Hey @Alice! thanks very kindly for reaching out. Sorry it took me so long to reply.
I’m glad to hear interest from the SOLID project in bridging our worlds. In fact, they are already quite close to bridged; one of the successes of the standardization project in the Social Web Working Group was the convergence of SOLID and ActivityPub through Sarven Capadisli and @rhiaro’s LInked Data Notifications spec. Already, both LDN and AP use the same inbox
and delivery mechanism! And LDN was, iirc, built for SOLID. So I think the overlap area there is clear and intentional.
The differences then come partly in terms of knowledge representation: the SOLID project prefers graphs, the AP community prefers trees. In theory JSON-LD handles both, but in doing so, each side seems to want their view of the world to be the “real” one, and I think that’s lead to some strife in the past. But I am optimistic in the way that @pukkamustard’s Open Engiadina project seems to take bridging the worlds of linked data and activitypub seriously, something we haven’t seen as much out of the other larger prominent AP implementations.
@aschrijver does represent my concerns correctly about ACLs vs ocaps; see the following for more background:
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Hygiene for a Computing Pandemic gives an intro to why a push for ocaps
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OcapPub lays out at a high level where we plan to go (but is incomplete in some of the details towards the end)
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Spritely is my active project to “level up the fediverse” by implementing said ideas.
I think @aschrijver and @Sebastian both remarked feeling a bit burnt out on efforts to bridge the SOLID and AP communities; I’ve felt this way myself a bit in the past. However I know Sarven is interested and an active developer, and your own message here @Alice is very nice, and I’ve also had plenty of nice conversations with Dmitri, who I know supports it.
There’s interest on this side. When the SOLID folks want to work on interop with AP, we are here to talk. What I don’t have energy is convincing the SOLID team that AP is a worthwhile direction. However, I know that SOLID community members such as Sarven think it’s a worthwhile direction. What I don’t know is: what about the rest of the SOLID community? AFAICT in past discussions, it’s been somewhere between a split and lukewarm from the community at large… and the community has to be the one to decide to join us in bridging worlds. If that’s changed or changing, great! (And the most likely way it’s going to change is if TimBL himself says: “we should have interop with the activitypub community”. AFAICT, I haven’t heard that? But anyway.) I do think it’s also critical that we take a unified task on moving away from ACLs, though that’s kind of a sub-conversation.
But as said, happy to talk. Thank you for reaching out!