I really by and large have mostly lost faith that anything short of a miracle will get #ActivityPub to where I would like it to be, and the forces working against success here are just hard to even look at
I support the groups that are trying to define a way forward, and I suspect in many, many ways the battle is lost until and unless one of those efforts succeeds well enough to define a better way forward, and there's no way to know what that would look like or if it is even possible.
There are several people doing very good work in this field still and they may get us there either in part or in whole... eventually, dragging everyone kicking and screaming into a better model of development and of thinking. #Letterbook comes to mind as an example.
But as a vision or as a community I don't have much hope unless something dramatic changes.
That makes me sad and I've lost more and more hope the more I've dealt with it or the more I've seen.
Not because, as one person put it, I "don't know social networking software" but because I do understand distributed systems software, protocols, and APIs.
Sure sure, I don't think anything is dying tomorrow, and I do prefer it here to elsewhere, but it doesn't seem to be sustainable.
That just makes me sad every time I go back to hammering out the details in my own projects.
Maybe someone will pull off a miracle, godspeed to those fighting that fight, I hope you prove me wrong.
@jdp23 Yes, but slowly. Reevaluating my approach right now on it and how I want to manage it going forward. Which may be more public and more aggressive or it may be a completely different direction, or it may be just focusing on my own project first and worrying about the compatibility layer later.
@hrefna There's a lot to be said for worrying about the compatibility layer later. It's such a bizarre situation ... the 2022/2023 adoption had so many people with deep distributed systems experience, and while there are some very encouraging projects (Letterbook for example, and the data portability stuff Lisa Dussault has been working on) the overall ActivityPub ecosystem has really failed to capitalize.
But I feel burnt out. Refraining from making these arguments again. 😬)
Wrt. FeatherPub I'd recommend organizing such that you keep decent level of control on evolving the spec. In a similar way to e.g. ATProto take a greenfield approach, learn from the past, be open to feedback, but otherwise make decisions in smaller dedicated group or alone.
fair interpretation, but i wasn't referring to "the FOSS community", which i agree isn't really a cohesive entity.
i think the potential of the fediverse comes from the ability for affinity groups to create interoperable platforms and possibly cross-community solidarity. i'm excited for the possibility of new paradigms of social organization to bloom in the chaos of the fediverse. i appreciate the potential contributions of the distributed systems people that are on the network now, but mastodon didn't make the network blow up through any kind of technical prowess or vision. they had a marketing budget.
(i would add, i'm not trying to have an argument with anyone. if you think that's what's happening i'm sorry, but i'm not going to have a conversation in that format. i'm just sharing some thoughts.)