this post was submitted on 01 May 2022
6 points (57.1% liked)
Fediverse
17698 readers
10 users here now
A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.
Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".
Getting started on Fediverse;
- What is the fediverse?
- Fediverse Platforms
- How to run your own community
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I didn't say ActivityPub is innovation. I specifically said ActivityPub "only supported some of the simpler use-cases". In that sense we agree.
But I wouldn't call it a regression, either. It's a lowest-common-denominator kind of thing, where yeah it does not support a lot of fancy features, but after 15 years of dozens of different projects each making their own precious incompatible protocol that had ~2k users each, now we have a protocol that brings a bunch of different projects together.
That's a huge step forward. Decentralized social networks always suffered from the Network effect working against them. By agreeing on a protocol, as non-ideal as it is, this got turned around, somewhat.
Overall I get what you're saying and sort of agree but...
I was in those socialcg meetings. What was agreed upon didn't always make it into the protocol because mastodon devs had an outsized influence, and so even when the majority voted on certain things the chair went with what the Mastodon devs wanted.
And then to add insult to injury the Mastodon devs decided not follow the protocol anyway.
And then because MastoPub had the most users, many newbie devs thought that's what they had to implement rather than AP.
And again, most of the things complained about by this person are due to that side of the story.
It's a tragedy of history. And yeah, I guess you could call it a success story too but at what cost? What type of success story would we have had if it didn't go down that way? I argue, much greater success, and much fewer people questioning whether fediverse is a good way forward.
Ah, thank you for that context. I was not on these meetings, but I did follow the e-mail conversations in the fedsocweb working group. And I vividly remember the protocol measuring contest that any suggestion of finding a common ground and choosing/designing a common protocol for the 50+ different, incompatible decentralized social media protocols devolved into very quickly.
At the same time, I was on Diaspora; and on StatusNet, which was all-but killed by Evan developing a yet another incompatible protocol PumpIO and just migrating the biggest StatusNet instance to it, thus tearing the heart out of broader StatusNet. The Network Effect worked against tiny, incompatible, decentralized social networks, and so we were all stuck in walled gardens.
Then comes ActivityPub and suddenly a dozen or so different decentralized social media projects talk the same language. The Network Effect starts working in our favour. That's a big deal!
So that's the lens I see ActivityPub through. Not saying AP is perfect. But it's a large step in a good direction.
Done is better than perfect, I guess.
ActivityPub is the standardization of the ActivityPump (aka PumpIO) protocol, so all this came from that massive fuck you Even threw at the community. Set us back years, but we're starting to see progress again these days I think, a little.
Well, progress is often not linear, or even monotonic.