You know I'm a committed user of the fediverse,  perhaps this post will surprise you. Still, at some point the truth has to be told, before lying leads to a catastrophe. I think I've been present in the fediverse (sometimes hosting a pod of some software and sometimes not) since
  • rysiek@szmer.info
    5·
    3 years ago

    First, there is a social network on top of XMPP, which is Movim.

    I am aware. Was around way longer than ActivityPub too, obviously. You can build anything on XMPP, the problem is that the XEPs compatibility matrix will do you in.

    Second, being an “old protocol” doesn’t make it difficult or “hell to implement” to get the same.

    I didn’t say that just being an old protocol makes something hell to implement. What I said is that these specific three protocols are difficult to implement, with all the accrued additions, XEPs (for XMPP), etc.

    And even with that you have Delta Chat for instant messaging.

    I don’t think DeltaChat uses SMTP directly. It uses IMAP to talk to your mail server.

    XMPP, as example, has an XEP implementing other range of protocols for this, RTP family, which is already used as background protocol by SIP for communications.

    Sure. Again, XEP compatibility matrix makes XMPP difficult to use for users. I’ve run 4 different XMPP servers over the last 15 years, I stopped for that reason. XMPP needs some kind of certification, “XMMPv2” or something, to make it sane.

    SIP is also getting extended

    I never SIP is not getting extended. I said SMTP, XMPP, and SIP were designed with different goals in mind and in different times than AP, and their usefulness for building a social network using them is therefore limited.

    If it wasn’t, we’d have a huge, thriving social network with millions of users and thousands of instances years before AP even come into existence. We didn’t. Almost every developer of every decentralized social network decided to develop their own protocol, rather than use SMTP, SIP, or XMPP as the base for their social network. There’s a reason for that.

    My point is not that these protocols are somehow “worse”. They are okay for what they were designed to do. But they were not designed to be used for a social network (in the sense of microblogging, or facebook-like activities).

    And yes, one can claim “e-mail is a social network”, but I’d consider that a disingenuous take in this conversation.

      • rysiek@szmer.info
        4·
        3 years ago

        I could say in my own POV, that people like to reinvent the wheel to learn, and in the process they find something that fits in their mind for what they want.

        I never disputed that and I am not sure what point you are trying to make here. I explicitly mentioned 50+ other protocols devised by people along the way. Pretty clear that people like to experiment, and that’s awesome.

        The thing is, blogpost’s author is making a very strong statement, namely: that ActivityPub is a bad protocol, and that we already had better protocols that could be used for the same purpose:

        ActivityPub looks like it was written by an idiot who just won second prize in idiots’ contest. It has every possible flaw without having any good.

        and

        Could SMTP, XMPP, SIP have been used to build the fediverse?
        The answer is: yes, and they would have worked MUCH better.

        I believe this has nothing to do with reality. Such strong claims (let’s ignore the ad hominems there) require strong proof. And there is no proof provided. Yes, these protocols are used to build federated communication networks of one type or another, but they are not social networks (in the sense in which Twitter, Facebook, or the Fediverse are).

        The fact is, nobody built anything close to how successful the Fediverse is using any of these three protocols over decades of them being available.

        ActivityPub, while far from perfect (whoever and however defines what “perfect” is in this case), seems way better for the purpose of building a modern social network than SMTP, SIP, or XMPP. That’s simply because it was designed for this purpose.

        The author seems to be just ranting because they don’t like ActivityPub for whatever reason; they’d like a more peer-to-peer protocol; they complain about the “mostly south american communists , european anarchists , vegans and other freaks you won’t be friend with in real life”; and they throw around the word “idiot” a lot. 🤷‍♀️

        I really don’t think such rants need to get the attention this one is getting. They come a dime a dozen, my favorite examples:

        I think the conversation we’re having in the threads here in a decentralized, federated (using ActivityPub, no less!) way are way more useful and helpful than whatever the author of that blogpost wrote. Now, if we can only find a way to have them without first having to deal with low quality hot takes like the ones in the blogpost, we’d all be better for it.