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/?
@trwnh
I want fedi folks to start thinking about commons instead of getting hung up on stuff that’s basically warmed over “the cathedral and the bazaar.”
All functional commons involve inclusion and exclusion. They are neither purely closed nor open. They are variously open or closed depending on the combination of who you are and what you want to do.
@MichaelTBacon i think you’re using closed/open in a different way from how i’m using it, which for formal logic means either “everything is true unless it’s false” or “there are some things i don’t know, and they aren’t necessarily false, i just don’t know”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-world_assumption
@[email protected] Ah, yes, I did miss that distinction, and it’s been long enough since I did formal logic that it didn’t ring a bell. I agree with your point too but yes, I see what you’re doing is different.
@[email protected] In other words, a “protocol” needs to know everything there is to know, and it is undesirable to have unknowns. Contrast with the viewpoint that it’s perfectly fine to have unknowns, and in fact, you can expect unknowns by default. You’ll never have a complete view of the universe.
@[email protected]
In that regard, I have to say that I think I’m still in a little bit of a grey area. The power of AP is in the fact that it can socialize a wide range of things, and I don’t think that world should be closed in advanced.
At the same time, a protocol needs a set of sub-standards at least (lots of old IETF protocols had CAPABILITY commands) that let you figure out which specific closed world you’re operating in.
@[email protected] i’m rotating in my head the idea of a FEP that defines a conformance profile for a “social networking profile” that basically formalizes what you’d need to implement a “fediverse network”, basically as a superset of AS2+AP (because AP is not enough on its own, it says nothing about message shapes or how to interpret specific props in a social network setting)
@[email protected] actually my main reservations about it are like
@[email protected]
If I can give unsolicited advice on nebulous question . . . ;)
Those may be totally useless or non-sequitur to your actual concerns. Wouldn’t be the first time in this thread alone I misunderstood!
@[email protected] right, i’m just wondering how to nudge implementers in the “right” direction on here (story of my life for the past 5 years lol)
@[email protected] unfortunately the common response to “can we make things better” is “we need $200k”