A response on the Write.as forum relating to the challenge: SocialHub Community and Fediverse Futures.
The issue is that all federated projects do their own thing with regards to the Fediverse. They use the open ActivityPub and ActivityStreams for that, that were developed to allow interoperability such as the Fediverse (somewhat) provides.
But these standards are still immature. They contain holes that need to be filled. There’s a win-win for any project to help fill them in. Next versions of the standards, as well as common extensions need to be released. Unfortunately there’s no one really willing to help with this effort, and so the evolution of the Fediverse languishes.
This means three things:
- Extending federation-based features is inproductive. Have to (re)invent them or learn & adapt from other codebases.
- No single project will benefit from the full potential of the technology. It remains untapped.
- Technology base remains weak and fragile, and there’s high risk it will be passed and replaced with the next shiny thing.
An example of the way that individual projects - here write.as in a proposal to @thebaer - tackle things is in:
Federate reader page as AP community/group - Feature requests - Discuss Write.as
Would be cool if people could not only subscribe to individual users via ActivityPub, but also to a group of blogs. The reference implementation for that is probably Lemmy, but Soapbox/Pleroma is also working on groups support. The reference for Lemmy’s implementation can be found here.
Lemmy is NOT the reference implementation of Groups! It is just one possible implementation. And it may differ from the next impl. and the next and the next. Until we have 100 flavours of Group implementation and zero interoperability overall.
That is because the Groups implementation discussions were never finished. Nothing was standardized, no agreement reached. There was insufficient interest to further open standards.
If all projects thinking about Groups support had interacted with SocialHub to share their insights, and had they written or improved Fediverse Enhancement Proposals, then the situation would much improve and there would be reference implementations, instead of ad-hoc development.