I've wanted to write up a "critique document" of both "present day ActivityPub" and ATproto but wasn't sure how they'd be received. I think knowing you'd be interested makes me feel pretty positive about it
I do think that @blaine is right in that there's shall we say a "fixed point of convergence" if things were to work right, and so maybe that's the right way to frame things around
@stefan AP currently does not survive nodes going down well. That's addressable, and I have written out part of the answer of how to address it, but it's true that it doesn't do that presently and I'm not sure there's community interest to fix it.
I actually think that the people working at Bluesky do believe in decentralization, and they have a lot of good people there. If there are ways to collaborate which are fruitful, I'd rather not burn a bridge, which is partly why I keep my mouth shut. But there are serious, serious structural problems for achieving decentralization and I don't think the financial model will prioritize fixing them, and in the meanwhile many users mistakenly believe they *are* on a decentralized system.
Also I spent some time reviewing Bluesky's DID stuff enough to be fairly convinced that it won't, in a useful way to users, really survive nodes going down in the ways users believe (that's on top of did:plc being centralized, which is well known, and did:web being completely superfluous, which seems obvious but I'm surprised I don't see advocated as often). I have a lot of analysis on this stuff, but I'm hesitant to post some of this because I just sound like I'm being grouchy.
But really, I'm worried about users being sold on the idea of decentralization and it falling out from under their feet and losing faith in it, when there's architectural challenges there from the get-go. That's why this really bugs me.
Maybe they can be addressed, and that's one reason to post the critique, but I suspect it'll just make people mad at me, I dunno
BTW re: "content which survives AP nodes going down", I made a demo of how to do that in an AP-spec compatible way a few years ago, and it even had encryption so not everyone hosting the content needed to know what it was https://gitlab.com/spritely/golem/blob/master/README.org
basically I am pretty skeptical the relay design is gonna be able to support many independent instances
ActivityPub as-deployed has many challenges, if you've read enough of my writing you'll certainly hear that (and some of how to improve the situation) but at least it started under a foundation of a lot of nodes participating on the network
With ActivityPub, you can make the decentralized version of Twitter, or the decentralized version of YouTube, or the decentralized version of BlueSky
It's been really awesome getting to work with @a every day at Spritely. Amy joined as Technical Administrator about a month ago and has been doing an incredible job.
When I say Amy is an incredible #Emacs witch, I mean, just look at her "boxy" org-mode diagram tool https://gitlab.com/grinn.amy/boxy-headings/
I have a lot of opinions about ATProto but I don't think they'd be received as productive so I'm mostly keeping them to myself I guess
Spritely's office hours / community meeting is tomorrow! https://spritely.institute/news/first-office-hours-recap.html
Feel free to post topics to talk about here! https://community.spritely.institute/t/next-office-hours-rfp-what-do-you-want-to-talk-about/587
the scientists were so busy asking whether they could, they never stopped to ask whether or not they should go get lunch
I'm not quite sure but I see the old proposal I co-authored with Jay Graber when Bluesky was in its "what should Bluesky be" phase about ActivityPub + ocaps mentioned in this writeup about bluesky and ATProto https://whtwnd.com/alexia.bsky.cyrneko.eu/3l727v7zlis2i
But it's linked to suggest that ATProto has ocaps in it, and afaik that's not true, right? Is capability security part of the design in some planned state? I only ask because though this isn't written up by a core bluesky dev, Paul Frazee who is a core bluesky dev, reposted it saying he thought it was a good writeup
(FWIW not really much of anything from the co-proposal made it into ATProto afaict, they went a fairly different direction, which is fine, I just found that confusing)
Listen I have exactly this far memorized in Beowulf
Modified version of Zelda OOT where Navi just shouts "Hwæt!" over and over again
please don't think I want to do this actually
*packs self into shipping crate and seals door*
"Ship it!!!!"
A friend of mine advocates that social communities compost over time, and that's okay. It's okay for a community to compost, and move on. Hopefully the good parts can continue.
Ran a small US "New England" trans support group for a while and today decided: I'm done. I will not do this anymore. I am doing too many things. I don't know how to manage things rn and the other admins don't either and we're all busy.
But I think sometimes it's okay to let something go. C'3$7 la V13
Are you making something with Blender and Grease Pencil? I want to see!
Found at the bottom of this article on type inference https://bernsteinbear.com/blog/type-inference/
