Egregoros

One of the most annoying aspects of the ongoing corporate capture of our network is that protocol-related discussions increasingly happen on Github instead of Fediverse (or friendly platforms like SocialHub and Codeberg).

Today's example: https://github.com/swicg/groups

Why use Github to talk about federated groups when we have federated groups right here in Fediverse? That makes no sense. But some self-appointed "leads" decided to create a repo anyway.

Similar Github repos ("task forces") also exist for other protocol features. I don't see any reason to legitimize this by participating and hope that other developers will do the same.

@silverpill @phnt w3c has a real problem with over-reliance on github in general

i think swicg might have been actually renamed to social web cg at some point or social cg but the github org and w3c mailing list / calendar doesn't reflect this at all in their uris because uris aren't supposed to change

re: "we have federated groups": no, we have boost bots. you can't follow a group without being assumed to be a member, and you can't be a member while unfollowing the group. you can't assign roles to people. you can't do rbac without some binary concept of "mods" or "admins" without a definition of what that actually means. you can't generally control groups cross-instance. you can't manually approve certain posts. etc

re: "legitimize" we are in an unfortunate position that the main reason pretty much anyone ever cared about activitypub is that "it's a w3c spec". they don't even care about the spec mostly (how many implementations publish Activity instead of Note?), just the w3c rubberstamp of approval. and it's barely a spec anyway -- just profiles ldp:inbox, defines as:outbox, you can maybe Follow/Like/Announce and even then you will still have problems (no in-spec way to remove a follower...)

@a @phnt

Boost bots are for Mastodon. In our parts of Fediverse, we have FEP-1b12 and conversation containers, which are more powerful, and can be easily extended to support Join/Leave and roles (good topics for FEPs, by the way).

I don't think anybody who matters actually cared about W3C approval. By 2023, we had FEP process going and ecosystem leaders (Mastodon, Lemmy) were contributing. The rebooting of SWICG was absolutely unnecessary. The intentions behind this effort were quite clear from the start, but it would have lost momentum quickly if you hadn't participated, but you did and continue to do, and now these Github repos are becoming a problem.

@silverpill @phnt do you mean "you" as in me personally or "you" as in some generalized sense? would me personally dropping swicg help anything, now or in 2023? because i'd probably do it if i didn't see a point to it, which is mainly "get the w3c specs into an actually usable state" (if at all possible).

i guess it seems like a problem if you see w3c involvement as a problem, but then i would ask who the constituents are. certainly there was a crowd in ~2017 onward who *really* wanted everyone to know activitypub was a w3c spec and won't stop talking about it to this day. i'm guessing you are okay with excluding those people, but then i wonder how to get anyone else actually on board with whatever it is the goal actually is.

having clear goals and a clear constituency is a prerequisite imo for any attempt to replace activitypub. for example, the spritely institute is doing a lot of work on ocapn in the face of legal threats. off the top of my head i can think of maybe a handful of people who would be interested in doing something outside of activitypub (and i'm in contact with a lot of them lmao)

i don't want to say activitypub is fully sucking the air out of the room but as someone who would rather work toward personal websites and local-first representations, it's frustrating that the idea of an activity is ostensibly described by activitystreams while not being fully usable for describing activity streams. it's frustrating that activitypub is not fully usable for publishing activities. i am not entirely sure of the value of making my own https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_vocabulary if it's going to end up 80% similar to activitystreams. the as2 documents i publish on my website are not readable by any fediverse software anyway, and i'm not sure i would want them to be, if it leads to being misunderstood and mangled that badly.

@a @phnt I mean you personally and yes I think you dropping SWICG would have helped in 2023. Not sure about now, I don't know what you stand for.

>constituency

Do you mean the target audience? That's existing Fediverse users.

The job of any organization that maintains standards is simple:

- See what developers are doing and document it.
- Do thorough security analysis, and perform other tasks that developers may not have time for.
- Try to prevent situations where there are N different ways of doing the same thing.

SWICG fails spectacularly on all three, in fact it seems to be doing the opposite thing in every case.

>personal websites and local-first representations

This sounds like FEP-ef61 to me. I am currently working on an offline-first client.

@silverpill @phnt

> existing fediverse users

this might be the wedge issue i guess -- my interest in fedi has been trending downward for years since all the "cool people" left years ago. if fedi is mastodon and lemmy then i am not interested in fedi. more toward neocities and nodebb, less of the twitter/reddit culture.

i would think a constituency should involve users but not always directly -- we don't write protocols or specs for users to implement directly, unless we have a very tight loop between minimal software and conventions to be adopted. the constituency of admins who actually host software to power their own websites or community websites is more pressing to me than fedi users in the abstract. right now i am grappling with a network that is terribly broken because i have people who can't follow me and people i can't even see from my instance, and that's without any blocks involved. that's just weird undiagnosable software issues from a fundamentally incomplete protocol implemented within a space that seems resistant or even hostile to fixing issues because that will "break" some other thing that's already broken. everything being ad-hoc and fundamentally untestable is unsustainable. everyone trying to reuse the same vocab for something it wasn't designed for is also not sustainable. if the goal is to see what devs are doing then it feels like all of this is somehow "too early" despite being simultaneously "too late" societally.

the tide of "social media" is looking to me to be more and more of a mistake, and getting traction on the issue seems daunting when everyone just wants to be the next twitter.

so i guess what i "stand for" is mostly two things:

1. a future where hosting a personal website is as easy or even easier than posting to social media

2. trying to not let the current situation get much worse because without fedi, as much as i'm disenchanted with it, i have nowhere to go other than fedi, everything else is unusable.

ef61 doesn't seem like quite what i have in mind since it talks more about keys and ap: uris than about storage and transport aside from a brief mention of "gateways" which... idk if that's the model i wanna go for personally, because https uris can outlive their servers if you don't bind the server and dns name together irrevocably. i think base uri + relative reference is more my speed, and in a local-first sense the base uri is just file:// or http://localhost or whatever. i want federated identity more than i want to syndicate my content to 30,000 other websites. if i'm going to syndicate content to other websites then i want the multiple identifiers to all be recognized as referring to the same thing

@a

>the constituency of admins who actually host software to power their own websites or community websites is more pressing to me than fedi users in the abstract

Sure, this is important, and by "existing users" I mean all developers, server operators and regular users.

>right now i am grappling with a network that is terribly broken because i have people who can't follow me and people i can't even see from my instance, and that's without any blocks involved

Are you talking about your own implementation? I can help with debugging

>that's just weird undiagnosable software issues from a fundamentally incomplete protocol

Let's not confuse protocols and specifications. ActivityPub specification is incomplete and IMHO beyond repair.
Fediverse protocol is a different thing, it is more or less complete, and allows platforms as different as PeerTube, Lemmy and Mastodon to happily interoperate. This protocol doesn't have a specification, but I am working on it: https://codeberg.org/ap-next/ap-next/src/branch/main/guide.md

A protocol is like language. Languages are created by people who use them, not by people who write dictionaries. Same goes for protocols, and there is probably no better illustration of this than Fediverse.

>a future where hosting a personal website is as easy or even easier than posting to social media

Isn't it already easier? A static site with an Atom feed?

In any case, I think the best way to secure this future is to build things. What have SWICG achieved since its reboot? I can name only two useful outputs: HTTP signature report and WebFinger report. The rest is pointless bikeshedding and politicking.

@phnt