#ThoughtProvoker
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The current fediverse is an evolutionary dead-end for 2 reasons:
1. It has painted itself in a small niche of decentralizing typical social media use cases, by means of post-facto interop and the introduction of protocol decay.
2. Lacking a proper grassroots standardization process, and with the primary mechanism for fediverse extension being only post-facto interoperability, there is no way out.
Congratulations to the early adopters, who managed to "cross the chasm" with their own app platforms. It took true grit to become deep #ActivityPub experts, and plug holes needed for your app, but you have made it. Post-facto interop works in your favor now. You are unrestrained to productively add more features in your app, and put them on the fedi wire for others to deal with.
To avoid fedi to become less and less attractive to newcomers, we must now consider:
“Why do we want to grow the open social web, and for whom?” -- @ben
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The current fediverse is an evolutionary dead-end for 2 reasons:
1. It has painted itself in a small niche of decentralizing typical social media use cases, by means of post-facto interop and the introduction of protocol decay.
2. Lacking a proper grassroots standardization process, and with the primary mechanism for fediverse extension being only post-facto interoperability, there is no way out.
Congratulations to the early adopters, who managed to "cross the chasm" with their own app platforms. It took true grit to become deep #ActivityPub experts, and plug holes needed for your app, but you have made it. Post-facto interop works in your favor now. You are unrestrained to productively add more features in your app, and put them on the fedi wire for others to deal with.
To avoid fedi to become less and less attractive to newcomers, we must now consider:
“Why do we want to grow the open social web, and for whom?” -- @ben
100% agree.
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The current fediverse is an evolutionary dead-end for 2 reasons:
1. It has painted itself in a small niche of decentralizing typical social media use cases, by means of post-facto interop and the introduction of protocol decay.
2. Lacking a proper grassroots standardization process, and with the primary mechanism for fediverse extension being only post-facto interoperability, there is no way out.
Congratulations to the early adopters, who managed to "cross the chasm" with their own app platforms. It took true grit to become deep #ActivityPub experts, and plug holes needed for your app, but you have made it. Post-facto interop works in your favor now. You are unrestrained to productively add more features in your app, and put them on the fedi wire for others to deal with.
To avoid fedi to become less and less attractive to newcomers, we must now consider:
“Why do we want to grow the open social web, and for whom?” -- @ben
Quoting from another toot I just posted:
> What I am talking about is architecture and design, and all the things that allow people to easily form a clear mental picture on how things fit together, wrap their head around the fediverse.
> Never defining this well, and having the documentation be scattered all across the fediverse in 1,001 random locations doesn't help. Meanwhile the dev talk that is going on for years remains very inefficient due to endless Babylonian speech confusion.
Another quote has steps that would then be involved with solution design, and expand fedi's interoperable apps & services:
https://social.coop/@smallcircles/116109322688804011
Without that, with app-centric protocol-decay-ensuring method we have:
0. Deteriorate your domain, reduce ambition
1. Hammer your design until it looks like a microblog, add warts for own features
2. Plug and pray that it works
3. Keep fixing based on daily fedi weather conditions
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4. Discuss fixes in fire-and-forget fleety communication channels -
100% agree.
I sometimes feel that I must be crazy, and totally off the mark, as I - and luckily others with me - are saying these things for 7 years now. But it somehow hits a wall of inertia.
It is this inertia in itself, that has started fascinating me the last 2 years, and it is the reason why https://coding.social exists. We have to figure out how to deal with the grassroots social dynamics such that healthy long-term sustainable standards, ecosystems, and online environments emerge and further evolve.
Long ago I took notes on some major challenges that in my opinion hold back the fediverse from becoming The Future of Social Networking. These are all mostly social in nature, and are as relevant today as they were then. But this is also just imho. 😬
https://discuss.coding.social/t/major-challenges-for-the-fediverse/67
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I sometimes feel that I must be crazy, and totally off the mark, as I - and luckily others with me - are saying these things for 7 years now. But it somehow hits a wall of inertia.
It is this inertia in itself, that has started fascinating me the last 2 years, and it is the reason why https://coding.social exists. We have to figure out how to deal with the grassroots social dynamics such that healthy long-term sustainable standards, ecosystems, and online environments emerge and further evolve.
Long ago I took notes on some major challenges that in my opinion hold back the fediverse from becoming The Future of Social Networking. These are all mostly social in nature, and are as relevant today as they were then. But this is also just imho. 😬
https://discuss.coding.social/t/major-challenges-for-the-fediverse/67
@smallcircles@social.coop oh definitely, and like, I think part of that is down to the fact that W3C received the first version of each of the specs and went "that's good enough for 10 years", when there were so many unaddressed and incomplete aspects of these specs. The fact that there wasn't actually authn/authz in the original specs should have kept the WG open until that was resolved. Without it, half the spec was basically pointless.
I really hope the activitypub ecosystem can escape the inertia of the existing network and architecture that is widely deployed today. I've said a few times that Mastodon's threat isn't Bluesky, no, it's the next generation ActivityPub app that does microblogging well but built with C2S. That's what will unseat Mastodon from it's dominant position, not a social app on a different protocol that has different features.
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@smallcircles@social.coop oh definitely, and like, I think part of that is down to the fact that W3C received the first version of each of the specs and went "that's good enough for 10 years", when there were so many unaddressed and incomplete aspects of these specs. The fact that there wasn't actually authn/authz in the original specs should have kept the WG open until that was resolved. Without it, half the spec was basically pointless.
I really hope the activitypub ecosystem can escape the inertia of the existing network and architecture that is widely deployed today. I've said a few times that Mastodon's threat isn't Bluesky, no, it's the next generation ActivityPub app that does microblogging well but built with C2S. That's what will unseat Mastodon from it's dominant position, not a social app on a different protocol that has different features.
And this time I am the one responding that I 100% wholeheartedly agree with that. Thank you.
(PS. I wouldn't describe it as "unseating" where it comes to the position of Mastodon. This would bring Mastodon in a better position too.. "uplifting"?)
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And this time I am the one responding that I 100% wholeheartedly agree with that. Thank you.
(PS. I wouldn't describe it as "unseating" where it comes to the position of Mastodon. This would bring Mastodon in a better position too.. "uplifting"?)
@smallcircles@social.coop I say unseating, as in, this sort of significant shift in architecture would like be appealing to people who want to use multiple social apps. The cracks would immediately be visible to everyone with the current social app vertical architecture of the fediverse.
Sure, it'd be more microblogging, which is good for Mastodon, but people on Mastodon wanting to use other apps would feel annoyed and want to migrate to gain access to more applications in the ecosystem — where as right now the choice is to migrate from one vertical platform to another vertical platform, which isn't really beneficial to most people.
I think @cheeaun@mastodon.social will likely be the person to build the first "killer" C2S app.
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@smallcircles@social.coop I say unseating, as in, this sort of significant shift in architecture would like be appealing to people who want to use multiple social apps. The cracks would immediately be visible to everyone with the current social app vertical architecture of the fediverse.
Sure, it'd be more microblogging, which is good for Mastodon, but people on Mastodon wanting to use other apps would feel annoyed and want to migrate to gain access to more applications in the ecosystem — where as right now the choice is to migrate from one vertical platform to another vertical platform, which isn't really beneficial to most people.
I think @cheeaun@mastodon.social will likely be the person to build the first "killer" C2S app.
Yes, I agree.
I think the important thing is that we get in a position where the ecosystem as a whole is able to make rational technology decisions that make the most sense and which fulfill clear objectives. But in order to be able to do that we first have to have a clear picture of where we are today, what we have established, where pain points are, and where we want to be tomorrow. Then work strategically along a shared (technnology) vision on ecosystem level, top-down. While individual developers drive experiment and introduce technology innnovations to be incorporated, bottom up.
Who dares imagine the fediverse of 5 years in the future. Or 10. Or ...
Who dares to #ReimagineSocialNetworking?
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Yes, I agree.
I think the important thing is that we get in a position where the ecosystem as a whole is able to make rational technology decisions that make the most sense and which fulfill clear objectives. But in order to be able to do that we first have to have a clear picture of where we are today, what we have established, where pain points are, and where we want to be tomorrow. Then work strategically along a shared (technnology) vision on ecosystem level, top-down. While individual developers drive experiment and introduce technology innnovations to be incorporated, bottom up.
Who dares imagine the fediverse of 5 years in the future. Or 10. Or ...
Who dares to #ReimagineSocialNetworking?
@smallcircles@social.coop I think something that is going to be really interesting to explore is that with ActivityPub C2S, it may make sense for there to be aggregator services, which fulfil a role much like "relays" in AT Protocol — essentially a big fat pipe for applications to aggregate data from all their accounts from many individual data servers.
There may even be a need to have a way to have an application when writing an activity to the data server, to be able to say "also deliver this to the relay as a bcc/bto" (a relay could just be an inbox/outbox setup).
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@smallcircles@social.coop I think something that is going to be really interesting to explore is that with ActivityPub C2S, it may make sense for there to be aggregator services, which fulfil a role much like "relays" in AT Protocol — essentially a big fat pipe for applications to aggregate data from all their accounts from many individual data servers.
There may even be a need to have a way to have an application when writing an activity to the data server, to be able to say "also deliver this to the relay as a bcc/bto" (a relay could just be an inbox/outbox setup).
Yes, a whole range of new architecture patterns come within reach. The whole notion of services (and I don't mean as:Service actors) leads into new territories. A service-oriented fedi, or the fediverse of apps & services to not exclude anyone. Services that compose, orchestrate, and choreograph into solutions that serve people's needs. Consumed as social experiences that are entwined into the social web.
That is what Social experience design (SX) is targeting. The combination of:
1. Sustainable free software development
2. Of the future of the social web
3. Taking into account grassroots environmentAnd where the commons gradually build the foundation upon which it stands, and each of the 3 points above are continually improved.
The old book "SOA Design Patterns" from the good old XML days, still has a completely up-to-date pattern library to guide us along..
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Quoting from another toot I just posted:
> What I am talking about is architecture and design, and all the things that allow people to easily form a clear mental picture on how things fit together, wrap their head around the fediverse.
> Never defining this well, and having the documentation be scattered all across the fediverse in 1,001 random locations doesn't help. Meanwhile the dev talk that is going on for years remains very inefficient due to endless Babylonian speech confusion.
Another quote has steps that would then be involved with solution design, and expand fedi's interoperable apps & services:
https://social.coop/@smallcircles/116109322688804011
Without that, with app-centric protocol-decay-ensuring method we have:
0. Deteriorate your domain, reduce ambition
1. Hammer your design until it looks like a microblog, add warts for own features
2. Plug and pray that it works
3. Keep fixing based on daily fedi weather conditions
--
4. Discuss fixes in fire-and-forget fleety communication channelsTo chain things together a bit on this fleety medium of ours, create a hyperweb 😜 I'll quote this toot to follow-up to
https://social.coop/@smallcircles/116110545919004233
I remember about 2018 or so, when I joined my first #SocialCG meetup. It was when the CG was still strongly tied to #SocialHub community.
There were mundane items on the agenda, interesting to any #ActivityPub dev, and also the call to action was "whether you are technical or not at all, join the meetup, we are open and inclusive to all fedizens". Very friendly, good vibes.
However during the session the talk was not only CS expert level, but dealing with subject matter nowhere near the spec. It was 'wire reality' slang, and to learn it the guidance was either nowhere, or everywhere, dispersed. And this is still as it is today. To expertised AP developers their domain language sounds all natural, but it likely seems Martian to a dev newcomer.
Stark contrast to the W3C specs that leave folks with refreshing "Let's implement this" vibe.
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To chain things together a bit on this fleety medium of ours, create a hyperweb 😜 I'll quote this toot to follow-up to
https://social.coop/@smallcircles/116110545919004233
I remember about 2018 or so, when I joined my first #SocialCG meetup. It was when the CG was still strongly tied to #SocialHub community.
There were mundane items on the agenda, interesting to any #ActivityPub dev, and also the call to action was "whether you are technical or not at all, join the meetup, we are open and inclusive to all fedizens". Very friendly, good vibes.
However during the session the talk was not only CS expert level, but dealing with subject matter nowhere near the spec. It was 'wire reality' slang, and to learn it the guidance was either nowhere, or everywhere, dispersed. And this is still as it is today. To expertised AP developers their domain language sounds all natural, but it likely seems Martian to a dev newcomer.
Stark contrast to the W3C specs that leave folks with refreshing "Let's implement this" vibe.
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
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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
@smallcircles @ben The interesting thing is that it's not really a trade-off at all.
The right side of the diagram almost never works in practice — unless there's a dominant player who can enforce strict compliance, like Walmart for a supply chain or the U.S. government for corporate filings — so it's typically a choice between messiness or failure, not between messiness or slow progress.
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@smallcircles @ben The interesting thing is that it's not really a trade-off at all.
The right side of the diagram almost never works in practice — unless there's a dominant player who can enforce strict compliance, like Walmart for a supply chain or the U.S. government for corporate filings — so it's typically a choice between messiness or failure, not between messiness or slow progress.
Yes, I agree. Though the diagram is too simple to capture it well, it is important to identify the forces that are at play, and the mechanics that drive them, and to subsequently monitor where you are and where you want to be in the future. So timely action can be taken to make corrective actions.
For the #SolidProject ecosystem for instance they might have identified a minimum set of standards to adopt, with which reasonably powerful "MVP's of the Semantic web" could be approximated with. And focus on strong library and tool support for that in multiple programming environments. Instead you enter a jungle of open stardards in various stages of completion, and good luck go figure it out. Also they might've focused on actual movement building. Far-reaching innovative standards - a new paradigm for the web - aren't adopted by the boardroom of a company, but are introduced by devs who get excited by what see and how they are empowered. And persuade management.
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Yes, I agree. Though the diagram is too simple to capture it well, it is important to identify the forces that are at play, and the mechanics that drive them, and to subsequently monitor where you are and where you want to be in the future. So timely action can be taken to make corrective actions.
For the #SolidProject ecosystem for instance they might have identified a minimum set of standards to adopt, with which reasonably powerful "MVP's of the Semantic web" could be approximated with. And focus on strong library and tool support for that in multiple programming environments. Instead you enter a jungle of open stardards in various stages of completion, and good luck go figure it out. Also they might've focused on actual movement building. Far-reaching innovative standards - a new paradigm for the web - aren't adopted by the boardroom of a company, but are introduced by devs who get excited by what see and how they are empowered. And persuade management.
Though with regards to progress, there's a difference in both approaches.
At the #SolidProject side you have inertia by the slow standardization process. But should they figure things out in a good way, eventually the ecosystem catches up and the inertia can quickly decrease.
While at #ActivityPub side, since AS/AP remains stagnant, the ever increasing protocol decay and tech debt non-linearly increases inertia and progress. And on top of that, you are never done once you implemented the 'ad-hoc specs' of the installed base, and you have to account for continuous whack-a-mole development and maintenance burdens to fix #interoperability breakages.
The AS/AP based fediverse devolves into effectively no interoperability, and a situation that is more comporative to NPM dependency hell.
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Though with regards to progress, there's a difference in both approaches.
At the #SolidProject side you have inertia by the slow standardization process. But should they figure things out in a good way, eventually the ecosystem catches up and the inertia can quickly decrease.
While at #ActivityPub side, since AS/AP remains stagnant, the ever increasing protocol decay and tech debt non-linearly increases inertia and progress. And on top of that, you are never done once you implemented the 'ad-hoc specs' of the installed base, and you have to account for continuous whack-a-mole development and maintenance burdens to fix #interoperability breakages.
The AS/AP based fediverse devolves into effectively no interoperability, and a situation that is more comporative to NPM dependency hell.
Btw, just found the v2 release announcement of @fedify and that is a prime example on how, on the grassroots environment end of the spectrum we can maneuvre into better territory.
Kudos to the #fedify developers. Handing people tools they need to focus on solutions, and build without getting thrown into deep on-the-wire impl detail reeds to worry about.
That is the positive side of the equation. There's not only a big uptick in interest for the #SocialAPI i.e. #ActivityPub client-to-server, which offers new opportunity to correct course. But also are there more #FOSS projects focused on robust tool and library support for the 'Solution developer' stakeholder.
In the revamp of the delightful commons initiative, made possible with support of @nlnet I emphasized all these projects, while I de-emphasized the apps that are already doing good for themself, but contribute to further divergence from open standards.
https://delightful.coding.social
https://hollo.social/@fedify/019c8521-92ef-7d5f-be4d-c50eae575742
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undefined fedify@hollo.social shared this topic
undefined hongminhee@hollo.social shared this topic
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Btw, just found the v2 release announcement of @fedify and that is a prime example on how, on the grassroots environment end of the spectrum we can maneuvre into better territory.
Kudos to the #fedify developers. Handing people tools they need to focus on solutions, and build without getting thrown into deep on-the-wire impl detail reeds to worry about.
That is the positive side of the equation. There's not only a big uptick in interest for the #SocialAPI i.e. #ActivityPub client-to-server, which offers new opportunity to correct course. But also are there more #FOSS projects focused on robust tool and library support for the 'Solution developer' stakeholder.
In the revamp of the delightful commons initiative, made possible with support of @nlnet I emphasized all these projects, while I de-emphasized the apps that are already doing good for themself, but contribute to further divergence from open standards.
https://delightful.coding.social
https://hollo.social/@fedify/019c8521-92ef-7d5f-be4d-c50eae575742
@fedify @hongminhee I would be delighted if #fedify contributors would take a peek at the fediverse development curated list and propose a PR on how best to incorporate the changes to the project, now that the various #TypeScript packages have been modularized. That would be very helpful. And create an issue if the current list format is no good fit.
https://delightful.coding.social/delightful-fediverse-development/
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@fedify @hongminhee I would be delighted if #fedify contributors would take a peek at the fediverse development curated list and propose a PR on how best to incorporate the changes to the project, now that the various #TypeScript packages have been modularized. That would be very helpful. And create an issue if the current list format is no good fit.
https://delightful.coding.social/delightful-fediverse-development/
@smallcircles@social.coop Okay, we'll look into the list, and send pull requests!
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System moved this topic from Uncategorized
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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
@smallcircles
I remember this sentence from https://ufind.univie.ac.at/de/person.html?id=1001662, around 2013:
"Interoperability can only be proven after the fact."
@ben -
@hongminhee thank you!
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@reiver that's a json thing, which is itself a JavaScript thing. JS doesn't have an integer type, only number, which is a double precision floating point. Json is a serialization spec for JavaScript objects, and jsonld is spec for pretending that adding one property to a json document makes it a collection of rdf triples and then getting mad about it when the rest of the world just wants things to be parseable
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@silverpill @sabrinkmann @naturzukunft2026 @julian
i should use socialhub more... i'll catchup on the dicussion, soon
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There is a larger discussion about fixed-point numbers versus floating-point numbers.
And that, ALL programming-languages should have fixed-point numbers built into them.
And that, programmers should be warned against using floating-point numbers in all but a set of very specialized situations — where inexact math is OK.
For most programmers in most situations inexact math is NOT OK. And, they should NOT use floating-point numbers.
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This is likely (directly or indirectly) the fault of a single paragraph in IETF RFC-7159 / RFC-8259 (shown in the attached screen-shot).
(And note that, there is a difference between JSON and IETF JSON. JSON did not have this. IETF JSON does.)
That paragraph (in the IETF RFC) was NOT a requirement. But, others made it a requirement — including JSON-LD.
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This is from the JSON-LD spec.
ActivityPub / ActivityStream are based on JSON-LD.
I think it was a very bad idea for JSON-LD to define "number" this way!
It makes it so numbers with fractional values are inexact & lossy.
This include values that are common for money.
For example, neither 0.10 and 0.20 can be represented exactly. So, 0.10 + 0.20 does NOT equal 0.30!
It should have used FIXED-point numbers rather than FLOATING-point.
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@smallcircles @ben Unfortunately, the top-down approach often stalls under its own inertia and never develops into anything at all.
If you try for too much interoperability too fast, the costs aren't evenly distributed: some implementors will have to make very few changes (usually the ones who had the most power and influence during the standardisation process), while others will have to tear up a lot of stuff and start over.
In the business/government/aid world, that can have ripples far beyond the IT systems, right into the way they organise their operations; in the FOSS world, it can mean abandoning popular features, losing users, and even destroying the contributor culture.
An 800 lb gorilla like Walmart can force that level.of dirigisme on its suppliers, but in the open world, we can just ignore or fork if we think someone's getting too restrictive: note how most web syndicators stuck with RSS 2.0 even after Atom came along to "fix" its "problems," for example (and Atom wasn't even that bad). 🤷
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@naturzukunft2026@mastodon.social yes that's correct, it's just a flat list for ease of processing. The tree building takes place after all of the objects are received and processed.
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@julian and the collection is always a flat-topped tree!
