Shout out to WAFRN ( @admin) and @anewsocial for taking the uncomfortable position of straddling the space inbetween protocols. I think this is truly the strategy that is going to be needed if we want to "win" the push towards an open social web for the whole internet.
Discussion
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@liaizon I absolutely agree. I think the client-first development environment for ATProto makes this kind of work extremely emergent.
As @tsyesika said at FOSDEM in the Social Web Devroom, the ActivityPub social API ("C2S") is our equivalent to this programming interface. We need to get it kickstarted so we can build interesting social networking applications without having to build the server side, delivery, queuing, etc.
We're trying to get this going in the SocialCG:
https://github.com/swicg/activitypub-api
I think @django has done great work to evaluate all the different servers. It would be cool to get to a reference server that developers could use.
@evan @liaizon I haven't yet got to evaluating ALL the servers from @smallcircles delightful list, but my list is growing https://github.com/mediaformat/c2s
@pfefferle @evan @liaizon @tsyesika I was just going to say we have a meeting tomorrow!
@liaizon@social.wake.st
The separation between PDS and appview is a great advantage. I guess ActivityPods's is trying to do something similar by unify Solis and AP, but I don't see much talk about it.
ATProto also has something alike Zot's "nomadic identity". And while there has been work to get it working on ActivityPub, only a few software support it and many don't even care about implementing it.
A big problem of the AP side of fedi is that while seeing itself as the most decentralised in quantitative terms, in some qualitative aspect acts in a semi-centralised manner either by making migration harder and incomplete or by being suspicious of any tool that separates identity from log in credential (nomadic identity, multiple identities, etc). It's pretty obvious that many AP devs and sysadmins have a user lock-in mentally and only defend the self-hosting aspect of decentralisation.
@liaizon I’m not sure who “we” is. There’s this constant competition y’all seem to want to foster. I’m staying way the fuck away from anything that’s chasing VC funding. But honestly, that’s just me. The more choice people have, the better. People have had these fears for a long time but ActivityPub just keeps on chugging along.
my 2 cents:
- on atproto development is easier just because sucking from the usual VC money: everyone is on a basically unlimited pds for now, you code whatever you want and then people can use it and they save the stuff on bluesky pds; basically it's almost like making bots on telegram more than really using decentralization
- if people had to start choosing a PDS, they would have to start guessing which one they can pay, which one is local to their town, which one will limit them and which one will just have a subscription
- bluesky is just methadone for twitter americans
- anyone can make apps because they don't care about standards so you get no interoperability between them
As per now i'd say that bluesky is a flash in the pan. I envy the architecture that allows them to have portable identity and feeds, but 1/2
@liaizon it's cringe to have to have to double toot for half of a single sentence but here we are lol
but it's nothing that we cannot replicate on the fedi.
I'll add something just to make this second toot worth lol:
What i actually think fedi is missing out is proselitism to political actors. I'm fine not having the social media aspects on this social network but it's not fine not having the possibility to have local news actually worth to know, because that's, theoritecally, the strenght of the federated model 2/2
@liaizon Seems to me that development on AT sped up *at the expense of* development on AP.
That is to say, a lot of the people who've gone all-in on AT were building here before, but have pretty much abandoned AP development. And it's worth examining why AT development was so much more appealing for those folks.
I've been to some of the Bluesky / ATmosphere conferences.
You are correct that there are former AP people over there (at AT) now.
I talked to a number of them. This (at the following URL) is a common reason I heard for why they switched from AP to AT:
https://mastodon.social/@reiver/114208310829137604
(I am quoting / paraphrasing someone who switched AP to AT. But, I heard others say similar, too.)
...
@reiver @liaizon I would guess that the person who told you that had been involved in an opt-in/opt-out dispute. That seems to be the development issue that exercises fediverse users the most. Which is not to excuse the behavior, but that /is/ one fundamental cultural difference between here and there: Opt-out is the default assumption there. (Which is borne out by the next post in your thread, where a dev says they prefer BS because it provides the user data needed for an AI-driven filter.)
Just to say it explicitly, for anyone else reading this:
Regarding:
AI & BS vs Fedi
Nowadays, when most people say "AI" they tend to mean LLMs and Diffusion Models.
But. the type of AI referred to in that post is not an LLM or Diffusion Model. But the type of AI that has been around for decades, most people (in certain parts of the world) already use (whether they realize it or not)
Ex of that other type of AI: anti-SPAM filters, reading hand written address on mail, etc.
@reiver
There is lots of talking about a Fedi "culture" that allows this and expects that. But the real culture is that we allow these gatekeepers and bullies to shout, despite that they don't represent the Fediverse, "the community" or "the culture". Every time a developer folds the bullies win and we lose.
@lrhodes @liaizon
@liaizon anything cool like @HolosSocial happening on AT?
@liaizon i think one factor the ap ecosystem could do a lot better at is finding nodes for ap devs to aggregate around. part of atproto ecosystem dev speed is technical, but other important part is how atproto has a much more legible dev ecosystem that constantly interacts with each other. ap dev ecosystem is much more fragmented, with very little interaction between the devs
@laurenshof @liaizon interactions between AP software devs is painful to watch sometimes, and the lack of interest from imolementers to work on standards is truly impressive.
@thisismissem @laurenshof I really really don't understand why so many ap devs just refuse altogether to participate in the standardiazion process. I wonder how we could make FEPs more exciting for people. How much of this is a vibe thing
@liaizon @thisismissem @laurenshof it's because FEPs aren't standards and the actual standards are not allowed to change
@jenniferplusplus @thisismissem @laurenshof ouch... so with a combination of these two things, what would need to change to get you psyched about participating in the standardization of all these under-standardized edges?
@liaizon @thisismissem @laurenshof
I genuinely don't know. Lexicons?
They provide 2 critical things. One is schemas, which actually support coordination and interoperability. The other is namespacing, which actually avoids collisions and supports efficient filtering. But linked data makes that impossible.
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@liaizon @laurenshof because politics and fights and strong opinions divide us.
Standards work, particularly at the W3C, attracts a certain type of person, and that's usually very different to builders.
@thisismissem from my perspective, I don't feel comfortable writing a specification until I have verified it with a proof of concept. And by the time the proof of concept is done to my satisfaction, usually the community has moved to another solution to doing the same thing so it becomes kinda of a moot point.
@thisismissem @liaizon @laurenshof 2¢: I'm writing my first FEP right now, it's a big one, and all the implementers have been great. Bringing their ideas and goals and perspectives, being polite, constructive and helpful. Might be a reflection of who's there (or who isn't), but hey.
The only hurdle so far is that no one seems to want to write. 😅 Then again, not having to merge other people's chunks of text into a cohesive document has its upsides.
@julian @thisismissem @laurenshof happy to see an optimistic take here! Can't wait to see the implementers list start popping off
@julian @liaizon @laurenshof wait until after the FEP is written and published..
@liaizon on an abstracted level is ap well suited for building networked communities while atproto is great at global distribution. in that context its painful that the atproto network has run a lap around ap when it comes to dev ecosystem network
@laurenshof I think the age of the developers is not to be undervalued here, I feel like there are a lot more young ATP devs then on fedi
@liaizon If my understanding of things is correct, this seems like the kind of thing that could be accomplished in the fediverse using ActivityPub C2S. Which of course depends on C2S actually getting some use... but a more generic ActivityPub server with varying C2S frontends could get us there, I think
@jfred there are lots of paths that could help, this being one of them, but some of those paths would actually need a combined effort and be widely promoted so that the ecosystem actually starts adopting them and that takes quite alot of time
@liaizon okay so what exactly do we need to have and why?
@elexia have you explored how the lexicon system there works?
@liaizon no. what could have possibly prompted me to do this? I don't use the thing.
@liaizon sorry, that came out too confrontational.
after further consideration I don't think I currently care enough about this topic to engage with it at the necessary depth to have a meaningful conversation. not a super techy person anymore.
@elexia thanks for the reply, its a vast expanse of jank pretty much everywhere and very hard to keep up with everything.
@liaizon Yep, said pretty much the same thing the other day.
To me, the one key feature we need is the ability to disable replies, and maybe also control who can reply, those are top 1 and 10 requests on Mastodon's GitHub, and both have been open for several years.
The team's response: it's too hard. Which, fair enough. But putting any effort into UX/UI polishing, as needed as that is, will be wasted as so many people already left because of the constant harassment and gatekeeping.
I also pointed out that by the time Bluesky's VC money runs out, there might already be enough independent communities running the full ATProto stack, so people will just be able to migrate without needing to ever look at the fediverse again.
@stefan @liaizon that said I wish Mastodon tried to work a bit more like an project that puts the open source development process first, seems like the team is pretty secretive about how and what they work on except for the very high level overview. I doubt it is a very good recipe for attracting outside devs.
@stefan @liaizon things that may be in the way of that are:
1. fully independent communities don't seem to come cheap with ATproto
2. there's almost no effort to get people to anything else besides the corporate servers so the alternate infrastructure is unlikely to be at a scale that would support any significant migrations at that point
@stefan another place where WAFRN and GoToSocial leading the way with close to zero funding
@dansup Really nice to see someone taking safety features seriously!
Do hidden comments federate? That is honestly a great feature to have, I only thought of this recently during a conversation around reply controls, as a potential way to deal with the delay caused by the roundtrips needed to verify if a reply can be posted.
(Presumably this works differently on Loops, definitely curious to learn more.)
@stefan @liaizon We don't yet federate the hidden state, but soon will.
If you have a Loops.video account, you can see this in action here (press Load more until you see the Show hidden comments button): https://loops.video/v/5YvxWOxcRa
(Hidden comments require auth, but I'm going to remove that limitation in the next update)
If the Pixelfed/Loops user wants to disable comments, and other software doesn't respect that, why would the Pixel/Loops user care about ghost threads/replies?
We're focused on providing better/safer experiences for our users, and if other platforms don't abide by that, okay, but I'm not sure it's as pressing of an issue as you think it is.
We will get this fixed with interactionPolicy, people love our platforms because we have supported this for years.
@liaizon Yeah, if I had the time and resources, I'd set up a server with GoToSocial and a Phanpy frontend, gave it a cool modern name, and try to lure in normies, without advertising the whole federation thing too much, just as an added bonus.
Alas, I really don't want to deal with content moderation.
@stefan same same 100%
@liaizon We've really fumbled the big Twitter/X migration, and just learned nothing.
@liaizon In theory yes, but in the real world, I've heard from many people that Pixelfed is the best photo sharing platform on AtProto (via Bridgy) and similar for Loops.
When you try to do everything, the experience is limited, and that's quite evident from the feedback and experiences I've had.
@liaizon@wake.st I think that development is good for both. In my mind the fediverse will never be a replacement for mainstream social media, but a strong counter-culture presence. On the other hand, I feel atmosphere does have aspirations to replace social media (along with a lot of its harms).
If the outcome is Fedi as space B + Atmosphere as mainstream social media instead of Fedi as space B + Twitter/Instagram/etc as mainstream media, I think we've had a win.
If the outcome is Fedi as space B + Atmosphere as mainstream social media instead of Fedi as space B + Twitter/Instagram/etc as mainstream media, I think we've had a win.
@ruben I agree with this synopsis
@liaizon @ruben I think fediverse could still become mainstream, but clearly not through Mastodon.
I had pretty high hopes when Tumblr originally announced integrating ActivityPub, of course that's not happening anymore.
Less so with Meta's Threads, given the company's history.
Flipboard and Ghost are still putting in the effort, which is great, but those are not platforms used by regular social media users.
We really just need a new fediverse platform that's user-friendly. Seems like that's nearly impossible without VC money though, so I don't know.
@stefan@stefanbohacek.online @liaizon Yeah, I'm definitely thinking more from the microblogging point-of-view, which I use more. I can see pixelfed, something like piefed, or a brand-new type of application eventually going there.
I think it could be mainstream, but I don't feel strongly about whether it should.
The culture/s fostered in the fediverse seem to me at-odds with current mainstream social media culture: connection vs consumption, control vs convenience, small and close-knit vs firehose, etc. I think a culture shift more than a technical/ux one would determine this.
I would still like to see all those technical and user-friendliness improvements come to fedi though.
I think it could be mainstream, but I don't feel strongly about whether it should.
The culture/s fostered in the fediverse seem to me at-odds with current mainstream social media culture: connection vs consumption, control vs convenience, small and close-knit vs firehose, etc. I think a culture shift more than a technical/ux one would determine this.
I would still like to see all those technical and user-friendliness improvements come to fedi though.
@ruben All very good points!
And honestly, I also care less about fediverse being mainstream than about growing the diversity here.
But also, I really do want us to move beyond corporations being the middlemen of our social connections. Honestly, if ATProto takes off, Bluesky eventually folds, and the future is independent Atmosphere communities, that's really not so bad.
I care a lot less about the tech stack than who controls it.
(Okay, I will never get used to the ATProto-style usernames, for that reason alone, I hope the fediverse "wins".)
I have been watching both spaces for many years (almost the beginning of fedi) and Bluesky when it was just a discord room before Jay was chosen. There is a major shift going on where some of the ideas that have been talked about in various shapes across various communities are being implemented with nice interfaces and able to be used by "normal people" aka not people who know how to patch their Linux kernal.
Shout out to WAFRN ( @admin) and @anewsocial for taking the uncomfortable position of straddling the space inbetween protocols. I think this is truly the strategy that is going to be needed if we want to "win" the push towards an open social web for the whole internet.
@liaizon @admin @anewsocial you can't be decentralized if you are on just one protocol ... and you can't win if you don't figure out how to work together ..
@liaizon ohh wafrn looks very cool
@fivexhotel try it out. They already have an Android app too that's very good
Thank you for pointing me to #warfn.
I'm looking for a programmable solution. My idea is, to create some kind of LinkedIn-alternative, where i can publish my resume, and post inquiries for new open jobs. I want it to work with both the fediverse, and at-proto. Even though I prefer the fediverse, I want to be visible in both.
Are you aware of any (preferred) Python-library, or framework, that would solve that? Or do I have to fiddle with multiple incompatible ones?
@cdonat @admin @anewsocial if you want to start with a base thats already in the wild and working, WAFRN or Bridgy Fed are the only options today.
Thank you very much. Since I like Python more than TypeScript, Bridgy is probably the best starting point.
I will say here again I am very much on team fediverse and the anarchist anticapitalist free culture side of networks. Bluesky has some "help" with dirty money vc bullshit. There are many things Bluesky (the company) is doing that is awful (like verifying ICE ffs and deleting Palestinian accounts) and those are things I have been continuously pointing out as well.
lol cool cool
... What uh... What exactly constitutes extreme ideology in the quoted text?
Acknowledging the existence of Palestinians? Is that all it takes now?
"Anarchist anti-capitalist free culture side of networks" isn't a political ideology... It's protocls like IRC. Usenet.
So... I can only assume we have a problem with other human beings _existing_.
Is... Is my response the type of extreme political ideology you'd like to avoid on the fediverse? 🤨
@liaizon this is harassment.. you're getting your crowd to shit on me and misinterpret my words. I never said anything against Palestine. Anti capitalism and anarchism is by definition a far left ideology in pretty much every democracies world wide. This is just facts. I'm entitled to my opinion, so what? You guys are acting like mobs.
I hope you don't mind @nicobao I federated your reply over here. As the cofounder and CTO of a company "Agora helps people overcome disagreement and find consensus, for more democratic and efficient decision-making." I would recommend doing some research into the ideologies that underline all of the decentralized protocols that exist and where they came from.
@liaizon you're taking this WAY too personally, while we don't even know each other. I am very much entitled to my own opinion, btw, cofounder of Agora or not. I am not an anticapitalist anarchist, fine, so what? What the heck is this ad hominem attack? The whole point of Agora is to get people to talk to each other, people who usually don't appreciate each other, without trolling, and finding common ground. Your very reaction shows exactly why I build it.
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@liaizon Keep on running buddy
@liaizon "I don't want to be on the same instance as ICE"
"You must be what people call an extremist"
@neauoire @liaizon this is defamation. I was talking about anarchism and anti-capitalism. Not Palestine. Being extremist can be good, it's just being on the extreme of the political spectrum. But the spectrum can move too. It is not an insult. You guys are mobs, it's insane. Where is civility here? It's supposed to be part of the moderation rules btw.
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@liaizon "extreme ideology" like thinking genocide bad hmm... 
@liaizon I think Bsky/atp has already won the protocol war in the sense that it will be the dominant mainstream federated social media platform of the future (unfortunately). I think there's a few reasons why this happened. one is that it was a closer like for like X/Twitter replacement during the musk takeover and only had a single instantiation at the time vs Masto/fedi having a bunch and needing an explainer about them. I also think that therev was a decent amount of FUD that was put out at the time about fedi being confusing that hindered its adoption. lastly I think "big" accounts were put off by the idea of server level defederation. Someday I think someone will write the post-mortem of the Twitter succession crisis and I feel these 3 things will be key points for why bsky gained momentum
@Bike I mostly agree about the reasons you mention here. I guess the part that I am uncertain is what exactly "won" will look like. I don't see the current fediverse going away, but I do fail to see any path at this getting mainstream adoption like bluesky is currently getting. and that narrative concerns me. I think there are still avenues that must be taken to work together on a shared future path.
@liaizon @Bike
Na... bluesky will eventually entshittified at some point and mastodon will still be there.
It is not something we have to win, I am pretty happy that my mastodon feed is nazi-free, I am pretty sure it would be different there (but it will go and check).
I got discussions here I never had on twitter (even when twitter was good).
The philosophy is different, and if it means it cannot win the game, then I will be happy losing.
@liaizon @Bike seems like the "mainstream" is still very much TBD. In the big picture it has almost no adoption and is losing active users by the day and all the supposed other applications for ATproto are virtually unused currently. Meanwhile the startup is also probably going to have to find more funding soon.
Of course it's possible that all the excitement leads to newly found success but it doesn't seem like there's anything suggesting that is an inevitability.
Bluesky also has its roots in other anarchist alternative networks. It takes a lot of inspiration from the core architects being involved in SSB (Secure Scuttlebutt)
The fediverse is anticapitalist I shout from the tallest mountain. The fediverse is explicitly an anarchist project I whistle into the wind. The fediverse is not the protocol, it is not a technology, it is an ideology above all that human communication should not be controlled by companies or oligarchs but by our friends and neighbors.
@liaizon this story feels a lot like the solid project https://solidproject.org/
Big splash at the beginning, some nerds get involved... but it's been years now, and when I tried to actually use one of the apps using it, UX was atrocious and I had to join a matrix room to get it working. Now I know I'm not the l33test hacker, but come on!
@douginamug @liaizon bsky is already usable by normal people imo, probably will get better from here
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@liaizon I honestly feel a little bitter. I know I haven't been working on the protocol, or committing to repos, but I've done a lot of advertizing and advocacy over the years. In the faith that the developers were acting in our interests...
And I know they have been! I don't want to sound ungrateful.
Ach I don't know. Just feels a bit like I/we wasted (some of) our time.
The SSB inspiration is why I placed my bets on AT Proto over ActivityPub. I'm more in favor of a peer-to-peer distributed web than a federated one, but if I had to go with federated I'll take the one that uses PKI for identities.