Figure I should post this here as well.

Evan Prodromou

@deadsuperhero @mmasnick.bsky.social wants to frame social networking protocols as a Pinewood Derby where lots of earnest competitors are trying their dangedest to make the fastest little car.

He's not willing to face the fact that he's on the board of a company that is trying to enclose the commons, and that it's a very risky strategy.

Evan Prodromou

@deadsuperhero I really dislike how much you erase other people, companies, and organizations in the ActivityPub space when you talk to me. AP is not "my" protocol; it very literally belongs to all of us. Hundreds of people have edited, implemented, documented and debugged the ActivityPub protocol and API, and it's really unfair to try to make it all about me.

Evan Prodromou

@deadsuperhero Lastly, you ask why I don't learn from Bluesky. As I mentioned, the patent status of the AT Protocol is up in the air; because they have a proprietary protocol that has not been through an open standards process, I don't know what the patent status is on the techniques. Consequently, I've tried to avoid Bluesky; I don't have an account, I haven't reviewed the protocol documents, and I don't try to emulate the features. I can't afford to introduce patented techniques into AP.

Evan Prodromou

@deadsuperhero I do really appreciate the BridgyFed bridge, and I like being able to read posts by people who use the network.

Sean Tilley

@evan This isn’t about We Distribute or your reception of it. It’s about how you engage with people who don’t want to build on ActivityPub, along with a general unwillingness to listen to feedback about the protocol’s shortcomings. I’ve seen you literally say to people that they should build on ActivityPub, and this other thing that they’re trying to do isn’t worth anybody’s attention.

This general hostility is cancer to communities. It’s on par with RMS and the Free Software Foundation, in the sense of pursuing one form of “correctness” above all others, and berating others for not doing things your way. It’s legitimately awful from the standpoint of advocacy, and leads me to believe that you might not be the best person to serve as a community advocate.

I can’t respect that. If anything, this situation has all but taken the wind out of my sails, to the point that I’ve contemplated closing my site and leaving forever. The Fediverse is not salvageable if you’re not willing to find meaningful change within yourself.

Evan Prodromou

@deadsuperhero 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. I feel like it's important to hold a firm line on open standards, and to counteract the Pinewood Derby paradigm which serves a single company's goals at the expense of the rest of the Internet.

Jens Finkhäuser

@deadsuperhero @evan @mmasnick I'm not a fan of what's happening with the foundation backed by GAFAM (TL;DR), but one point is rather irritating, Sean: what you say about FEPs.

FEPs are not substantially different from RFCs or W3C documents. Your argument here, then, seems to boil down to "the entire Internet and web are embarrassing because of how they're governed".

Sean, purely on a technological level, that's a pretty bad look.

Sean Tilley

@evan Regardless of the semantics of swearing or wrapping everything in the framework of polite conversation, you generally behave in a way towards competing efforts in a to manner that is dismissive at best, and hostile at worst.

Consider your own interaction with Mike Masnick, where you say things like “I’m not here to make you feel bad about your poor decision.” Yeah, no swear words, direct insults, or personal attacks, good job! Except that it’s still petty and hostile, and largely ignores what Mike even had to say.

I personally believe that competition between protocols in the decentralized social space is a valuable thing. We can’t pretend that things are perfect or that we have all the answers, and both AT Proto and Nostr have legitimately great ideas. I’m not saying to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but a general hostility towards people who took a different approach or built a different protocol makes zero sense. There is no shame from drawing inspiration from different efforts that evolved from a unique set of needs. We all have pieces of the puzzle.

Sean Tilley

@evan Regardless of the semantics of swearing or wrapping everything in the framework of polite conversation, you generally behave in a way towards competing efforts in a to manner that is dismissive at best, and hostile at worst.

Consider your own interaction with Mike Masnick, where you say things like “I’m not here to make you feel bad about your poor decision.” Yeah, no swear words, direct insults, or personal attacks, good job! Except that it’s still petty and hostile, and largely ignores what Mike even had to say.

I personally believe that competition between protocols in the decentralized social space is a valuable thing. We can’t pretend that things are perfect or that we have all the answers, and both AT Proto and Nostr have legitimately great ideas. I’m not saying to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but a general hostility towards people who took a different approach or built a different protocol makes zero sense. There is no shame from drawing inspiration from different efforts that evolved from a unique set of needs. We all have pieces of the puzzle.

bryan newbold

@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.

Sean Tilley

@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.

Evan Prodromou

@bnewbold @mmasnick I am so glad you take it as seriously as I do!

Like I said, it'd be a real relief to see a patent pledge from the corporation itself. Mike knows a lot about this topic and can help push it through at the board level.

Sean Tilley

@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.

bryan newbold

@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.

Sean Tilley

@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?

Sean Tilley

@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?

Emelia 👸🏻

@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.

Sean Tilley

@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.

Evan Prodromou

@bnewbold @mmasnick I agree! You've been expressing that intention for a while, without a lot of action. And only for part of your stack.

You also have a whole set of new investors. A patent pledge from the corporation is the best way to show that the whole org is aligned on this.

Sean Tilley

@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.