Note: this is a personal opinion piece for my blog.
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Note: this is a personal opinion piece for my blog. It is not an official statement coming from We Distribute, nor does it articulate that I feel as though everything is horrible and bad. It mostly serves a purpose of talking through my feelings.
Today was interesting, but in the kind of way that gives me a migraine. A shiny new non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the Fediverse […]
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@sean thanks! This is a good article and the criticism is all valid.
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Evan Prodromoureplied to Evan Prodromou last edited by
@sean in particular, my advocacy for a single, standardized protocol for the social web.
I believe that the social web is very important, and that its growth is best served with a single protocol.
I find it frustrating that you think ActivityPub is important to me because I am involved in making and maintaining it. It's just the opposite: I'm doing this work because I think it's important.
And I think it's important because it is an open standard that many people work on. It's our best hope.
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Evan Prodromoureplied to Evan Prodromou last edited by
@sean that said, there's more to life than the social web. Making cool things with computers is good. Connecting people is good.
I wish that people who do these things would align their work with the goal of building the social web, but if not, hey.
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Evan Prodromoureplied to Evan Prodromou last edited by
@sean that all said, all of the examples you give are of people actively talking shit about ActivityPub.
Almost always, the person is asked why they don't use ActivityPub, the open standard that connects tens of millions of people already.
Because everyone knows that using the open standard is the default choice. You should start there, and only create something else in extreme circumstances.
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Evan Prodromoureplied to Evan Prodromou last edited by
@sean And instead of answering truthfully ("we are building a business around a protocol", "I think it would be fun to hack my own protocol", "I have a Messiah complex"), they pretend that their reasons are about some imagined technical faults in ActivityPub.
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Evan Prodromoureplied to Evan Prodromou last edited by
@sean I'm not obligated to let those false claims go by without comment.
I can modulate my tone, though. You pointed out an example where I called a group of people liars. I changed it to say I don't believe them. It's functionally the same thing, but the second one is less harsh.
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Evan Prodromoureplied to Evan Prodromou last edited by
@sean I'll try to keep it in mind next time a startup CEO is on stage telling untruths about the social web, or when a hacker's new protocol manifesto is making the rounds.
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Hi Evan, thanks for taking the time to respond to my humble blog. I’ll try to take the time to address your points individually, to the best of my ability.
Also: I’m sorry. You came to me last week with a news story about this new foundation you’re launching, and all the things you hope to accomplish with it. It probably feels weird for me to report on it, and then turn around and pour out all these feelings that seem to go in a different direction. I promise, I have no ulterior motive, and I’m not trying to stab you in the back. It’s just that complicated feelings finally bubbled over.
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deadsuperheroreplied to Evan Prodromou last edited by
Here’s the thing: our opinions may differ on what it means to talk shit about something. I have no doubt that some people have been less than charitable in evaluating the spec, but I feel that even the more difficult criticism is sometimes warranted.
Take, for example, the lengthy feedback that @[email protected] often posts when criticizing ActivityPub. This isn’t some hater or someone trying to poison the well, but a person who has built multiple implementations several times over, and has deep concerns about the specification and its shortcomings.
Instead of reflecting on feedback from people like this, and how we can collectively make things better, you lean into one of your worst tendencies: equate all critiques as the opinions of haters who want to talk trash, and then block them.
These are the very people we could be taking serious lessons from, with regards on how a future version of the spec could be better. Ignoring their input doesn’t fix anything, or make the situation better in any way.
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deadsuperheroreplied to Evan Prodromou last edited by
This is the exact kind of smug, self-assured, passive-aggresive tone that is driving people away from the Fediverse, though. Many of the criticisms about the Fediverse, its overlapping communities, and its overall ecosystem are entirely valid.
You are in a unique position to not only advocate for the Fediverse and ActivityPub and their respective strengths, but to double down and actually make things better. That requires carrying the spec forward, fixing the various things that are wrong, and actually implementing solutions instead of hammering on and on about things like LOLA or E2E Encryption, as those things are effectively vaporware right now that get carted out whenever it’s convenient to make a case about how we’re “going places”, when in fact most of the heavy lifting is being done at the grassroots level with FEPs.
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Evan Prodromoureplied to deadsuperhero last edited by
@sean Yeah, protocol work takes time. I do think a lot of great work is happening in FEPs.
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Evan Prodromoureplied to deadsuperhero last edited by
@sean Insisting that people unblock you is creepy and abusive. I don't know if I have this person blocked or not, but please don't do this.
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I get a json response (AP
Note
) when opening the link with desktop chrome/firefox user agent, is this intentional? @deadsuperhero -
Evan Prodromoureplied to deadsuperhero last edited by
@sean it's not a problem at all. We have been allies and friends for over a decade. The call is coming from inside the house, and I appreciate your thoughts.
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Evan Prodromoureplied to Evan Prodromou last edited by
@sean There are collective areas where we collaborate on ActivityPub -- SWICG, SocialHub. People who want to have input on ActivityPub should participate there. I don't think having a connection to me personally is required to be part of ActivityPub.
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Evan Prodromoureplied to marcin mikołajczak last edited by
@mkljczk @sean @deadsuperhero I think this happens sometimes with WordPress's ActivityPub implementation.
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Sean Tilleyreplied to marcin mikołajczak last edited by
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marcin mikołajczakreplied to Evan Prodromou last edited by
it's likely related to some caching mechanism (plugin?) that's not aware of the
Accept
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Evan Prodromoureplied to marcin mikołajczak last edited by
@mkljczk @sean @deadsuperhero Yeah, that what I heard. Are you talking about the link to socialwebfoundation.org (we've had reports of this since yesterday) or Sean's blog?