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Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

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Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#191

Post by paroneayea »

kick wrote: post #139
mactavish88 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, Mastodon doesn't implement the full ActivityPub spec [0]. They're still very much behind the effort though, it seems [1] (or at least they were in 2018). I'm not a Mastodon developer, nor have I developed with it, but surely there are learnings there that could potentially be contributed back to the W3C to make ActivityPub better (including making it more rigorously spec'd). The people at the W3C are not gods -…

Sure, Mastodon doesn't implement the full ActivityPub spec [0]. They're still very much behind the effort though, it seems [1] (or at least they were in 2018). Not only this, but they go against it in multiple places. How they've implemented 'summary' and the bizarre things they've done to create compatibility with Misskey (but not in an actually-compatible way, Misskey's had to patch their own solution every time) h…

Hi, Chris Webber here. You're quoting my blogposts out of context.

Yes, the standardization process was a difficult one. Standards efforts often are, and social web ones especially. Nonetheless I think we did a good job.

The purpose of those posts is to ask people to stop fighting each other and try to work together; it feels highly ironic for you to quote them to increase division.

Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#192

Post by masukomi »

kick wrote: post #82

To those of you pushing for ActivityPub: Webber's trashed it (the initial author) and is working on a way to mitigate the problems of it by implementing incompatible changes, the biggest piece of software claiming to implement it doesn't even implement it (Mastodon), the only piece of software that stays semi-faithful is full of devs who hate it (Pleroma). AP is completely broken for anything but publicly-scoped cont…

ActivityPub literally isn't a viable solution to this because it isn't decentralized. It's federated. There's a big difference.

Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#195

Post by gargron »

capableweb wrote: post #186
M2Ys4U wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Exactly. I somehow doubt Dorsey doesn't know about ActivityPub - why not just endorse it publicly if he genuinely cared about decentralization? Dorsey follows the Mastodon twitter account - he knows about it.

Although knowing Mastodon doesn't mean you know ActivityPub. If I recall correctly, Mastodon didn't implement ActivityPub in the beginning but started recently (within last couple of years)

Mastodon launched in November 2016 and fully switched to ActivityPub in October 2017.

Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#196

Post by emacsen »

kick wrote: post #82

To those of you pushing for ActivityPub: Webber's trashed it (the initial author) and is working on a way to mitigate the problems of it by implementing incompatible changes, the biggest piece of software claiming to implement it doesn't even implement it (Mastodon), the only piece of software that stays semi-faithful is full of devs who hate it (Pleroma). AP is completely broken for anything but publicly-scoped cont…

> Webber's trashed it (the initial author) and is working on a way to mitigate the problems of it by implementing incompatible changes,

This is not true on multiple levels

Webber has not trashed ActivtiyPub. I'd love if you could provide some evidence.

And the updates, in the form of OcapPub, are not at all incompatible with the current AP. They're an optional add-on that has a good default behavior.

Source: I worked on the same paper where Webber talks about improving ActivityPub, I presented my own white paper about ActivityPub. I gave a talk about these possible upgrades at the ActivityPub conference and I do a podcast with Webber where we talk about ActivityPub.

Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#197

Post by x3haloed »

munfred wrote: post #182
Arathorn wrote: post #129

For what it’s worth, Matrix is trying to be the protocol that Jack describes here - complete with relative reputation systems ( https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/msc2313/propos... ) and an open standard ( https://matrix.org/docs/spec ) and even an open governance process and foundation ( https://matrix.org/foundation ) - and with work progressing towards fully decentralised p2p matrix. Rather than buildin…

Agreed (I'm a matrix user myself). When I saw the thread I was confused about what exactly (if anything) he wanted to achieve that couldn't be done with matrix. I'd be surprised if he wasn't familiar with it already. Perhaps it's largely about branding/development control? I imagine it looks better to investors to say "we're making this new thing" rather than "we're gonna use this other thing that we don't own".

I stumbled upon Matrix the other day. The reason I passed it over was it sounds like all discussions happen in rooms, which made me think Matrix is basically chat room software. Is there a way to have a public discussion on Matrix with the entire user base like Twitter?

Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#198

Post by ummonk »

mathnmusic wrote: post #28

They should at the very least evaluate ActivityPub. It's a W3C standard that reached "Recommended" status almost two years ago, is flexible enough for future use-cases, and already has multiple implementations like Mastodon. In fact, any app can be made to act as a source, sink or both of ActivityPub events. I recently added ActivityPub support to learnawesome.org so that reviews can be consumed in any ActivityPub cl…

Apparently they will evaluate existing APIs: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766089353129984

Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#199

Post by kick »

Arathorn wrote: post #170
kick wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matrix has a lot of problems, too, but at least it's not fundamentally flawed, which is a good thing.

(matrix proj lead here): ooi what sort of problems are you thinking of here? just to check they are on our radar at the right priority.

(Breaking out this sentence into blocks because it's very large.)

The specification as-written is really, really bad (though I don't think this is a fault of the protocol),

Synapse is kind of...and work on Dendrite seems to have mostly stalled,

the billion people signed up on matrix.org has allowed for a sort of de facto centralization (not a huge problem, though in practice it sort of is, given how much the server buckles under the weight of all of the users; might be solved if it's ever moved onto a more performant implementation?),

the lack of encryption by default is iffy (though done for understandable reasons).

To lend credence to the specification being bad:

"I tried writing a matrix homeserver but I couldn't figure out how the state resolution process works" said by the author of Audacious/one of the authors of Pleroma/much more, so certainly a person who should be able to understand something that simple:

https://socially.whimsic.al/notice/9oxtjVqQw8gRS6QDKa

I know multiple people who've tried to implement the spec but who have gotten stuck on things that should be simple but are unclear if going by the spec.

Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#200

Post by MrZongle2 »

frogpelt wrote: post #120
majormjr wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's going to be Oracle.

Obviously, it's Facebook. Because there has to be one giant tech company that everyone hates and Microsoft lost interest in the position over 5 years ago.

From this thread the only conclusion I can draw is that Twitter is in the bottom five. Which is bad enough.
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