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/?
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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
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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”
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On a vaguely related note, I think a really interesting way to do a proof of concept of this would be to demonstrate its use in a social media game.
The old adage that everything on the internet truly only takes off at first as either games or porn is still somewhat relevant. I think a mastodon-adjacent but very much not mastodon-specific form of social gaming could be really fun, demonstrate some ideas, and bring a different set of people to the fedi.
@[email protected] this has the potential to be like when people kept getting farmville activities in their facebook feeds 😭
@[email protected] I mean hopefully we’re better than that! I don’t think the sum total of social gaming should be people posting their wordle scores.
There was a time when a big part of the appeal of Facebook was Words with Friends and other doofy little games that lived in the platform. FB decided it could print money other ways but those were strong early draws to the platform.
A fedi version of chess or go or mancala that used AP for its moves and allowed others to follow along would be cool.