The fediverse is a strange place to be sometimes. It's an open network where progress happens in fits and starts in random, often hidden, pockets. And the rest don't often hear what's really going on. In the 6 years I've built on #ActivityPub, we've all had to fight for some kind of coordination.
Especially re: the new #SocialWebFoundation (which I've backed as an outside supporter via my tiny company @write_as), you can see something new is happening.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from matt@writing.exchange
E.g. the days of every fedi platform needing to be open source (as you'd get dogpiled for back in 2018) are gone. Proprietary platforms and major corps like Meta are joining, and they're collaborating with other major fedi platforms behind the scenes to take this all mainstream.
But that's what's happening right now, just so everyone knows.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from matt@writing.exchange
And there should probably be some more transparency. And it can absolutely be alienating, especially to long-time fedizens.
But it doesn't exclude similar efforts from everyone building this space. It doesn't crush those fighting for what has made this place great in the first place.
The fediverse is everyone's, and we should all recognize that. Don't lose hope. Keep on building the web we all want to see.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from matt@writing.exchange
@matt because it's everyone's, it cannot be a corporation's, not even a tiny bit. A corporation isn't anyone and cannot help but consume the commons.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from fschaap@mastodon.social
@fschaap agreed in spirit, but I don't see how this makes the fediverse any specific corporation's, any more than email is Google's or ActivityPub is Mastodon's.
Yes corps consuming the commons is frequent, but it's not predestined.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from matt@writing.exchange
@matt Maybe I am too cynical and it is good you are positive about this, but I'm afraid that's where we disagree.
Read the stories of people trying to run their own completely DKIMmed, SPFed, DANEd mailserver and still getting ghosted by corporations. Mail effectively is an oligopoly now.
A corporation will use standards as long as they benefit them or when they are legally bound to and will (ab)use every opportunity to tweak/break the rules and embrace/extend/extinguish a standard.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from fschaap@mastodon.social
@fschaap @matt This is not entirely true. Email is actually still (or even more so) a competitive landscape, with lots of smaller providers in addition to the largest ones. Also, I haven't had issues with sending mail to large providers from my own mail server so far.
Is it a perfect protocol? Absolutely not. But was anyone successful in owning or controlling the protocol? Not really.
I'm less concerned with someone EEE-ing AP than I am with the foundation equating The Social Web with AP only.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from raucao@kosmos.social
@raucao @fschaap I'm genuinely trying to understand that criticism, because to me it just seems like semantics. I think the social web includes AP, and frankly we can call whatever we want the "social web."
What is it excluding? Other protocols / forms of socializing on the web?
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from matt@writing.exchange
@matt Yes, it very much seemed like they were trying to claim the term for AP exclusively. The launch post e.g. says this:
The “social web”, also called the “Fediverse”
Add to that the posts documented in https://deadsuperhero.com/2024/09/swf-icky-feeling/ like e.g. this one:
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from raucao@kosmos.social
@matt Here's what's especially ignorant about that post:
=> View attached media | View attached media
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from raucao@kosmos.social
@raucao So because it's excluding Nostr?
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from matt@writing.exchange
@matt No, because it's excluding everything that isn't AP. And likely even FEPs that aren't to the liking of the foundation members.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from raucao@kosmos.social
@matt E.g. their data portability project seems to completely ignore what I would regard as the most essential quality, i.e. giving full sovereignty over their data to the user, instead of relying on servers only. The FEPs for that would be https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/ae97/fep-ae97.md and https://codeberg.org//fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/ef61/fep-ef61.md for example. Again, I hope I'll be proven wrong, but it doesn't look or feel good to me right now.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from raucao@kosmos.social
@matt ... not to claim that these FEPs are the only solution, or the best solution. The point there is that this is something we can learn from other protocols like e.g. Nostr, where hashing and signing content is already making all data completely portable. There simply is no server dependency issue on Nostr whatsoever. But this could be mostly true for the fediverse as well.
But do we all think Meta wants that to be the case?
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from raucao@kosmos.social
@raucao Yeah, I would never look to Meta to solve our pressing fedi issues lol. But fundamentally, I think we can take what we get and all keep working together as we always have. No single org is going to do it for us.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from matt@writing.exchange
@raucao Yeah, I agree that's pretty important. But it's also the fediverse, and everything moves slow -- we've been talking about better identity handling for at least as long as I've been here.
If the foundation doesn't address it, hopefully the rest of the vast community can make things happen.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from matt@writing.exchange This content has been proxied by September (3851b).Proxy Information
text/gemini