 federation is just one way to achieve some form of decentralization... but only on one axis. the axis of "service provider choice". what is needed alongside this is a great "unbundling" of services. in the usa, if you want to sign up for just internet, companies often (more often in the past) force you to bundle in phone and tv service as well. we can think of one of fedi's current problems as the bundling of several services into a single provider -- identity, data, communication. question mainly to proponents of quote posts, but anyone can respond: what would you say is the semantic relationship between a “quote post” and “the post being quoted”? Are there any semantics at all, or is it a generic link/reference? What’s the difference between a “quote” and a “link preview”? By semantic, I mean “meaning”. What does it mean to “quote” something? If “quote posts” never existed, how would you design an equivalent? EDIT: got plenty responses! see downthread for conclusion
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 To me, in Smithereen, it's a link preview that's getting some special treatment and that you create with a dedicated UI. The difference between quotes and link previews is that I don't do link previews yet. The semantic relationship is the same as when I link something in my own post. To quote something means to include it as part of your own post, possibly adding your own comment, to have a conversation about it with your followers.  >What’s the difference between a “quote” and a “link preview”? I think there is no difference. Quote is simply an enhanced preview. stop doing activitypub, facts and logic were not meant to have side effects, they have played us for absolute fools .png shitpost of course but i am once again thinking about the muddiness of treating activities as commands or as remote procedure calls, instead of treating them as purely notifications. i mean really they're just a series of statements. bit weird to go attach behaviors to them. it's the kind of thing that makes me make jokes about the activitypub vm or programming language 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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  @trwnh Thanks for the thread! Coming myself from a linked data background and having adopted a simple use of JSON-LD as Linked Open Usable Data (LOUD), I never understood (and still don't understand) what problems people have with JSON-LD in AP and AS. I am much in favour of an open world approach. It is quite powerful if people share their extensions and try to find and reuse solutions by others. In the end, we'd create shared data models together: a social act for the social web.  @trwnh 1.) love this, looking forward to the blog post. 2.) i'm not 100% convinced of the analogy of open-world : closed world :: AP : "one" "social" "network" , but it resonates a lot with my thinking on platforms lately. i think the fediverse thinks of itself as ONE OPEN platform, rather than multiple overlapping platforms (that could include closed platforms, too, in every sense of closed including the economic!) with no global guarantees, periodt.
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 do you feel a sense of fear and apprehension when you spend any amount of money, even minor amounts Anonymous poll
Poll
yeah
17
81%
uhhhh ?????? no?????? what are you talking about
21 people voted. 4
19%
Voting ended 19 Jun 2023 at 7:58.
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i think there's an expectation of instances to stick around for a long time once they pass a certain threshold -- if an instance shuts down after a year or two, it's not so surprising. but the recent shutdown notices have taken me by surprise bc they're much older and more well-established, so there was a sense that they'd be around for much longer. i guess it just goes to show that anything can happen, and there really are no guarantees.  @trwnh I think the takeaway is admins should probably have a fallback admin who is a part of the community for a long time, so there isn't a trust issue if they ever need to hand it off. There's not much a responsibile admin can do at this point if they want to call it quits.  activitypub as an ecosystem has no authority like the xmmp standards foundation, which tends to lead toward a "fuck around and find out" approach. planning on extending the spec? just do it this is a really bad way to make standards imo, and i'm not sure the "fedi enhancement proposal" thing is a significant improvement because they lack any sort of authority. everything is really just best-effort  Do you envision your hypothetical ActivityPub "authority" as being comprised of the software developers who actually create the software that make up the Fediverse? https://github.com/reiver/fediverse-0 Or do you envision your hypothetical ActivityPub "authority" structured differently? a computer can never be held accountable therefore a computer must never make a management decision (IBM, 1979 slide) @trwnh Tech industry 2022: It's not us, it's the algorithm, bro! |
Gregory's Server
another aspect of federation is that it inherently requires giving up control. once your information crosses the threshold or boundary, it is outside of your control. so, how much of your information do you want to cross the boundary? maybe you're okay with providing your identification, but do you really want to provide your data too? what do you think other systems will do with that information?
with federated identity, you can get past gatekeepers and enter some venue. but the data stays in.