SocialWebFoundation - what do people think?

[jdp23]

@strypey

The fediverse.party team talked this over recently, and agreed that we still don’t include bridged accounts in our definition of “the fediverse”.

That’s good to know, I added that to the discussion in Is Bluesky part of today’s Fediverse? – I also updated that article to clarify Evan and SWF’s perspective that Bluesky is a Fediverse instance, even with their AP-only definition of the Fediverse.

But other people don’t see it that way. Seven Thesesfrom 2020 describes ActivityPub as “one of the most popular and most discussed protocols of the Fediverse.” Wikipedia’s Fediverse page lists multiple protocols, and includes Imke Senst and Mike Kuketz’s diagram A view of the Fediverse (2023) which lists DFRN, Zot, and Diaspora along with ActivityPub. DDFON’s Federated SNS (Fediverse) Historial Timeline also lists multiple protocols. Marco Rogers argues that AT should be considered a fediverse protocol. @mattl says “For me the Fediverse has to include all social media apps and protocols.”

@strypey

It would really help if you could acknowledge this preexisting consensus, and the history it emerged from, when you comment on the subject.

There isn’t an existing consensus. You and fediverse.party can pick whatever definition of"the Fediverse" you want, but no matter how loud you shout, different people will pick different definitions, and (at least in my opinion) theirs are more aligned with fediverse history than yours.

@strypey

This comments also explains that the goal of fediverse developers for over a decade has been to converge on a single, unifying standard

That’s not how I see it. I’d say there are “protocol supremacists” who believe in the One True Protocol, and there are others who think in terms of multiple protocols. I do agree that “protocol supremacists” have been been the loudest and most visible over the last 7 years or so, and that helps to explain why there’s been so little progress on the issues holding back broader Fediverse adoption … for example:

@strypey

It’s worth noting that this is not the first time Evan has been involved in a movement-building project. See the mention here of the 2010 the Federated Social Web Summit, organised by StatusNet. The results of that are, in many ways, why the verse was (mostly) able to converge on a single protocol, and why we’re all here.

The 2010 summit didn’t lead to convergence on a single protocol. Diaspora continued to exist, and @macgirvin’s protocols continued to exist and innovate. And all of those protocols and the platforms built on them had areas where they were signifciant improvements on what came later. Zot and Nomad have have had nomadic identity for over a decade, and almost everybody I talk. Everybody agrees that the Friendica/Hubzilla/(streams) family offers much better tools for people to protect themselves. But the protocol supremacists ignore these other protocols and the platforms built on them. ActivityPub and Mastodon don’t have any of these things, and their absence leads to major barriers to broader adoption of the Fediverse.

@trwnh

People can choose which protocols they want to use based on the people that are on those protocols, and what those protocols allow them to do

That’s my view as well. Of course, not everybody sees it that way.

As I say in the article, when people choose a definition of Fediverse where history stopped with Mastodon’s 2017 adoption of ActivityPub and ties the Fediverse’s success to a protocol that has major issues, it’s still worth asking why they choose that definition.