Tooted here:

Recent talk on direction of #mastodon are not what’s most relevant for our #fediverse future. Decisions of an individual #foss project are theirs to make. More important is where fedi as a whole is headed to.

A “Tragedy of the Commons” is at play. #TheFediverseChallenge is to remain relevant and healthy far into the future.

Individualism only gets us so far, but for Mastodon and other federated projects their choices are understandable. But only teamplayers will win!

  • @Liwott
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    23 years ago

    We got to HTTP version 1.1 in 1997, and have been stuck there until now. Likewise, SMTP, IRC, DNS, XMPP, are all similarly frozen in time circa the late 1990s. To answer his question, that’s how far the internet got. It got to the late 90s.

    This seems to imply that the evolution of protocols is the goal of human communication rather than the other way around. When I send a HTTPv1.1 request to a website, the news I get back is not from the 90s.

    This also ignores the difference between stagnation and retrocompatibility. The compatibility between Signal and e.g. XMPP for simple messages would not prevent the implementation of new features that would work only between Signal users. The possibility to play GBA games in a nintendo DS was not stopping the creation of touch-based games.

    • smallcirclesOPM
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      23 years ago

      In this analogy I see the evolution of protocols more as the evolution of language. Better language, grammar and vocabulary helps us to communicate better.

      We can do a lot of things with these protocols, true, which is one part of why they continue to exist. The other part is the legacy that is built on top of them which makes it very hard to innovate further and resolve problems with the technology efficiently. Still that may not be a problem. ActivityPub has a lot of potential in it that currently remains untapped, plus it competes against a whole host of other technologies.

      Overall IMO the open-standards based internet is to the benefit of the commons, while vendor-driven de-facto standards or whole proprietary protocols vendor walled garden platforms and the corporate web. ActivityPub does not have a real standards-body behind it (anymore), but a grassroots movement that must push it forwards.

      • @Liwott
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        33 years ago

        I like the language analogy ! I’ll try to elaborate on it while hopefully not going too far off topic.

        Say I’m French(-ish), I use French in my everyday life as it is the most suitable for my use-case of discussing my French culture with my French friends. In fact, the main thing that makes it suitable is that it is (close enough to) the standard around which said culture is built, rather than intrinsic features. But it is still the best language to order a beer at the local pub.

        (Say I’m actually a French-speaking Belgian, I need to mainly use French and the Walloon language is slowly dying because of that, which is a shame as the French language didn’t need us to abandon Walloon for its own survival. This probably still somehow fits the analogy (how much cultural value is there in reading Fortran77?), but is definitely too far from the original topic, so let’s leave the parenthesis here !)

        Fortunately, I also speak English, which means that I can communicate with people who don’t understand French. Probably English language can be a bit less efficient to describe my French everyday life, even more probably the fact that English is not my mother tongue corrupts my own implementation of it. But using this microblogging-inspired language in addition to my own one is a good compromise between my everyday life and international communication.

        Again, the only thing that makes English so suitable for international communication is its huge userbase. There are implementations that are more application-agnostic, like Esperanto, and the world would probably be a better place if everyone spoke that as a second language rather than English. But it also has its own legacies, like eurocentrism, or lack of an epicene pronoun. This yields people leaving to research “better” auxlangs, like Kotava or Spiritely, as well as milder forks like Riismo that still identify as and aim at expanding the use of Esperanto. The latter slowly (but still) evolving option is probably the one I would lean towards.

        (I guess the main flaw of the analogy in the last paragraph is English phonology and orthography, that make it too far from any good auxlang to transition to them. That may make it in fact closer to Facebook than to Mastodon, and I become the device rather than the client. God I hope a slightest bit in my comment is relevant :D )

        • smallcirclesOPM
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          23 years ago

          Nice, I had never heard of Kotava and Ri before. Yeah the analogy gets to be a bit of a stretch. But alright… some more:

          If you want to talk to someone else on the internet, even if you both speak the same language, then there is no direct path. You have to talk to an intermediary: the machines, which speak an entirely different language (i.e. the protocol). You translate what you want, the machine transfers it to another machine, and then it is translated back to your friend. Something goes lost in this translation unless the protocol is very good and both machines have an equal good understanding of it.

          In a diverse landscape and culture, even with an open machine “language” / protocol, you get a lot of different flavours. Slang and accents, and hence more is “lost in translation”. Facebook has the largest social media userbase, but they can exactly dictate what language is spoken by the machines, so they don’t suffer from this issue.

          Well, enough of the analogy. Concrete examples are that beyond the basic social primitives of ActivityStreams there is no consensus on the message formats to exchange, let alone semantics, and consequently interoperability suffers. For instance Group implementations are app-specific. Or, you can cannot migrate your account from Mastodon to Pleroma, etc. etc. There’s very little interop at all currently, and most of it is limited to stuff in the Microblogging domain.

          • @Liwott
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            3 years ago

            If you want to talk to someone else on the internet, even if you both speak the same language, then there is no direct path. You have to talk to an intermediary: the machines, which speak an entirely different language

            I was more seeing the following : even if we have similar sensations (that’s the applications’ use cases), if we need to communicate them to each other we need an intermediary : the language (that’s the protocol). People who speak the same language (French, or Lemmy-flavoured AP) will be technically able to understand each other’s experiences, but will only be able to communicate partially with speakers of English (or Mastodon-flavoured AP). For example, how do you explain the concept of cross-posting to an English-speaker?

            I don’t think I understand your extra layer. I mean, I don’t think that information is actually lost by a lower level language, but rather that all the information loss comes from those different dialects of AP. I may be completely wrong.

            In a diverse landscape and culture, even with an open machine “language” / protocol, you get a lot of different flavours.

            Agree, and probably even because you are using open protocols (as in the following Facebook example). This seems to be one of Signal’s reasons not to federate.

            Facebook has the largest social media userbase, but they can exactly dictate what language is spoken by the machines, so they don’t suffer from this issue.

            Indeed, that’s mainly why I used English=Mastodon rather than English=GAFAM and Esperanto=Mastodon, which is probably more suited for other aspects. For example, they probably share the position of a flawed open-door to the niche of the Fediverse/conlangs. My last point is probably also better put in that context : the way to go may be to follow closely the user-filled Mastodon (or Esperanto) while forking to adapt the features we don’t like (either adding stuff, or slightly changing it)

            There’s very little interop at all currently

            I guess “very little” is quite subjective. For example, AFAIK, Friendica and Hubzilla allows you to follow activities on at least 7 (not Lemmy, don’t know about WriteFreely and Plume, the others I think so) of the 10 most used fedi platforms, which I wouldn’t call too trivial. Again I may be completely wrong.

            But I do get your point that most interoperability is currently limited to social networking (and even that is far from done), while there’s more potential uses for AP.

            • smallcirclesOPM
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              23 years ago

              I don’t think I understand your extra layer.

              Think we more or less mean the same, but got stuck in the analogy :)

              In the interaction between apps we have the message formats, which for e.g. AS are well-defined. And then we have the semantics, which are only partially and more informally agreed upon and then mostly in a Microblogging domain (tooting). When things go slightly beyond that it becomes unclear. Like, say, Follow{Group} for one app might mean “I want to follow that group”, while for another app it may signify “I’ll join that group as member”.

              This is not a problem in itself if the semantics are really different between these apps. If the same semantics are implemented with different message formats and there’s no agreement what to use, then things become really hard to interoperate and for the fedi to mature. But this is the current situation. A developer either makes their own choice, or looks at another codebase and copies, or speaks to a random other dev and they align somewhat.

              Even this is not a real problem. A heterogenous Fediverse will facilitate many different app types and a universal agreement on semantics becomes nigh impossible anyway (striving for such a lofty goal is I think one of the reasons of the failure of the Semantic Web).

              Message formats and their semantics are domain-specific (I am looking myself into domain-driven design as a basis to model them). What we need is a combination of standardized AP extensions and better, more powerful ways of doing Capability Negotiation. AP extensions should be as small as possible, while still meaningful, and define a single domain concept really well. There’s no need to use an extension, but there should be a growing (crowdsourced) library of extensions to choose from. They are building blocks for federated app design. With AP extensions set up like that, the Capability Negotation need not be overly complex. It may start by asking Compliance Profiles from a remote endpoint: “I support SocialHub/Groups-1.0” and based on that you know what a Follow{Group} means.

            • @Liwott
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              13 years ago

              My last point is probably also better put in that context

              Although it did also make sense the way I originally meant it : Esperanto would be a more app-agnostic implementation of AP (for example one to be developed on SocialHub), people would still find imperfections and the way to go may be to mostly follow it for interoperability while doing slight adaptations.