The fediverse needs better developer resources.

[dansup@mastodon.social]

The fediverse needs better developer resources. The kind ATProto has.

Fixing that gap: rich documentation, interactive examples, instant prototyping.

Built indie-style with FediDB, browser.pub and other community resources to create a better foundation for the next generation of fediverse developers.

Sometimes one spark is all it takes. Share if you care ✨

#ActivityPub #soon

[julian@activitypub.space]

dansup@mastodon.social is this mock up design for ActivityPub.rocks? Looks neat (although I'm a light mode person myself)!

[hongminhee@hollo.social]

@dansup@mastodon.social Awesome! I'm really looking forward to it!

[thisismissem@activitypub.space]

You'd also need automatically generated SDKs that actually understand the data in a way that is useful to people. In ActivityPub, we have JSON-LD which is based on RDF which is effectively schemaless. Sure, we have object types, but every property is technically optional, or may be a single value of the type indicated, or be an array of the type indicated.

AT Protocol uses lexicons which have a much stricter schema; with the ability to have those be open or closed schemas. That gives you a lot of power in being able to generate SDKs and tooling that can handle all this data, because you don't need to think about all the edge cases.

I can of course still write data to my repository that says it's one lexicon (schema) when it's really not, and the default logic is to just drop the item as unprocessable and move on, however, that can lead to some unexpected behaviour for users and developers.

Fedify's work to split out the vocabulary tooling is a step in the right direction, but we've still a long way to go.

Also, ActivityPub is absolutely not "Simple, JSON-native", in any sense of those words, because it's JSON-LD, yes, it uses JSON encoding, but there's so many more rules and logic in order to correctly handle it.

[thisismissem@activitypub.space]

You also cannot separate the success of AT Protocol in it's developer engagement from the existence of the Personal Data Server (or, Personal Data Storage), building applications is much easier when you don't need to deal with user registration, authentication and authorization, data storage, etc. When all you need to concern yourself with as an application developer is "I write data to the personal data server for the authenticated account, using this lexicon", development is much much easier.

Right now in the ActivityPub ecosystem, we see all the same problems as those that the Solid ecosystem sees (both rely on JSON-LD and data effectively being schemaless), but on top of that, the current architecture of the Fediverse is these huge monolithic servers with their own proprietary APIs. If you spend enough time in the ATmosphere looking at AT Protocol, you'll note that they just don't have that issue. Sure, there's lexicon clashes where someone extends someone else's lexicon, and there's all the problems of schema design, but you don't need to think about so much lower level infrastructure — it just exists.

Only a relatively small handful of people end up needing to think about that lower level infrastructure: the people implementing custom PDSes, Relays, and AppViews, but that last one is changing with the advent of https://slices.network which makes it trivial to build an AppView for your application.