I’m all for this. I’m just not sure how broadly we (as social web constituents) share the same interests and a common goal. So I’d be interested in thinking about what those interests and goals are. If anything is clear, it’s that there are a great many needs that are currently going unaddressed. So what are they, and which ones should we focus on, and how do we address them? If we organize around those, then the whole “governance” thing becomes a little bit more clear, I think.
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Hey, @hamishcampbell . Thanks for opening up the conversation here. As you probably know, I’m one of the founders of the Social Web Foundation, and I’m happy to address some of your questions here.
Describing people as “users” who follow “influencers and brands” is a social mess
This has come up before; I use “users” if I’m specifically talking about people in their role of using social network software. I think it’s clearer than saying “people who follow people on the platforms people make”, even though users and developers are all technically people.
That said, I appreciate the note. Social networks are about people, and I’ll try to use that in future writings.
On the topic of influencers and brands: people follow influencers and brands on social networks. That is a thing that happens.
this is not the kind of project to engage with or be a part of building
That’s fine; the SWF is not mandatory. People who want to do other things for the Fediverse should definitely do so. But I do want to extend the invitation for people who are interested to reach out.
when this manifests as “entrepreneurship” we see the #deathcult path
I think you are talking about Tom’s bio, where he describes himself as a “technologist, product designer and entrepreneur”? That’s the only mention of entrepreneurship.
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We’ll be discussing grants and funding – and how to organize them outside of imperialist concerns maybe – at the upcoming OFFDEM.
The opening line says it all: leaders of the open social networking movement [1], but actually does not say it all: it’s based in San Francisco, half-an-hour from Meta’s SF office, and last but not least Meta is part of the “founders”.
OK, does it start looking like a US-based organization vs. the SocialHub then?
Here is my personal take on the people involved.
- Mallory Knodel did a fantastic work, among other things, about a feminist Internet, as well as Gender Representation in the IETF Nominating Committees and Impacts of the Internet on the Environment, Beyond Carbon… I would love to be able to discuss with her, since email comments on I.-D. did not work in the past, but I cannot find her on the Fediverse. As chair of HRPC and ISRG, I would hope she has some concerns about a foundation spinning up from her home country and ignoring years of ActivityPub presence and activity in Europe.
- Of course everybody knows @eprodrom for his pioneering work on OStatus and Pump.io. I would have loved to meet him in person, after all these years, if not at the first ever ActivityPub conference in Prague in 2019, when I spent a full month in Montreal in 2022. Unfortunately, somehow, Evan could not make himself available.
- Tom Coates (@tomcoates@me.dm), well, I can’t say, we do not seem to run into each other so often, coming from widely incompatible worlds.
I’m sorry @evanpro, I think what you call “social network” I call “corporate social media”, because in my social networks, brands are not something people follow nor are interested in.
This is terribly wrong doing this. You’re coming with Meta – Fakebooz, for the older people among us, one of the companies serving in attacking the internet and who culturally favors profit over the common good. As a Canadian, you should know that this statement you just made is colonialist and could be rephrased as a caricature: it’s OK to go walking, you’re free to do so, but we’re making the train, and your forest will disappear.
And what invitation? Why don’t you bring your discussions here? Why didn’t this discussion occur before with a larger number of people? Working hand in hand with Meta reminds me of a previous IETF experience with domain names for p2p networks. I do not think we’re looking out for the same people.
What about @cwebber, @rhiaro or Jessica Talon?
WTF.
When a social movement starts growing leaders, it’s on the verge of collapse. ↩︎
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I want to address some of the issues you brought up, @hrefna.
We are taking on a few, very bounded projects to start of with the SWF. We will be executing on this work, while we plan out projects throughout 2025. Sometimes, you need to work on the tasks that you can actually complete, rather than the tasks that are most important.
I’m taking the suggestions you have for our new projects pipeline. There are a few I need more info for, though:
- What do you mean by “registry”? Registry of software, extensions, something else?
- What do you think we could do to address homogeneity in independent software implementations?
- Feditest is working on testing; do you think there is more work to do here?
For E2EE, my user interface research shows that the lack of E2EE is a big inhibitor for people to use DMs at all, and that DMs are a crucial part of the stack for having real, human relationships happen on the Fediverse.
For the GDPR work, it will be an analysis of how and whether ActivityPub implementations can be compliant with GDPR requirements. Other work has been done in this space, but we want to pull it together into one document for implementers and for policy-makers.
For the question you ask, will it help small developers?, it’s a good question. We are more interested in helping users (sorry, @hamishcampbell ) get on, and stay on, the Fediverse, and have a good experience while there. If supporting small developers does that, I think it’s a good goal.
Versia actually looks promising with its focus on simplicity, although it seems to be modeled almost too closely against ActivityPub, such that it seems it will have a lot of the same problems as ActivityPub (for instance, it does not solve the problem of changing implementations on the same domain).
Extremely good question, extremely hard to answer 
. I think I mostly agree with all the stuff said in that thread the other day but surely there’s more stuff than that.
Again, coming from a U.S. and surveillance corporate standpoint, it’s difficult to trust what is going to come out of such work. You should rather involve people from EDRi, such as the people who have been working on https://GDPR.observer and actual GDPR work from within the European Union ; such a proposal coming from Meta is not credible at all. They already spend milions of Euros each and every year to influence EU policy. Putting this into the scope of SWF for ActivityPub is really threatening existing work and networks on this topic.
Here we’re in phase: there’s hardly anything else to say on the topic E2EE is required for ActivityPub to become a daily message routine, otherwise it’s a public amplifier and that’s all. But we also have other E2EE vectors that could be used apart from the Fediverse (and HTTP and DNS, if you follow my thought).
Are you saying you’re helping Meta figure out ways to engage in a decentralized network where small servers ran by families and friends will have to relay Meta bandwidth? It’s just that the question of scale remains very confusing when involving one of the richest companies in the world with clear imperialist goals and concerns. I can’t wait for What’sFed on Fakebooz Zero.
I wish I would not take it tongue in cheek, but this is so huge I cannot help but feel entirely powerless in this situation. Same old rhetoric, same old invasion patterns, the corporate uniforming of the world is riding its white horse with undefeated optimism and flatten young plants under it without even a consideration.
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spec level tweaks are one thing but i was kind of talking about even lower level than that. as in, what do people want to be able to do, how can the social web empower and liberate people. this kind of thinking should directly inform what gets developed into protocol building blocks.
a practical example: federation as it currently works in the fediverse is good for getting more people to see your posts, but more attention can be both good and bad. and the bad parts can outweigh the good. for the basic need of wanting to feel safe enough to express yourself fully, that makes federation a net-negative. many fediverse projects have thus far reacted by adding “local only posting” as a feature, but this is problematic in that it doesn’t prevent local abuse while cutting you off from the good people elsewhere. so what’s missing is more robust privacy features that let you control access to your posts in a way that supports people on other servers. our first step in addressing this is to identify what people want and need out of such a privacy framework. then we can look toward specs lile WAC or features like streams and arbitrary addressing. the needs come first, the features second.
Is this a good place to start this user-story exploration?
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Hey, Steve. Thanks for the points. I want to cover a few of them directly.
If the Foundation had been called the “ActivityPub Foundation”, I’d have less issues with it.
We chose our name pretty carefully. We didn’t use “ActivityPub Foundation” because we plan to do work that is not just at the protocol level, but also at the social and software implementation level. I think our projects page says it pretty well: we’re working on people, policy, protocol and plumbing.
As the “Father of the Fediverse” (see his SWF bio), I assume Evan sincerely believes this Foundation will help the “fediverse” (as he defines it), but it feels divisive and dishonest to me.
We want a united social web, using a single protocol for internetwork communication. I’d compare email, where proprietary LAN email protocols like Microsoft Exchange are gatewayed into the formal standard protocol SMTP. The way that IndieWeb, Nostr and BlueSky currently gateway into ActivityPub is a fair comparison.
We aren’t going to work on advocacy for tent.io or DSNP or XMPP PubSub or any of the myriad other social networking protocols that have come and gone. I think that’s confusing for anyone we’re trying to introduce to the social web; “Use one of these 20 protocols, it doesn’t matter which.” We simply have way more infrastructure, tooling, and support for AP than any other protocol, and it just doesn’t make sense to pretend that they’re all equivalent.
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such a proposal coming from Meta is not credible at all
I don’t think I was clear; this is a project of the Social Web Foundation, a non-profit supported by a dozen different implementers and stakeholders. Meta is one such stakeholder. As of right now, we don’t have anyone from Meta helping with this particular project.
Putting this into the scope of SWF for ActivityPub is really threatening existing work and networks on this topic.
How so?
But we also have other E2EE vectors that could be used apart from the Fediverse (and HTTP and DNS, if you follow my thought).
I’m glad you’re so supportive; I’d recommend putting some time into looking at the SWICG task force for E2EE. In particular, the integration models covers some different ways that AP and E2EE systems can interact. Based on conversations with developers and other stakeholders, I’m working on a community group report draft that will layer MLS on top of ActivityPub. Luckily, there are a couple of other projects happening in this same direction, so I’m going to try to align with those.
Are you saying you’re helping Meta figure out ways to engage in a decentralized network where small servers ran by families and friends will have to relay Meta bandwidth?
Uh, no? I think I was really clear in saying that the point of the Social Web Foundation is to have a bigger, better Fediverse. @hrefna was judging the projects we currently have on our roadmap according to whether they help small developers, and I responded that if helping small developers helped users, that would be a good goal to have.
I wish I would not take it tongue in cheek, but this is so huge I cannot help but feel entirely powerless in this situation.
So, what would it take to make you feel like you had some agency in this situation?
A few points:
For this I feel the is some danger for the névé #DIY openweb path we are on, the is no “security” and white lies about privacy which is fine. And more honest than the #closedweb path of the #dotcons with their very terrible “privacy” history, as people pint out a lot here.
I think the is real value in a clear separation of the openweb, with its native #4opens path, and the #closedweb with its crap history. To be sure, this is a balance, am a fan of 80% open 20% closed, the closed side is already catered for by projects like signal (good #UX) and p2p networks (bad #UX, need to do better) as examples.
Mixing these up by adding E2EE, is kinda dangerous without very strong need, I think a cultural path is better than implementing encrypted DM’s, we need to be wary of tech fixes, and this is a dangerous one.
That’s a question, and this start of #openproces is maybe a path, but the start is a mess, and a LOT of the assumptions are a mess, and there are real questions if this is good or bad for the openweb we have all been working on for the last few decades.
As I say in my opening post, the foundation path is problematic and not a first choice, but we hope it’s going to be #4opens so can be a part of a diversity we build out.
But as I also say, we have fucked up on this grassroots part of diversity. So we are left with the normal outcome for #mainstreaming, the foundation, and normal outcome for alternative, a mess., not good.
Mess https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=mess is something I write about a lot.
This is a problem of the funded #NGO path, maybe a strong #4opens statement and fallow up could mediate this mess? This is what this framework is for, so it’s very clear when to say “the word “off”.”
@how let me see if I can answer some of these.
it’s based in San Francisco, half-an-hour from Meta’s SF office
Medium generously offered us office space in downtown San Francisco. Tom is based in SF, where he has lived for more than a decade, and Mallory and I both visit a few times a year. I continue to live and work in Montreal; Mallory splits her time between DC and New York. It’s nice to have physical space, but most of our collaboration is remote so far.
and last but not least Meta is part of the “founders” .
Actually, the founders are Mallory, Tom and I. Meta is one of our dozen or so “supporting organizations”. You can see the full list on https://socialwebfoundation.org/ .
OK, does it start looking like a US-based organization vs. the SocialHub then?
That’s not the goal, no.
First, we still have to figure out how the SWF will manage international coverage. Should we have just one foundation for the whole world? Should we create chapters in different countries or regions? Or should we partner with local organisations that already exist? I don’t have an answer yet for this.
Second, what do you think would be a good relationship between the SWF and SocialHub? I don’t think “versus” is the best one.
And what invitation?
This is the invitation, right now.
Why don’t you bring your discussions here?
I’m happy to use SocialHub as one channel for collecting input from Fediverse implementers, participants and stakeholders.
Why didn’t this discussion occur before with a larger number of people?
We met with 150+ people for one-on-one conversations about the social web, about this foundation, and about the work we want to do.
We launched so we can have a broader conversation with more people on the Fediverse, and so we can show our intentions through the work that we do.
I talked to Christine about this non-profit before we announced it. Christine and Jessica are both working hard on Spritely Institute. What the relationship between SWF and Spritely will be is TBD.
Amy isn’t working directly on ActivityPub any more; you can talk to Amy about why.
If what they’re going to do is properly maintain the ActivityPub spec, rather than leaving it frozen in 2018, then I’d welcome that. Having a dead “living spec” has been the main problem all along, forcing developers to grow their own.
So, the bad news is that this is properly the work of the Social Web Incubator Community Group (SWICG or SocialCG), a part of the W3C. It isn’t one of the goals of the Social Web Foundation, although the SWF is going to support my work (and others’) at the W3C on ActivityPub.
The good news is that there’s a lot of activity right now. Over the last year, SWICG has been working through the backlog of issues on ActivityPub and Activity Streams 2.0 and building up documentation, errata, and ideas for a next version.
The W3C is working on chartering a new Working Group, which is what is needed to make a new version. It will probably be limited scope, an AP 1.1, with backwards compatibility, fixing errata, and clarifying unclear text.
I’ll be actively involved, and since I’m part of SWF you could say that SWF will be working on this, but the actual org is W3C.
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Periodic reminder that SWICG membershup is free and only takes (relatively chill) IPR commitment. chartering conversation is happening on the swicg mailing list and the /swicg/potential-charters repo
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It’s all being worked on in an ActivityPub-specific context. People using ActivityPub-based software, policy for ActivityPub networks, the ActivityPub protocol itself, and ActivityPub plumbing (whatever that may be). Given the ActivityPub-centric focus, I still think it would have less misleading to call it the ActivityPub Foundation.
The bigger issue is defining “social web” and “Fediverse” as ActivityPub-only. I don’t agree with your public opinions about ActivityPub being the only Fedi protocol (and that others are a waste of time). I feel it’s an attack on Fediverse tech diversity. From my perspective, this is intentionally spreading misinformation (while calling it “education”) and it’s disappointing to see it come from a leader in the community.
I understand that if the Fediverse were only ActivityPub it might be easier to sell to corporate interests. I’m just suggesting being honest about it and to not try to hijack widely used terminology to achieve your goals.
Whether that’s true or not (I see a lot of complaints about lack of AP tooling, libraries, etc.), you don’t have to pretend they are all equivalent to appreciate and support Fedi tech diversity… Is it possible to advocate for ActivityPub on its own merits rather than actively attacking and denigrating other protocol efforts?
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Is it possible to advocate for ActivityPub on its own merits […]
I am happy to do that, and I think it stands up quite well.
[…] rather than actively attacking and denigrating other protocol efforts?
I don’t do this.
When people spread false information about ActivityPub (like the Leaf protocol developer did, or like Blue Sky team does, or like Rabble did for Nostr), I rebut it. I don’t seek-and-destroy protocol efforts. I’m pretty sure I haven’t spoken about any of these protocols’ specific characteristics.
As you might not know, I organized 3 Federated Social Web Summits in Portland, Berlin, and San Francisco in the early 2010s, which brought together people working on dozens of different stacks and protocols.
I also co-chaired the Social Web Working Group, where we considered several different stacks and protocols.
I think that, before we had an open standard for social networking, protocol experimentation was more important. Now that we have an open standard, with a hundred implementations, tens of thousands of nodes, and tens of millions of users, I think efforts should go into encouraging the use of that standard and enhancing it through backwards-compatible extensions, rather than starting the whole process from the ground up.
I like tech diversity like different hardware platforms, operating systems, programming languages, databases and server stacks. But protocols are about interoperability, and having incompatible protocols reduces interoperability. And protocol diversity is just not as important to me as connecting more people on the social web.
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I think this is a bit too conservative of a take regarding backwards-compatibility. I really don’t think we’re at any sort of broad alignment, even within the ActivityPub space alone. Just about the only thing we universally do is POST to inbox. That payload is AS2 Activities. Things tighten up a bit when you consider e.g. the “Mastodon Protocol” as defined by ActivityPub - Mastodon documentation but even then, not everyone follows this protocol, and as a protocol, it’s got a lot of missing bits that are very important for a “social networking protocol” to have, not to mention it doesn’t closely follow the requirements laid out in AP or AS2. The main criticism that several people have raised (@hrefna @stevebate and @jenniferplusplus in particular) is that any interop we have on the fediverse today is more the result of the blood, sweat, and tears of implementers than it is the “open standard” that pretty much no one implements to the letter. The far more common outcome is to reverse-engineer Mastodon, or reverse-engineer Lemmy, with the aid of their documentation, with lots of hours spent looking at the code, and with outreach and collaboration involving other implementers.
Honestly, looking at the ActivityPub spec over and over and over and over and over (as I’ve done countless times), the well-defined parts that stick out are:
- A “following protocol”. You send
Follow, you get backAcceptorReject, you add tofollowersandfollowingas appropriate, and you can laterUndo. This is the core functionality of ActivityPub. - A “liking protocol”. You send
Like, which should get added to thelikescollection. - A “(re)sharing protocol”. You send
Announce, which should get added to thesharescollection.
But besides that, most of the activities that got specced in AP are for C2S CRUD resource management or Collection management. The way that these activities get used (or not used) in the fediverse doesn’t line up with the spec. For example, Create is described in S2S as having “surprisingly few side effects”. But in the fediverse it actually has more side effects, which aren’t described by ActivityPub. It also has unstated requirements on the “shape” of the activity, which properties are required, and how those properties get interpreted (which only somewhat aligns with the definitions provided in AS2).
I think there’s a lot of work that one would need to do to describe “the implicit protocol of the fediverse”, which is not sufficiently described by “the ActivityPub specification”. If you want to frame this in AP terms, the “server-to-server” bits aren’t the “real” protocol, but rather there are client-to-client protocols that are currently undescribed. These “client-to-client” protocols would be defined and layered on top of the AP S2S delivery mechanism, which is just LDN but with the restriction that the notification payload is an AS2 Activity and with some basic side effects sprinkled on top. And yes, most existing fediverse implementations ought to be considered Clients more than they can be considered Servers; they just happen to be monolithic and have subsumed the server component into the client, as if Thunderbird came with its own IMAP+SMTP implementation embedded into the application.
So, given all this, I have to ask: what are we targeting here? What are we trying to be backwards-compatible with? If it’s the existing install base of Mastodon and Mastodon-compatible software, then I think a blind adherence to backwards-compatibility is actually going to severely hold back the future potential of the social web. If it’s Threads, then I honestly don’t think that many of the smaller and independent implementers are interested in implementing and adhering to the Threads Protocol. Is it some kind of synthesis of the lowest-common-denominator of all fediverse implementations? Well, in that case, you can’t target something that isn’t clearly defined.
To bring up the perennial example of a chess extension to ActivityPub, you could imagine implementing a “chess protocol” that works client-to-client. You could even declare support for this protocol somehow, probably at an actor level you could indicate which clients are connected to your actor, but I’m getting ahead of myself here. The point is that just like we could have a “chess protocol”, we similarly could define a “social media post” protocol, which isn’t currently defined. Such a “protocol” would include things like interpreting a Create Note as a “status”, and it would include which properties are required or recommended or optional, and it would include guidance on how to interpret those properties and how to render them to the user, but also very importantly it would include a description of the side effects that you can expect that client to perform. Using Mastodon as an example, one of the side effects of receiving a Create Note currently is that the “status” it gets transformed into will be stored indefinitely in the local database, irrespective of HTTP caching headers. The “protocol” would ideally also define how the “status” should be deleted, and when, under which circumstances. For example, sending a Delete of your own actor is not defined anywhere as deleting your “statuses” as well. And I don’t think this belongs in the ActivityPub spec necessarily, because it’s just as valid to say that all activities delivered by the actor prior to its own deletion are notification messages that could be stored indefinitely or externally in your on-disk cache (barring the presence of HTTP caching headers which would cause them to be expired from cache). Perhaps if that “social media protocol” actually existed in explicit, unambiguous, documented form, then it would be possible to target it with backward-compatible extensions. But we don’t have any such thing today. The closest thing we have to that is ActivityPub - Mastodon documentation which is itself an incomplete description.
If this were the entire argument, then I would (facetiously) say to just use SMTP. After all, SMTP has billions of users, which is far more than ActivityPub has. Why does ActivityPub exist when the same mechanisms could have been specified on top of SMTP? Isn’t the existence of ActivityPub harmful to the email social network?
Hopefully you can see why this argument doesn’t (or shouldn’t) make sense. Not even when you switch out the protocols for different protocols.
If what truly matters is, as you say, “connecting more people on the social web”, then I think we’re going to have to come up with a definition for “social web” that we can agree upon. Because as it stands, the “social web” is more than just ActivityPub. And if the “social web” were limited to being just ActivityPub, and specifically limited to what current fediverse implementations do (or don’t do) with ActivityPub, then that’s not much of a “social web” and it doesn’t exactly inspire hope for the future.
Now, this isn’t to say that we should throw away ActivityPub entirely. But I do think we need to broaden our horizons and think really hard about what makes up a “protocol”, and which building blocks should be developed to form that “protocol”. We have a lot of work to do.
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If connecting more people to the Fediverse is so important to you, why are you so adamant about defining the Fediverse and “the social web” in a way that excludes BTS Army and the millions of Brazilians who joined Bluesky over the summer?
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Thank you, @trwnh, this is a fabulous yet sad-making summary!
You’ve mentioned some people who recently pointed out serious issues with AS/AP, but frankly here at SocialHub the entire forum is filled to the brim with discussions on such issues and people who want to improve things. Many of whom have left disillusioned. The only concrete thing in the AS/AP ecosystem one can get, the only ‘good-practice’, seems to be “Start coding, you babbling fool!” and then you hack & slash, reverse-engineer, cut/copy/paste, interpret/imagine/fantasize. Create that protocol flavour and balance tech debt against mastodontology. Then, once you sacrificed enough blood, sweat and tears, you have become elite and can keep your own fedi app and protocol flavour going, build community around it, or cults.
The protocol open standards had a great start, then they didn’t evolve.
It is very sad, very, very frustrating, and it burns people out who want to see the entirety of the AS/AP ecosystem reach its full potential, not just individual apps. Yet here we are, after many years of work and trying.
It’s us, our collective, our commons, our ecosystem that fell short to make lasting improvements.
And now there are others knocking at the door. The open-for-business foundations, the enterpreneurial types, and the corporations.
If Meta launched a multi-million dollar dev portal today, à la React or GraphQL, they’d probably make rapid progress and lead the whole shebang in no time. And also, incidentally, I think they would not be afraid to break backwards-compatibility. Many people would be relieved by such development, despite their misgivings against Meta.
And @eprodrom is there too, with SWF, on a similar mission, and maybe pragmatic to avoid the previous scenario. The volunteers and the commons have failed, and SWF may have more luck with decent funding (and good salaries for their staff). I am not a fan of the impending corporate fedi takeover, that SWF promises to speed up, but other than that I have no particular opinion on this effort. It is logical that it now exists, and more similar initiatives will soon follow. It is up to Evan and friends to appeal to the folks in the existing ecosystem… or not.
Social Web and SocialHub
So what’s the status now? Among our 
achievements we find:
We have a grassroots, decentralized open ecosystem, with a bottom-up 3-stage dev process.
We have a FEP process where collected 73 (!!) Fediverse Enhancement Proposals.
I am particularly proud of where we collectively got the FEP process.
And here we start bumping into problems and areas where we 
must improve:
- We got a basic discussion forum going here, but not in any way a community of action.
- We need more people in staff roles, as moderator, admin, or in the well-being team.
- We need more people facilitating the FEP process. Currently @silverpill is a lonely
Hero. - We need more input and feedback on improvements to make to the various processes.
- We need focus on streamlining collaboration across the 3-stages of the ecosystem.
- Here @eprodrom (and @codenamedmitri) it really does not help to ignore prior efforts.
- It is fine to have a Task Force dedicate to activitypub.rocks, but not informing SocialHub which is hosted under that domain, is - idk where to begin - the exact opposite of good collab.
- And then we need hands raised and people rolling up their sleeves to do actual work.
- If that doesn’t happen… well, so be it.
- Without active contributions complaining about shortcomings is all we can do.
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That doesn’t match with my experience and what others have reported.
Sean’s Tilley’s recent article (linked earlier in the thread), gives examples. You described promoting Nostr and other protocols as “undermining the network”. You said having a thriving marketplace of protocols hurts everyone and that the other protocols are ad hoc protocols by people “who refuse to use or contribute to standards” and that you don’t want to “lend legitimacy” to them. According to the article, you later deleted those posts. Anyone can have a bad day, but this is a repeated behavior. I’ve personally seen you respond to someone asking questions about BlueSky (or BS, as you like to call it) where you called it a failing protocol (among other FUD and misinformation). This is shortly after BlueSky had an influx of new users over a few week period that outnumber the MAU on the entire AP Fediverse.
I wasn’t aware of that and that’s great, but I’m discussing current positions of the SWF and recent related behaviors.
Also, people and their perspectives change. For example, in 2022, you wrote:
this week, Elon Musk completed his purchase of Twitter. I realized what a shitshow that was going to be, and how little I wanted to be a part of it. I didn’t want to keep doing something I know is bad for myself and for society.
Now, in 2024, the Social Web Foundation has a X/Twitter account. Things change.
I am aware of that. Like you said, you not only considered them, but released several W3C Recommendations for those other protocols and stacks. At that time, the “Social Web” wasn’t defined as only ActivityPub and the Fediverse. That’s why I was surprised by the SWF’s current definition.
In some ways, being a W3C standard is a disadvantage for ActivityPub (I understand there are some legal benefits for businesses). In my opinion, the specification isn’t good (I’m not saying it’s worthless!). I understand it was created under extreme time and political pressure, but that doesn’t change the fact that the spec has many issues and it’s very difficult to update because it’s a W3C Recommendation. That’s why other protocols are able to innovate more quickly than AP can.
It’s a different discussion, but I sometimes wonder if a grassroots protocol+profiles approach, inspired by ActivityPub (and initially backwards-compatible), would allow the (grassroots) spec to really live and better evolve to meet the need of the community (users, developers, and even business). In some ways, that’s what Mastodon has implicitly created and that’s what drives the Fediverse rather than the W3C spec per se.
To get back on topic, I believe we need protocol experimentation now more than ever.
I’ve seen you repeat this phrase several times recently. It’s not a lie, but it is misleading. The “tens of millions of users” implies multiple 10’s. According to fedidb.org (maybe you have a different source for the stat?), there are about 10 million users (accounts, really). However, there are only 1 million MAU so 90% of the accounts are inactive. I have friends, for example, who tried Mastodon after the Musk takeover of Twitter and they left after a few days of frustration. ActivityPub doesn’t connect “users” like this. That’s why MAU is a better metric.
See this research for more details.
With ActivityPub, not so much… but that’s another long discussion. In any case, you’ve already acknowledged that multiple Fediverse protocols can interoperate (via bridges and similar technology), so having those protocols doesn’t limit the ability to connect people.
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