SocialWebFoundation - what do people think?

[strypey]

@trwnh

And the challenge here, the issue is, that if we don’t do this work at a grassroots level, then Meta will do it for us. (Can you imagine a “developer portal” for “interoperating with Threads”?)

Sadly, unless we can grow the archipelago fediverse until it’s combined population is much bigger than any big continent in the network, that’s exactly what happens.

When mastodon.social and the big Japanese Mastodon instances became the bulk of the network population, Mastodon became the de facto standards body. Any project wanting to interoperate with the verse had to reverse-engineer their bespoke flavour of s2s AP, and use their c2s API.

A lot of people have been pointing out ever since why this is a problem. But they were mostly written off as representing the Dark Side (to be fair, a few of them did, but not most). It’s only now that Meta own the biggest continent that people seem to be waking up to why we need to be using vendor-neutral standards in practice, as well as just on paper.

@trwnh

Things like the FEP process allow writing up these “micro-protocols”, and then after that, the difficult task of cat-herding begins, as you need to get implementers onboard with adhering to these specifications.

If you take a Field of Dreams approach, then yes. As I understand it, the FEP process is meant to work like the W3C standards process, just without the bureaucratic overhead of getting a charter.

First you get a representative group of implementers who want to interoperate on something on top of AP. Then you draft an FEP together, with an understanding that you’re all going to use it. So the cat-herding is done before the drafting even begins.

Guiding new implementers on which set of AP+FEP plumbing to use could be done as FEPs too, as I described in A brief and unromantic history of ActivityPub - #22 by strypey

@strypey

With both the XEP and FEP processes, groups of implementers can define meta-standards, made up of the core protocol plus a list of extensions, some essential, some recommended, some optional. I haven’t seen that for the fediverse yet, but the FEP process is still fairly young. In XMPP world there is the Modern XMPP meta-standard (which I believe is itself codified as an XEP).

This comments also explains that the goal of fediverse developers for over a decade has been to converge on a single, unifying standard. Which for now is AP, although it used to be OStatus, and could in future be something else.

We don’t serve people looking for a social web replacement for the DataFarms if they have to install a dozen different apps, to cover all the protocols in use. BlueSky has done such people no favours by rolling their own protocol from scratch. Trying to shoehorn non-compatible networks into the definition of “fediverse” does them no favours either.

@jdp23

Yeah, Why choose a narrow, gatekeeping, ahistorical ActivityPub-only definition of the Fediverse?

Because of the above. Also because the word " fediverse" has a meaning, based on a history (see the linked comments above, as well as Fediverse history piece from 2017: A Brief History of the GNU Social Fediverse and ‘The Federation’)

It’s not helpful to describe networks that don’t connect with the IP internet as “internets”. It’s not helpful to describe document networks that don’t use HTTP, HTML and DNS as “webs” (eg FreeNet, BitTorrent, GNUNet). That would only confuse people, so nobody does that. For exactly the same reasons, it’s not helpful to describe networks that don’t interop over our current unifying standard (AP) as “fediverses”.

EDIT: Replies correctly pointed out that “TCP/IP internet” means quite a different thing from “IP internet”, which is what I meant. I have correct this.