Should a single company control the Social Web?
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@bnewbold @hallenbeck one thing that we could do, if you wanted to, is publish the AT Protocol specs as a CG Report. That process is pretty lightweight, but includes granting licenses on trademark, copyright, patents, etc. It would be a quick way to make this move.
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@evan
The strong yeses are either hypocrites or trolls. -
@evan I'm curious what would be the expected result in the same poll in Twitter... (rhetorical question)
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@lvctvs I don't use X or Bluesky but if you do this poll lmk
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@virtuous_sloth or mistakes or VCs
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@hallenbeck I asked something close a few months ago, assuming people want the Social Web to be successful:
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@evan Now let's hear from the other "yes" voters.
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@evan absolutely when are we creating this fictional company?
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@elight by other do you mean, other than you?
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This seems like a lot of Strong Nos.
I'm glad to hear it. I don't think Bluesky, Farcaster, or any other company should convince everyone to use the protocol they control. Their investors have bet that we will.
I like using and contributing to open standards developed in neutral standards bodies like IETF and W3C.
I will not stop saying that open standard protocols are better for the Internet than proprietary ones.
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Evan Prodromoureplied to Evan Prodromou last edited by [email protected]
I will, however, continue trying to learn how to say this in ways that are clear and comprehensible to listeners and don't push people away.
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I also think it's *great* when companies implement open standards. That puts them on an even playing field with individuals, families, coops, non-profits, universities, governments, and other parts of civil society. I hope the companies named above find better ways to engage with the wider Internet. I'm happy to help them however I can.
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Evan Prodromoureplied to Evan Prodromou last edited by [email protected]
I am sad that the ActivityPub network is still vulnerable to this kind of attack.
Protocols like HTTP and TCP/IP are ubiquitous enough that there aren't startups getting funded to create alternatives. ActivityPub is not yet that ubiquitous in its own problem space.
I am taking the news of the funding of Bluesky and others as a wake up call to help build the infrastructure and resources that ActivityPub needs to be the unquestioned default social networking protocol.
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Khleedrilreplied to Айсылу :comfyreading: :blobfoxwashingmachine: last edited by
@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.
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@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.
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@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.
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Evan Prodromoureplied to Evan Prodromou last edited by [email protected]
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.
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Evan Prodromoureplied to Evan Prodromou last edited by [email protected]
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.
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Evan Prodromoureplied to Evan Prodromou last edited by [email protected]
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.
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@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.
