Post by @silverpill@mitra.social

Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

@evan@cosocial.ca 2 days ago

@silverpill If you think there's a link that should be on activitypub.rocks, you can open a ticket here:

https://github.com/swicg/activitypub.rocks/issues

I'm glad to hear that you don't think of AP-next as a fork!

GitHub

Issues · swicg/activitypub.rocks

Content for activitypub.rocks website. Contribute to swicg/activitypub.rocks development by creating an account on GitHub.

silverpill

@silverpill@mitra.social 2 days ago

@evan There link was there before you removed it. And I have better things to do than opening tickets

silverpill

@silverpill@mitra.social 2 days ago

@evan There link was there before you removed it. And I have better things to do than opening tickets

silverpill

@silverpill@mitra.social 2 days ago

@evan There link was there before you removed it. And I have better things to do than opening tickets

Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

@evan@cosocial.ca 2 days ago

@silverpill OK! I think you know how to get this changed if you want to. Good luck with your work.

wakest ⁂

@liaizon@social.wake.st yesterday

@evan @silverpill I see it was @j12t who removed it. Maybe he can add it back? Seems like a trivial thing to do.
https://github.com/swicg/activitypub.rocks/commit/aed87b05133a161877c1e59bf4a7a5c24d64c09e

GitHub

Remove link to ap-next. Closes #63. · swicg/activitypub.rocks@aed87b0

Content for activitypub.rocks website. Contribute to swicg/activitypub.rocks development by creating an account on GitHub.

1+ more replies

elle

@elle@weathered-steel.social last wk.

@silverpill it does seem weird they would use that justification to remove the link. thought at first they might be consolidating for W3C-only resources, but there are non-W3C guides under the `Documentation` section (which is where I would guess the `ap-next` guide would also fit).

outside of clarifying underspecified pieces of the protocol, and highlighting some useful FEPs, how is the `ap-next` guide a "fork"?

silverpill

@silverpill@mitra.social last wk.

@elle This guide is just a summary of what I have learned while working on my ActivityPub project.

silverpill

@silverpill@mitra.social last wk.

@elle This guide is just a summary of what I have learned while working on my ActivityPub project.

Rimu

@rimu@mastodon.nzoss.nz last wk.

@silverpill @elle Yes, I had a read of the ap-next guide and don't see anything controversial in it!

You've just documented the current ways the AP is being used in the real world.

silverpill

@silverpill@mitra.social last wk.

@rimu @elle I think the real reason is the association with another thing I am working on: nomadic identity. Some people don't like it, although it is not clear why. It is an optional protocol extension, and similar features in ATProto protocol don't cause any controversy.

GitHub

Content-addressed ActivityPub messages · Issue #573 · w3c/activitypub

When working on ActivityPub, a major goal for me was making sure that the protocol wasn't so HTTP-based that we couldn't add content-addressing. So I believe this is possible to add in a spec compa...

silverpill

@silverpill@mitra.social last wk.

@rimu @elle I think the real reason is the association with another thing I am working on: nomadic identity. Some people don't like it, although it is not clear why. It is an optional protocol extension, and similar features in ATProto protocol don't cause any controversy.

GitHub

Content-addressed ActivityPub messages · Issue #573 · w3c/activitypub

When working on ActivityPub, a major goal for me was making sure that the protocol wasn't so HTTP-based that we couldn't add content-addressing. So I believe this is possible to add in a spec compa...

1+ more replies

🫧 socialcoding..

@smallcircles@social.coop last wk.

@silverpill @rimu @elle

I agree that ap-next is not a fork, and might have stayed on that website. That said I don't think there's deeper politics to this removal, just that the links on the site are rather arbitrary and in need of good curation. E.g. fedify is nice to mention, but also just but one such project where there are multiple.

The entire online presence of SWICG/SocialCG including the AP.rocks website are a mess that almost seems designed to discourage ecosystem participants.

It saddens me as 3 years ago, when AP.rocks was still considered to be part of SocialHub, I had a whole initiative prepared to once and for all create a great developer portal at this domain name.

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/activitypub-rocks-portal-from-standards-movement-to-grassroots-fedi/3577

In particular that top-level aggregator site would need to serve as an entry point to drill down into the entire grassroots ecosystem, help people find their way around..

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/ideating-organization-structure-for-the-grassroots-fediverse-wiki/3037

The SWICG took over that initiative without consultation, and then let it languish.

SocialHub

Ideating organization structure for the Grassroots Fediverse (wiki)

“Any decentralized [ecosystem] requires a centralized substrate, and the more decentralized the approach is the more important it is that you can count on the underlying system.” — Byrne Hobart. The Promise and Paradox of Decentralization Fediverse has gained critical mass. The ecosystem is going mainstream, appealing to a broader audience. There’s corporate interest, and even Big Tech is pondering an entry. → This means Opportunity and Threats.. now is the time to address them. Threats c...

SocialHub

🚀 ActivityPub Rocks Portal: From Standards Movement to Grassroots Fedi

🫂 Participate in rebooting activitypub.rocks Welcome contributor. We have exciting work to do! For a long time activitypub.rocks only provided marginal information, and was infrequently updated. That is now about to change. We want to turn this website into the Portal that our beloved Fediverse deserves. What is the plan? A portal for and by the developer community, That guides people to discover standards & practices, And gives an overview of many grassroots initiatives, Encour...

🫧 socialcoding..

@smallcircles@social.coop last wk.

@silverpill @rimu @elle

As for authority. I think at this point there truly are no authoritative bodies driving the fediverse.

In the 3-stage bottom-up standardization process I discussed at the time at SocialHub, the level of authority was highest at the W3C, lowest at individual FOSS projects, with the FEP process inbetween as a place where good practices and protocol mechanisms bubble up from the ecosystem as good candidates for further standardization.

This process in reality doesn't exist. The connections aren't there. The SWICG operates alone, the FEP does too, and so do all the various independent developers when they invent new things.

In that setup I'd say the SWICG has the same level of authority as the FEP Process does, or any other focal point for collab between fedi devs (e.g. code forges, podcasts). Just another party at the grassroots level figuring out best practices.

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/3-stage-standards-process-guaranteeing-an-open-and-decentralized-ecosystem/3602/40?u=aschrijver

SocialHub

3-Stage Standards Process: Guaranteeing an open and decentralized ecosystem

Further clarifying 3-stage Standards Process In FEP Process - Clarity on positioning: open and inclusive - #8 I collected feedback on the FEP process. The way I picture the FEP Process’ role as the 2nd-stage in a 3-stage standards process is: Just one way how things from the ecosystem permeate bottom-up to further standardization. The FEP process need not be used. Entirely optional. Ecosystem can directly participate with W3C. Ecosystem can define their own practices & standards (think e.g. S...

silverpill

@silverpill@mitra.social last wk.

@smallcircles I probably already said that - I don't like the idea of 3-stage process. This proposal was accepted and now reflects how SocialWG operates in practice:

https://swicg.github.io/charters/stage-process

According to the document, FEPs are at the same level as blog posts. Even a successful and widely implemented FEP needs a "champion" who will sign CLA and will present the FEP to the community group, which will bikeshed it to death. Even if it passes the initial filter of the community group, the document still needs to be reviewed by the working group, which is invite-only.

This is a ridiculous amount of red tape.

Compare this to the promise of the FEP process: you publish a FEP -> you convince other developers -> it becomes a de-facto standard.

@rimu @elle

SocialHub

FEP-5219: Groups and permissions

This is a discussion thread for FEP-5219: Groups and permissions Summary This document describes a permission system for ActivityPub groups. It is inspired by XEP-0045: Multi-User Chat, which defines a comprehensive permission system for XMPP group chats.

charters

CG/WG Proposal Stages

Discussion of potential CG and WG charters

🫧 socialcoding..

@smallcircles@social.coop 2 days ago

@silverpill @rimu @elle

Having looked in more detail at the #SWICG document. That's not the 3-stage process I advocated for at the time, and I agree with you: It will not work. Such top-down formal ceremony just does not fit a grassroots ecosystem.

Generally speaking I don't think #W3C as a standardization body is up to the task of being a good host for the ActivityPub specification. It is a) not organized for our environment, and b) only takes care of the technical aspects. Our social media landscape has a huge social component, and this is wholly underrepresented in our app-centric fediverse, where people are merely "users" and #FOSS culture is the only driving force.

Today I think SWICG should focus on the 'Protocol implementer' stakeholder: How can they offer compliant #ActivityPub protocol implementations.

Then #FEP can focus on the 'Solution developer', relieved from the plumbing: What interoperable designs do they use to serve the needs of participants on the social network.

🫧 socialcoding..

@smallcircles@social.coop 2 days ago

@silverpill @rimu @elle

I wrote a comment in the open issue on the 3-stage process, in the SWICG charters repo..

https://github.com/swicg/charters/issues/33#issuecomment-5470092604

#ActivityPub #SocialWeb #fediverse

GitHub

3-stage Standardization Process Proposal in staging proposal · Issue #33 · swicg/charters

This should be clearly one option. I don't think we should adopt this wholesale.

silverpill

@silverpill@mitra.social 2 days ago

@smallcircles @rimu @elle

Today I think SWICG should focus on the 'Protocol implementer' stakeholder: How can they offer compliant #ActivityPub protocol implementations.

Do you mean they should develop testing tools?

🫧 socialcoding..

@smallcircles@social.coop 2 days ago

@silverpill @rimu @elle

Not per se. But a full-blown compliance test suite to come along with the protocol specifications would still be a great thing to have.

silverpill

@silverpill@mitra.social 2 days ago

@smallcircles @rimu @elle It won't be very useful because the specs are too vague and incomplete, you can have a perfectly compliant implementation that can't talk to any other fediverse software. I think such test suite should be aligned with real ActivityPub, as implemented in fediverse. However, the document describing real ActivityPub was just removed from the official ActivityPub website, that is all you need to know about their priorities.

I think the closest thing we had to a useful test suite was helge's funfedi project.

Jupiter Rowland

@jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu yesterday

@silverpill @🫧 Social coding commons @Rimu @elle I guess I can accurately estimate on which side Mastodon is standing. Even though Mastodon can be considered "real ActivityPub" and "implemented".

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #ActivityPub

silverpill

@silverpill@mitra.social yesterday

@jupiter_rowland @elle @smallcircles @rimu I think Mastodon is better steward for ActivityPub than W3C

🫧 socialcoding..

@smallcircles@social.coop yesterday

@silverpill @jupiter_rowland @elle @rimu

Your perspective is "that what app / FOSS projects do, and works, is a good thing". And that is a very pragmatic, workable approach in this difficult grassroots ecoysystem we have.

It also leads to a fediverse that is wholly app-centric, evolving by FOSS culture. Fediverse is 'ruled' by app devs as it were, and a "user" can only hope that the app they chose will fit their needs. This is not an ideal social networking environment, and not very different than Web 2.0.

But I am the first to admit that it will be very hard to rise to a more non-technical solution-oriented fediverse evolution process, where fedizens have more say in how the social network evolves.

Phantasm

@phnt@fluffytail.org yesterday

@smallcircles @silverpill @jupiter_rowland @elle @rimu

>It also leads to a fediverse that is wholly app-centric, evolving by FOSS culture. Fediverse is 'ruled' by app devs as it were, and a "user" can only hope that the app they chose will fit their needs.
>...

So far Fediverse app devs showed that they are more competent at making ActivityPub work than W3C is. A "rule by consensus of Fediverse devs" so far has been better than "rule by a few privileged in W3C", which so far does almost nothing else other than bikeshed on non-issues (the whole as:Public URI being non-compliant) or work on issues that should have been abandoned years ago (ActivityPub C2S). Meanwhile Fediverse devs are working on documenting the current state and making extensions that users actually care about (through user demand of individual server implementations).

And besides all that, there's so much choice on the "Fediverse server market", that almost anybody will find what they want. From forum-like experiences, to micro-blogging, blogging, and even event organization.

🫧 socialcoding..

@smallcircles@social.coop yesterday

@phnt @jupiter_rowland @rimu @silverpill @elle

I spent years as SocialHub facilitator and know the frustrations. The W3C is also populated with app devs, albeit with different opinions wrt the future of social networking. The sad thing is that we have a fragmented ecosystem today and that is not good for the fediverse as a whole.

Ideally a whole end-to-end community-driven grassroots standardization effort would exist now, able to evolve fedi both in technical, socio-technical, and socio-cultural aspects.

What fediverse is, and importantly what it can be, is imho insufficiently discussed. Fediverse is merely an open technology space now, where devs build their apps.

But the stakes are much higher. Beyond our fedi there's an Epstein class, owners of AI and Social Media, who are building a technofascist society, using these technologies as their weaponry.

Fediverse can be our answer. An innovation by the people, for the people. But it won't be if its merely an open technology space.

silverpill

@silverpill@mitra.social yesterday

@smallcircles @phnt @jupiter_rowland @rimu @elle

Additional coordination can be useful, but I think you need to be more specific about the goals. For example you said that you're concerned about technical debt. This is a hard problem, but not intractable - I can share a couple of success stories from my own time on fedi.

🫧 socialcoding..

@smallcircles@social.coop yesterday

@silverpill @phnt @jupiter_rowland @rimu @elle

It is mostly a social challenge, not a technological one. We had a technology standard, ActivityPub, developers built apps with that, and the fediverse-we-have formed by emergence.

It might have been beneficial if there was a technology vision based on what ActivityPub is capable of, and project 5 to 10 years from now on where we could be.

Even better would be a socio-technical imagining of the future of social networking and how it might serve and benefit people.

As guiding lights for the development of the grassroots ecosystem. As a means for people to put their noses in the same direction, and cocreate that future together. As a means to establish grassroots chaordic organization that enables us to get there.

That can all still be done, although I doubt if the fediverse as a whole can still be course-corrected. More likely are either continue as-is or forks in the road ahead. Or new technology that ultimately takes over the field.

silverpill

@silverpill@mitra.social yesterday

@smallcircles @phnt @jupiter_rowland @rimu @elle My vision of what ActivityPub is capable of is in this picture: https://mitra.social/objects/01a0400f-fa18-7310-bbfe-4486928136c0. To put it in words: it supports a wider range of applications, provides strong privacy, it is easier to host and develop for, it scales to billions of users, can survive a nuclear war and can be used to communicate with colonies on Mars.

I don't know if a shared vision of social aspects could exist. I guess it is "most of us still want to be on the same network"?

elle

@elle@weathered-steel.social last wk.

@silverpill it does seem weird they would use that justification to remove the link. thought at first they might be consolidating for W3C-only resources, but there are non-W3C guides under the `Documentation` section (which is where I would guess the `ap-next` guide would also fit).

outside of clarifying underspecified pieces of the protocol, and highlighting some useful FEPs, how is the `ap-next` guide a "fork"?

CaohuaK 🐺 ❄️ :gd_demon_extreme:

@caohuak@moon.lonewolf.zone last wk.

@silverpill Is ActivityPub starting to get into that boring factional infighting too?

silverpill

@silverpill@mitra.social last wk.

@caohuak ActivityPub always had factions but Twitter migration of 2022 brought people with LinkedIn profiles who immediately seized control of the dormant SocialCG and have been trying to suppress grassroots development since then

silverpill

@silverpill@mitra.social last wk.

@caohuak ActivityPub always had factions but Twitter migration of 2022 brought people with LinkedIn profiles who immediately seized control of the dormant SocialCG and have been trying to suppress grassroots development since then

silverpill

@silverpill@mitra.social last wk.

@caohuak ActivityPub always had factions but Twitter migration of 2022 brought people with LinkedIn profiles who immediately seized control of the dormant SocialCG and have been trying to suppress grassroots development since then