Konrad Hinsen
and 3 others
boosted
Egon Willigh☮gen 🟥
boosted
I checked the number of followers of the @PartijvoordeDieren on #Mastodon and #X on #wikidata and added also the current numbers:
X:
2025-02-12: 63,992
2026-02-26: 62,256
⬇️: 1,736 (2.7%)
Mastodon:
2025-02-12: 2,674
2026-02-26: 3,859
⬆️ : 1,185 (44%)
The #PartijvoordeDieren is the Dutch political party with most followers on Mastodon.
For all Dutch parties on Mastodon see:
https://www.politici-op-mastodon.nl/#partijen
I checked the number of followers of the @PartijvoordeDieren on #Mastodon and #X on #wikidata and added also the current numbers:
X:
2025-02-12: 63,992
2026-02-26: 62,256
⬇️: 1,736 (2.7%)
Mastodon:
2025-02-12: 2,674
2026-02-26: 3,859
⬆️ : 1,185 (44%)
The #PartijvoordeDieren is the Dutch political party with most followers on Mastodon.
For all Dutch parties on Mastodon see:
https://www.politici-op-mastodon.nl/#partijen
I made a diagram yesterday that contrasts #ActivityPub and #SolidProject that is I think interesting to consider.
In the past I've been very active on the Solid forum, and tried to get a collab going with #SocialHub community. A number of points that existed then, are still issues today I think.
Like, though anyone could participate in the standards process via chat, the Solid team and Inrupt were not really interested in their community, hardly giving attention while people were building interesting stuff there.
Also at the time basically all available code was Javascript, making Solid uninteresting or hard to access for other language devs.
But I think biggest issue was that Solid didn't know what it was. It was positioned as 'personal data vault' on the landing page then (but not using this term), but was 'secretly' TBL's desire to reboot the #SemanticWeb. The new web would be all 'Solid apps'. But the adoption strategy for that didn't exist.
Here's the diagram btw: https://social.coop/@smallcircles/116113963712755122
The problem of #SolidProject knowing what it is, is more an inherited problem of #LinkedData / #SemanticWeb knowing what it is.
Semantic web always was "if only all information on the web were semantic and machine-readable, then...". And there it stopped. Presumably magic would happen.
And perhaps it would. But to make such a big leap, a paradigm shift of the entire web, along the way you have inspire a whole lot of people to set the (r)evolution in motion and keep it going.
If you look at what linked data is, it is a very low-level format. Nice if you have it, but now what are you going to build with it? There are some good application areas, but the case for linked data elsewhere is not a given.
Still today there are regular discussions on 'what would be the killer app for Solid' or linked data in general. Saw some interest for LLM's fed semantic data to make them more deterministic. I'm not interested.
I recreated an old diagram in Excalidraw that I spread about a couple years ago, and made it a bit more informative. Explanation can be found in the #AltText
See also and for discussion: https://discuss.coding.social/t/diagram-interoperability-in-practice/828
Or join the Social experience design chatroom at: https://matrix.to/#/#socialcoding-foundations:matrix.org
Also posted to #SocialHub at: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/activitypub-versus-fediverse-interoperability-in-practice/8498
#SX #SocialCoding #SocialWeb #ActivityPub #SolidProject #fediverse
Egon Willigh☮gen 🟥
and 1 other
boosted
WikiPathways RDF IRIs are now dereferenceable! Every http://rdf.wikipathways.org/ identifier now resolves via HTTP with content negotiation: HTML for browsers, Turtle/JSON-LD/RDF-XML/N-Triples for machines.
Try it: click any IRI on the about page, or curl one with an Accept header.
https://rdf.wikipathways.org/about
https://github.com/wikipathways/wikipathways-iri-resolver
#LinkedData #FAIR #WikiPathways #RDF #Bioinformatics #SemanticWeb
WikiPathways RDF IRIs are now dereferenceable! Every http://rdf.wikipathways.org/ identifier now resolves via HTTP with content negotiation: HTML for browsers, Turtle/JSON-LD/RDF-XML/N-Triples for machines.
Try it: click any IRI on the about page, or curl one with an Accept header.
https://rdf.wikipathways.org/about
https://github.com/wikipathways/wikipathways-iri-resolver
#LinkedData #FAIR #WikiPathways #RDF #Bioinformatics #SemanticWeb
🫧 socialcoding..
and 1 other
boosted
It does not need to be that way. I am quite happy after all (after being initially frustrated) by how #ATProto has disrupted things, and opened the eyes of devs in the #ActivityPub ecosystem that we must act or lose out (stay niche, which may be fine too) to the Atmoshpere and how it enables devs to focus on service and product delivery instead of low-level wire plumbing and continuous breakages.
ATProto also shows the way that we can now follow on the #fediverse to catch up again: cocreate a similar robust basis for people to build on. #Bluesky had the advantage of a greenfield start and dedicated team unburdened by past decisions. And they build this whole Lexicon system and ways to introspect functionality.
We can do that too, solve the #LinkedData conundrum, and create an extensibility mechanism that allows devs to focus on service modeling. The more introspection this mechanism allows for, the less design-by-consensus is required, easing expansion to new domains.
I think we underrated the power of the actor model and the extent we can incorporate it on the #ActivityPub fediverse. Somehow we got eternally stuck in talking about HTTP plumbing and core protocol capabilities that we never fleshed out thoroughly in order to be able to just focus on the higher-level concerns of app and service modeling.
Actor systems based on loosely-coupled event-driven architecture, delegation, supervision, supervision strategies, inbox strategies, let-it-fail, actors fronting domain aggregates, service-orientation, etc.
The biggest folly imho is this idea of "let's cram every domain into #ActivityStreams somehow". Flatten everything and project it onto this small set of social primitives that AS defines.
It is once more a choice of pragmatism: "Hey, I've seen it working with Mastodon, so I copied that. And #LinkedData extension mechanism is a handwaved horror show".
So understandable perhaps that we did it. But now we must overcome this trend which has taken stubborn root and drags the ecosystem down.
Right now extensibility of #ActivityPub shapes up as custom app-by-app app-centric development where individual devs just pragmatically throw new stuff on the wire, and when their app gains any popularity or other apps to integrate in a similarish application, things are bolted onto that in random ways. That whole story really constitutes a Big Ball of Mud anti-pattern that only introduces protocol decay, tech debt, and whack-a-mole programming, that is very hard to get rid of once there exists an installed base.
The reason that we do things that way is very understandable. It works in a grassroots environment where indivualist devs find it very hard and not valuable to collaborate at scale in what amounts to a kind of design-by-consensus process. But it comes at a high cost, where interoperability is basically out the door and any app has to be shaped as a pretzel and adopt all the quirks introduced by predecessors in a particular app domain to fit itself on the wire.
It does not need to be that way. I am quite happy after all (after being initially frustrated) by how #ATProto has disrupted things, and opened the eyes of devs in the #ActivityPub ecosystem that we must act or lose out (stay niche, which may be fine too) to the Atmoshpere and how it enables devs to focus on service and product delivery instead of low-level wire plumbing and continuous breakages.
ATProto also shows the way that we can now follow on the #fediverse to catch up again: cocreate a similar robust basis for people to build on. #Bluesky had the advantage of a greenfield start and dedicated team unburdened by past decisions. And they build this whole Lexicon system and ways to introspect functionality.
We can do that too, solve the #LinkedData conundrum, and create an extensibility mechanism that allows devs to focus on service modeling. The more introspection this mechanism allows for, the less design-by-consensus is required, easing expansion to new domains.
It would be even better if on #fediverse as a whole the developer ecosystem were able to move beyond the app-centric development model that dominates. Basically the app-centric approach constitutes a "poor man's TAM", facilitating technology uptake on the basis of how #FOSS projects are typically developed where the individual devs are in charge and there's hardly need to coordinate and collaborate at ecosystem levels. Here the grassroots environment within our ecosystem failed miserably. Apparently we are too fiercely independent to be able collaborate at scale. When a big player joins you get app-by-app competition, and their product development process is likely to easily blow the FOSS project out of the water.
If we had a more service-oriented #ActivityPub fediverse, a fedi of apps and services, then - depending how this is designed - it might be much harder to 'win' the market, as the competition becomes more on quality of service than feature sets.
The fediverse has been weirdly stuck for many years, driven by app developers who attended first and foremost to their own app projects and only secondary to the technology base the entire app is built upon. There was also hardly funding to do anything else. It may be pragmatic approach, but its not smart, eventually weakening the entire ecosystem. And here we are today, with a mountain of protocol decay and tech debt holding us back.
For many years people, me included, have argued that we should focus on getting robust extensibility mechanisms in place, fill the #ActivityPub holes, and not handwave it to say "yeah it is #LinkedData this and that sorta kinda". #Interoperability requires way more rigour at the protocol level.
Nice effect that #ATProto had, was it opened people's eyes to the benefits of having a sound technology base. The ATProto ecosystems excites newcomers, whereas fedi only frustrates with its high barrier to entry and whack-a-mole dev.
Konrad Förstner 💻🧬🦠
and 3 others
boosted
#OpenScience and the #fediverse .. let's get that ball rolling 💪
@jfietkau @jonny and @bonfire opened a brainstorm and evaluation on how we can provide better support for the academic world and #science in general to the #ActivityPub-based fediverse.
Various different iniitiatives are underway, and there's great opportunity to bundle forces and align these efforts where possible. Set standards.
Interested? Join the discussion:
https://discuss.coding.social/t/my-current-goals-for-activitypub-and-academic-data/750