Something that makes me annoyed about computing is that two systems can’t just talk to each other without prior coordination anymore.

Alex Zenla

pasta la vida

@alex what kind of system are you talking about?

Alex Zenla

@risottobias any third party service to any other third party service is almost certainly unable to talk to each other without prior coordination.

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@alex as compared to....?

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@alex if a company makes something new that speaks a new language, it'd have to have coordination

like if we had said everything has to speak AOL and new things aren't allowed

or if we froze activitypub

or froze kubernetes

and entrenched an old standard... becoming... SMTP or XMPP, with the upsides and downsides to a permanent standard

Alex Zenla

@risottobias i am watching an old video about NEXTstep, and the model for cross application communication is generic enough that two apps can work together without prior work. My observation is that today, the web basically doesn’t have this, web hooks exist, etc, but that still requires coordination of payloads.

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

@alex @risottobias this was the point of using JSON-LD for activitypub, but it doesn’t work well.

Khionu S :trans_furr_white:

@risottobias @alex The thing is, it's possible to design systems that are forward compatible. It's hard, but that's not a reason against doing it.

pasta la vida

@khionu @alex that also requires being reverse compatible, right?

Khionu S :trans_furr_white:

@risottobias @alex kind of not really. When you design a forward-compatible system, it has a foundation that eliminates the need for backwards compatibility

Khionu S :trans_furr_white:

@risottobias @alex one way to visualize it is you get horizontal branching instead of more linear branching over time

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@khionu @alex what even would that look like?

Khionu S :trans_furr_white:

@risottobias @alex often some form of framing, thoroughly detailed optionals, forecasting the needs of users and capturing their complexity in someway(s).

pasta la vida

@khionu @alex I don't understand it but I sense this is just something on another plane of existence I'll never achieve.