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smallcircles (Humane Tech Now)

A federated protocol where everyone creates ad-hoc extensions for their own projects means we'll soon have a spaghetti-code #Fediverse that no one fully understands and gets harder and harder to interoperate with and less attractive to build new apps for.

The tech debt is already very large, and most documentation is lacking. The "Tragedy of the Commons" of fedi is that it is not a project in and of itself, so nobody maintains it, only uses it as a dependency in their own project.

@dansup @cj

14 Sep 2021 at 18:29 | Open on mastodon.social
5 comments
Robert Kingett updates

@humanetech @dansup @cj If only open source projects could become a community effort and not just a never ending toy developers just abandon at will multiple times. Like, I'd love to see Activity Pub become a very solidly maintained protocol that's built on. Take RSS, for example. But the internet at large is trying to kill RSS, so... how did email become so maintained?

14 Sep 2021 at 18:50 | Open on writing.exchange
smallcircles (Humane Tech Now)

@blindscribe

In "The Fediverse Challenge" I quoted Moxie's reason for not making Signal decentralized:

"We got to the first production version of IP, and have been trying for the past 20 years to switch to a second production version of IP with limited success. We got to HTTP version 1.1 in 1997, and have been stuck there until now. Likewise, SMTP, IRC, DNS, XMPP, are all similarly frozen in time circa the late 1990s"

(Not saying that is a valid reason)

socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/

@dansup @cj

@blindscribe

In "The Fediverse Challenge" I quoted Moxie's reason for not making Signal decentralized:

"We got to the first production version of IP, and have been trying for the past 20 years to switch to a second production version of IP with limited success. We got to HTTP version 1.1 in 1997, and have been stuck there until now. Likewise, SMTP, IRC, DNS, XMPP, are all similarly frozen in time circa the late 1990s"

14 Sep 2021 at 18:58 | Open on mastodon.social
Fabian (Bocchi) 🏳️‍🌈

@blindscribe EMail only exists because there is literally nothing else to communicate without beeing forces to use someones platform.
For the same reason matrix was just pushed to be used by the german health care system*.
The problem for the fediverse is… that it's a toy, nothing companies need to interoperate.

* matrix.org/blog/2021/07/21/ger

14 Sep 2021 at 19:03 | Open on mstdn.social
Григорий Клюшников

Humane Tech Now, I prefer to actually do stuff instead of spending years and years being ignored or talking and not agreeing on anything at all because the number of potential use cases grows indefinitely. I did my best to try and make use of this process, but it clearly didn't work.

I needed a mechanism to append things to someone else's collections and I made one, and I published a FEP, and other developers said that the thing I made is good. I don't like all this theoretical talk because it doesn't move the world forward in any meaningful way. Building a concrete implementation, and then proposing a standard along with a demonstration that it actually works and achieves what it needs to achieve, works much better.

Humane Tech Now, I prefer to actually do stuff instead of spending years and years being ignored or talking and not agreeing on anything at all because the number of potential use cases grows indefinitely. I did my best to try and make use of this process, but it clearly didn't work.

I needed a mechanism to append things to someone else's collections and I made one, and I published a FEP, and other developers said that the thing I made is good. I don't like all this theoretical talk because it doesn't...

15 Sep 2021 at 19:51
smallcircles (Humane Tech Now)

@grishka sure, and can't blame you in the slightest. It does not really matter how the process is set up, and if things are documented before or after the fact. You participate in discussions, and FEP process, which is more than many others do.

Also the fedi specs work best if ones use cases are already well represented, and just need some tweaks and extension here and there. But if widespread, rich interop is where your app starts off and thrives, its a much more risky bet to 'just start'.

16 Sep 2021 at 5:28 | Open on mastodon.social
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