some thoughts on Bounce, the new tool by @anewsocial that

Fediversity Fediverse Report
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some thoughts on Bounce, the new tool by @anewsocial that lets you migrate your social graph from bluesky to mastodon and pixelfed

https://connectedplaces.leaflet.pub/3lxhywrnwnc2d

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Recently I wrote about how decentralised networks lead to fragmentation and decentralisation in the underlying protocols that power them. People might see bridging as a temporary solution to a problem caused by developers with a Not Invented Here Syndrome. Instead, I see this fragmentation and protocols that are only partially compatible with each other as a logical result of giving people freedom to build and hack whatever they want. Sure, it leads to interoperability issues and it can be annoying, but it is also an unavoidable result from the social dynamics that are part of truly open networks.

I agree with you strongly and also think that the future social web is a multi-protocol web that emerges over time, where social web technologies weave together and build on top of each other, evolving organically, driven by grassroots forces. This lends strength, versatility, and resilience to the technology landscape, and also contributes to freedom and diversity. The freedom to choose ones own way, and bring their own technology and skills to the table.

But all that is in the context of well-defined technology boundaries, in this case referring to separate social web protocol specifications and how to bridge between them in interesting ways.

The problem of fragmentation that was discussed at SocialHub was of a different nature. Where unclarities and gaps in the ActivityPub specification, combined with app-centric development approach followed by implementers, results in ad-hoc creation of protocol extensions. Which subsequently leads to protocol decay and growing tech debt that is much more serious than just annoying.

The current approach to fediverse evolution will see a continuing deterioration of overall Interoperability. An ecosystem to become ever more complex, thus unattractive, and that will hamper broader adoption of ActivityPub. I once created a diagram that contrasted ActivityPub to Solid Project, which follows almost a complete opposite approach to standardization. Solid takes a top-down, spec-first, spec-everything approach and is organized similarly to W3C specification process. Both technologies see a non-linear growth in complexity over time, but in the case of ActivityPub this trend is more harmful than for Solid, as the reality on the-fediverse-wire diverges more from the specs. I coined the term - which found some popular uptake - of ‘Whack-a-mole driven development’ (WDD) where fediverse integration entails api-to-api per-app hard-wiring against moving software release targets.

Diagram that demonstrates how ActivityPub and Solid move to opposite extremes of subsequently ad-hoc interoperability and universal interoperability. In both cases (accidental) complexity shoots up exponentially.
Diagram that demonstrates how ActivityPub and Solid move to opposite extremes of subsequently ad-hoc interoperability and universal interoperability. In both cases (accidental) complexity shoots up exponentially.1200×415 35.4 KB

Confusion between technological diversity in the social web landscape ( :white_check_mark: great! ) versus fragmentation in the ActivityPub ecosystem ( :cross_mark_button: oh noos! :scream: ) is easily made.

Unless I misunderstand there is for instance no clear definition of what a “protocol” means in an AS/AP context. That is at least my impression seeing that SocialCG wants to start a Protocol Task Force and I followed up with questions about AS/AP domain terminology. Aren’t we talking “protocol extension” for which we need a good design approach and best-practices for implementers? There is no good shared language yet, and Babylonion confusion is also an emergent phenomenon in grassroots movements as they decentralize further, I gather.