniferplusplus @julian discovered firsthand when working on my toy AP poster that Mastodon won't even do the "right" thing with an "image" object - instead of converting this to an embedded image in a post, it just shows it as a plain link! have to use their Attachments thing to a note activity to get that to work