Then this list is not a great example of that. Because the first 2 in your list are fully Free Code software that anyone can run, and hundreds of people do. The second one is a company that maintains a number of fully Free Code packages (including WP) that anyone can run, and thousands of people do. Yes, all the entities behind all 3 run one or more flagship instances, but as I said, they’re also longtime supporters of the fediverse in good standing (1).
In neither of these cases do I see a “platform”, in the obviously negative sense of the word that you’re using (by analogy with what Meta do). Can you explain why you do, and more importantly, what you think it means to be …
Also, I’m still waiting for a link to demonstrate that SWF use “social web” and “fediverse” interchangeably.
EDIT: This was provided by @stevebate . Thanks for this. But that doesn’t really clash with what I say below, especially in the context of the the blog piece you linked by Tom Coates.
My interpretation is that Evan’s definition of “social web” very much includes networks that he doesn’t yet consider part of the fediverse (even if he does include accounts on the bridged services within them). With the aspiration that the SWF can help the various social web networks to unify. In a similar way to how the SWWG helped the OStatus, Diaspora, and Zot networks to unify to form the fediverse that existed when Eternal November began.
If I’m right that this is Evan’s understanding and aspiration, I thoroughly endorse it.
(1) Automattic by extension, as the new employer of Matthias Pfefferle who has been developing fediverse extensions for WP since it was still using OStatus
You may well be right, but the point is that tries to claim that the internet isn’t the network of networks unified by IP networking, and nobody says “internets” (except you, today, but have you ever written that before?).
Exactly what it says on a the tin. Implementing enough of the core AP spec to have some level of interop with other software that does the same. As I’ve said elsewhere, my ideal AP would be as minimal as possible, like IP and XMPP-core, with everything else standardised in FEPs. Including meta-FEPs defining AP+FEP bundles for use cases like the threadiverse, or video federation, or events federation (Mobilizon, Gancio etc)
@trwnh seems to think we should try to fold all of this into AP itself, and I have no idea why they think this is a good idea.
I have no idea how to interpret this because I don’t know what you mean by “Fedi”. If you mean “the fediverse”, no, that’s never been the case. If you mean “federation protocols in general”, then yes, of course. People use email for some things, XMPP or Matrix for others, and AP or AT Proto or Nostr for others.
I’ve talked to the developer of Prosody (also founder of ModernXMPP and Snikket) quite a bit about the pros and cons of bridging. He says it’s a brittle and resource intensive way of doing things, that’s only useful in adversarial interop (eg Mastodon<>Titter crossposters), or as a stopgap while trying to converge on a common protocol. This matches my observations over about 2 decades of using and researching decentralised network software.
Would you claim the opposite, that the IndieWeb is a secondary protocol that just bridges into it using bridgy? The IndieWeb and the fediverse are 2 separate federated social web networks, bridged together. The fact of that bridging doesn’t automagically fold one into the other, in either direction. Adding BlueSky and Nostr doesn’t automagically make them part of the the fediverse, any more than it makes the fediverse part of BlueSky or Nostr.
I’d ask you the same question as Jon. Why do you seem so determined to dilute the well-established meaning of the term “the fediverse”? I don’t remember seeing you in discussions about fediverse development before Eternal November either.