Should a single company control the Social Web?

Khleedril

@wonderfox_dev @evan Those are lonely attention-seekers. Some even admit as much in the discussion, saying they only voted so others would notice them.

Bruce Elrick

@evan We need to keep the successful insertion of inscrutable DRM into official HTML standards by powerful interests top of mind when defending ActivityPub from the corporations at the gate.

Evan Prodromou

@khleedril I've had some people get quite angry at me for saying that I don't think a single company should run the Social Web.

I'm glad to know that the resistance is more about how I say it, and not that I say it at all.

Evan Prodromou

I don't like conversations about comparing protocols on technical grounds. It's not that I think ActivityPub cannot stand up to others -- it's a fantastic, expressive, flexible, secure and extensible protocol -- but I think the framing ignores the governance issues. I do appreciate the challenges, though -- it helps make ActivityPub better.

Evan Prodromou

I think ActivityPub is flexible enough that experimentation can happen in a huge number of ways. Building an extension on top of AP is very straightforward and extensions carefully designed can easily be backwards-compatible. It's simply untrue that anyone needs to start over from scratch with an incompatible base protocol in order to develop interesting new features.

Evan Prodromou

Lastly, I think a lot of the discussion around ActivityPub in some communities is really negative. Instead of celebrating the immense success of the protocol, and its impressive positive characteristics, there's a lot of picking at flaws around the edges. In those communities, people find my enthusiasm about AP irritating. I understand why people might want to talk that way, but I also prefer to talk about why I love it, and how we can make a good thing better.

infinite love ⴳ

@evan this isn't a slight against activitypub but i don't think the comparison to http makes sense. partly because activitypub in a sense *is* http, at least in how it's broadly implemented. but it's just one class of http messages. i don't think it makes sense for all web traffic to be in activitypub format.

Evan Prodromou

@trwnh I don't think you understood the example. I tried to rewrite it to make it clearer in which way I am comparing AP to other protocols.

infinite love ⴳ

@evan evan, might this be an unfair framing? the activitypub specification has a lot of positives, but the problems are a) not always at the edges, and b) mostly in how popular implementation ("the fediverse") has diverged from the spec, in some places quite significantly, to the point that anyone wanting to implement "activitypub" to the letter of the spec will not be able to talk to anyone on "the fediverse". webfinger and http sigs are one thing, but the core message semantics are another.

infinite love ⴳ

@evan the rewording is better, but i still think that "problem space" is not sufficiently defined. you call out "social networking protocol" specifically, but i think part of the problem is that there are people interested in activitypub that aren't as interested in social networks as you are. the relatively poor adoption of C2S as a standard API for managing web resources is either insignificant or very significant, depending on who you ask.

McNeely

@evan I mean this question in the least antagonistic way possible, but how many of the perceived problems with AP are due to the flagship implementation (Mastodon) vs the actual protocol?

One of my worries is that developers are so focused on compatibility they end up repeating acknowledged mistakes of the past.

Evan Prodromou

@McNeely that question is fine. I agree with the framing; people who experiment with, for example, different kinds of activities or content types can feel frustrated when Mastodon handles them poorly. Finding the right solution here is important to the future of the Fediverse, and probably the future of Mastodon.

Evan Prodromou

There seems to be some misunderstanding on my intention here.

I am discussing why some people find my upbeat take on AP uncomfortable. This is not a discussion about the qualities of ActivityPub nor is it an invitation to debate the characteristics of ActivityPub.

If you would like to talk trash about ActivityPub, there are lots of places where that conversation is welcome, but this thread is not one of them.

dbat :godot:

@evan who voted yes? shivvvver.

Evan Prodromou

@dbat Well, at least the Bluesky team and their investors.

Bluesky raises $15M Series A, plans to launch subscriptions | TechCrunch

Decentralized social app Bluesky announced on Thursday that it has raised a $15 million Series A round, following its $8 million seed raise last year.

TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)

Evan Prodromou

@trwnh I don't think it's an unfair framing, but I'd be happy to read more positive posts about AP from others, if you think I've missed them.

infinite love ⴳ

@evan my point was more that “negativity” is not necessarily targeted at AP, but at the architecture and ecosystem of the present fediverse. people expressing their frustrations or criticisms should be seen as an opportunity to improve pain points at a protocol or profile level. one example is possibly spinning up a task force or report to document the lifecycles of resources and objects as they are created and deleted. another example is mapping out required properties and associated behaviors.

infinite love ⴳ

@evan basically, people want to see considerations go into one or more formally defined “protocols” that can be signaled or negotiated client-to-client or actor-to-actor. if i want to do a chess extension, i need to know that the other actor can play. if i want to do e2ee messaging, i need my keys negotiated between clients instead of actors. and if i want to make “posts” then i need to agree with other actors what a “post” is.

i’d be happy to bring this up at the cg meeting next week…

infinite love ⴳ

@evan at its core, AP lets you do a lot of really cool stuff — practically unbounded! which is both good from the perspective of what it enables you to do and build, but also it’s a lot to take in for any prospective users of AP in building software. i think as long as AP exists in the domain of the W3C, we have a responsibility to pave those paths so that people have an easier time understanding how everything fits together.

:PUA: Shlee fucked around and

@trwnh @evan The purpose of a system is what it does - Stafford Beer