Grassroots open standards for fediverse evolution

[aschrijver]

Alt-text to the diagram. Click to expand the text.

• Grassroots growth has seen the fediverse gradually diverge from ActivityPub open standards.
• With post-facto interoperability the dominant driver, increasing protocol decay hampers innovation and growth.
• Fediverse as it stands today has limited its application areas, and lost attractiveness to newcomers.
• A shift back to open standards is possible and required for ActivityPub to remain relevant in the future.
• Current technology standardization process is unfit for the social dynamics in fediverse grassroots environment.
• Challenges to standardization are fostering shared ownership, proactive involvement, governance, and recentralization.
• There are four points where recentralization is a risk: server instances, app platforms, the FEP process, and W3C SocialCG.
• While funding is available for individual FOSS projects, it is lacking for any work on healthy technology ecosystems.
• Grassroots open standards allow specification documents to evolve from the bottom up in inclusive commons based ecosystems.
• Grassroots standardization aligns top-down protocol design with innovation in the creative cauldron of the commons.
• The social web offers opportunities to natively support standardization processes, and decentralize specifications.
• Specifications as code that may be bundled with their apps and services, and can be introspected at actor endpoints.
• Decentralized specification hubs can serve the interoperability needs for different interest groups and solution domains.
• FEP may become the fediverse evolution process and be part of protocol design that enables robust solution development.
• Work on the ActivityPub API offers opportunity to reposition the FEP as federated service for Grassroots standardization.
• With ActivityPub as a grassroots standard, fediverse can be the Future of social networking where we Reimagine social.

🫧 socialcoding.. (@smallcircles@social.coop)

Thanks to @silverpill and @eprodrom, the pillars of grassroots standardization and ecosystem cohesion.

What triggered me to write the blog post was in relation to another discussion I started, and where I added this:

@aschrijver

All of you are right, and yet none of you are. There exists no clear path forward.
The road simply hasn’t been paved, and its unclear who can pave it.
The open standard is stuck, fossilised, unable to naturally evolve.
The chaotic grassroots ecosystem has moved on, unable to healthily grow.
The installed base that’s content with the status quo, has increasing inertia to change.

The only options that exist in the fediverse today are ..

1. Either force-push changes through the formal W3C process, and hope for adoption.
2. Or force-push changes as a post-facto interoperability leader, and hope for popular uptake.

For the “promise and power” of going “back to standards” consider this:

🫧 socialcoding.. (@smallcircles@social.coop)

[aschrijver]

@aschrijver

A bug in @Discourse #ActivityPub plugin? cc @angusmcleod

Image from the subject 3 times included, and with the #AltText being the filename, not the alt-text I gave in the #forum post.

[silverpill]

Just for the record, I do not agree with the premises of that article.

Fediverse doesn't gradually diverge from the ActivityPub spec and software development doesn't look like you describe.

Overall, it looks like an attempt to discredit FEP process by painting it as ineffective and unsustainable, in favor of... I am not entirely sure, GitHub repo and a non-profit?

[aschrijver]

@silverpill

Overall, it looks like an attempt to discredit FEP process by painting it as ineffective and unsustainable, in favor of… I am not entirely sure, GitHub repo and a non-profit?

Not at all. You misread and misinterpreted me then. Or you just skimmed the article, which I can imagine as it is a whopping one hour read. But the blame of misunderstanding is likely on my side, as I have a complex material to convey. The FEP is fabulous! It is the ‘as-best-we-can’ approach to follow in a chaotic commons. However, there are serious sustainability risks, which I address in the article. Where FEP is “just a bandaid” is measured against the most optimal process, which is the evolution goal of a SX solution, should that development methodology be practiced. The most optimal solution requires sustainable chaordic commons and continous evolution. The whole blog post is written from perspective of Social experience design, which I have been elaborating for the past couple of years.

What is further in the article is merely brainstorm. The article is ‘appeal-for-reflection’ and hopes to inspire new ways of thinking and fresh ideas. There are plenty variations for impl and process improvement to distill from that, but the most radical approaches see FEP become protocol-native.

As for explaining it all and properly, for crystal clear understanding.. There’s a paradox there, which I just realized yesterday and am trying to formulate clearly. Related toot: The Paradox of Emergence.

I don’t know if you noticed, but I called you a pillar of the fediverse and true hero, that is all genuine, and I am grately thankful to you. If fediverse had more commons janitors like you, it would tackle the grassroots evolution issue much faster. Most FOSS devs don’t realize I think how many of the boring chores are kept away from them, so they are free to experience the joy of coding. Things should be more fairly delegated, a grassroots evolution point of improvement.