idk where to really put this (might turn into a blog post later or something). it’s what you might call a “hot take”, certainly a heterodox one to some parts of the broader #fediverse community. this is in response to recent discussion on “what do you want to see from AP/AS2 specs” (in context of wg rechartering) mostly devolving into people complaining about JSON-LD and extensibility, some even about namespacing in general (there was a suggestion to use UUID vocab terms. i’m not joking)

1/?

  • infinite love ⴳ@mastodon.socialOP
    1·
    2 months ago

    it is my personal belief that this whole “closed-world social network” vs “open-world social Web” thing is leading to a big disconnect that makes addressing people’s needs harder.

    because, to be on the “network”, you neglect being on the “Web”.

    sure, your software might still publish your “posts” as Web resources, but that’s it. you’re not actually granted control or ability to manage Web resources for yourself.

    and that’s why #ActivityPub C2S is being neglected, among many other things

    29/?

    • infinite love ⴳ@mastodon.socialOP
      1·
      2 months ago

      i am personally more in favor of a “social Web” than a “social network”.

      what i want to do is make it easier for anyone to make a website, and to manage that website.

      i want those websites to be able to link to each other in well-defined and clearly-understood ways.

      i want to make friends and express myself to the fullest, in varying contexts on various websites, without context collapse.

      but it feels like #fediverse is more interested in replicating the “social network” paradigm.

      30/30

      • Marco Rogers@social.polotek.net
        1·
        2 months ago

        @[email protected] thanks for writing this thread. It sparked a lot of thoughts for me.

        I do have one response in the form of a question. What’s stopping you from just doing the thing you want? You don’t really need permission.

      • infinite love ⴳ@mastodon.socialOP
        1·
        2 months ago

        addendum 31/30

        there’s a whole lot of things i could say about “how we get there” but the thread was getting long enough and i want to cut it off here and clean it up into a blog post or something, without drifting too far off the original topic which was to voice my thoughts about the divide itself

        • infinite love ⴳ@mastodon.socialOP
          1·
          2 months ago

          addendum 32/30

          there’s a separate thought experiment you could do about what it really takes for a “social networking protocol” because honestly you don’t even need http. you can do “social networking” over xmpp or email or whatever. or invent your own way to send bytes over tcp/udp/whatever (inb4 xkcd)

          seriously tho, newsletters and deltachat and movim and a bunch of other things show that you can do it

            • infinite love ⴳ@mastodon.socialOP
              1·
              2 months ago

              also i should mention since this is happening kind of simultaneously, this is not about the social web foundation’s use of the terms “social web” and “fediverse”, although the blog post did go live in the middle of me writing the thread which is a kind of irony i guess. another irony is that even though it’s not about that, it could still be kinda about that. if nothing else, it demonstrates that “social web” and “fediverse” are not synonyms.

          • blaine@mastodon.social
            1·
            2 months ago

            @[email protected] nice writeup! Just glancing, so without getting into detail, I think I agree.

            This is perhaps my own bias in all of this, but it’s interesting that one of the most-consistent aspect of Fedi implementations is their reliance on Webfinger.

            I worked on that part because I didn’t think the data format stuff really mattered that much, and at worst was going to be stifling. It was excluded from AP for political, http fundamentalist reasons, but [imho] is essential to the networks functioning.

            • blaine@mastodon.social
              0·
              2 months ago

              @trwnh linking, which as you point out is key – to people – depends on regular people being able to share their names. I learned a long time ago that most people aren’t good at groking the HTTP part of links, because the structure of links is actually really complex. When you mention xmpp and email, the identifier is the thing that makes both of those networks work.

              For me, “fedi” or “AP” or the social web or whatever we want to call it has always been about making personal identity linkable.

              • infinite love ⴳ@mastodon.socialOP
                0·
                2 months ago

                @blaine i’m wondering to what extent fedi would implement webfinger if mastodon didn’t require it

                i think if i had to really pick a format for identity then it would be a weak preference for FQDN, but having your id be a pretty-url is also okay i guess. but one other thing that i think would be cool is being able to find your contacts via webfinger if they choose to make themselves findable by other means! so you could do wf?resource=tel: or ?resource=mailto: and still get back useful info…

                • blaine@mastodon.social
                  1·
                  2 months ago

                  @[email protected] fun fact, webfinger actually supports URLs and [in theory] phone numbers!

                  The key (and this is a social science and cultural insight, not technical) is that when you ask someone’s “name” or “address” they need something that’s unambiguous, personal, and opaque in the sense that it works everywhere (online / distributed, it needs to be globally unique, too) or they won’t use it.

                  Bare domains aren’t ideal because (1) they’re expensive and (2) management is hard.

                  • infinite love ⴳ@mastodon.socialOP
                    1·
                    2 months ago

                    @[email protected] tumblr made it work so idk if it’s “ideal” per se but they definitely had a cultural thing going for quite a while with “dot tumblr dot com” even being a meme at some point

                    it can’t be too hard to manage tbh, the modern version of this is atproto handle services that do nothing but allocate you a subdomain for use on bluesky

                  • blaine@mastodon.social
                    0·
                    2 months ago

                    @trwnh the “trick” with webfinger is that it’s a way to go from a “name” to an authoritative context (the authority for “[email protected]”’ is “y.xyz” and the authority for “blah.com” is “blah.com”; the challenge with phone numbers is that it’s impossible to infer the authority for +1-416-867-5309 / telcos don’t provide a lookup system). That’s really it; the rest is a cultural thing.

              • blaine@mastodon.social
                0·
                2 months ago

                @trwnh when the first round of “social networks” were built, the first thing that got added to the databases were a “users” and a “friends” table, because “the web” doesn’t (didn’t?) have that.

                Decentralizing that is a radical act, and the sorts of things that we can do with a linked [bi-directional] web of people is infinite and bounded only by our imaginations. AS and AP actions and data formats and C2S are, as I think you’re saying, just stubs for rebuilding the old world in a new way. ❤️

                • blaine@mastodon.social
                  1·
                  2 months ago

                  @[email protected] (useful stubs, and important, hard things to agree on – I don’t want to diminish the work of folks on those aspects in any way! Just that I hope we don’t limit our imaginations based on the standards of today)

                • infinite love ⴳ@mastodon.socialOP
                  1·
                  2 months ago

                  @[email protected] yeah, the ultimate goal is letting people link with each other in the spaces that they wanna link up

                  i think “your website” should be like your home, but also you should be able to go to other websites just as if they were “venues”. so you go to the local forum to hang out. but you can still have your activity on that forum broadcasted to your followers. or alternatively you can participate in the forum from your own site, just like you can reply to a github notification email!

        • Oblomov@sociale.network
          1·
          2 months ago

          @[email protected] this was a fascinating read, thanks for sharing. Looking forward to the blog post.

          I’ve had thoughts along those lines since I’ve started using Mastodon and getting familiar with AP, which I always saw as an extension of email and Usenet rather than a more general tool for the “social web” —and even for that it’s being held back by the absence of a “content independent” AP server (AFAIK the only one in development is Vocata, and it still has some way to go).

          • infinite love ⴳ@mastodon.socialOP
            1·
            2 months ago

            @[email protected] yeah, there’s the old “it’s like email but for websites!” which isn’t terribly inaccurate, but that’s honestly more a consequence of “HTTP POST to ldp:inbox” than anything else in AP. the side effects for each activity kinda stray from that model and go into almost RPC-like territory. there’s also some potential redundancy with HTTP verbs, but that’s because HTTP verbs don’t notify arbitrary audiences (although i guess they could do that with a header!)

            • Oblomov@sociale.network
              1·
              2 months ago

              @[email protected] actually what made me think of “extensions of email and newsgroups” was more the object structure, but on second thought that’s more an ActivityStream characteristic than an ActivityPub one, although an actual implementation of the C2S part of AP would still fit the bill in some sense.

              (Yeah, the lack of usage of DELETE and PATCH surprised me initially, but the fact it would have needed to also define how to propagate them partially explains it.)