@smallcircles @deadsuperhero I've quietly been borrowing ideas from AT Protocol for ActivityPub:
- declaring moderation actors
- supporting content labels (first party abd third party)
- looking at how custom feeds, DIDs and other tech may translate across
@heluecht @deadsuperhero hey, is anyone interested in participating in the API task force?
Here鈥檚 the thing: Mastodon already has a really good API. There鈥檚 a whole ecosystem of clients around it, to the point that many other Fediverse implementations adopted it, so that they can use the apps.
I don鈥檛 think this is a bad thing in and of itself. But, if we want projects like Mastodon to support it, the value proposition has to provide things that the Mastodon API does not.
I think a killer feature to focus on would be identity management.
Yes. Mastodon has always given their own product decisions precedence over healthy evolution of the ecosystem as a whole. And despite many people being very frustrated about that, I think this is perfectly valid decision. After all choosing to implement an open standard should not come with the obligation to maintain/evolve that standard. It is only smart to do so, and Mastodon did this with an eye on their own product development.
Imho it is really the broader dev ecosystem that is at fault in letting the fedi be taken hostage by past Mastodon decisions, making them the post-facto #interoperability leader. As for Mastodon API I'd argue that its users are not on the fediverse. They are on Mastodon.
Identity management may be killer feature, but only when first a sound #ActivityPub foundation is in place. AS/AP isn't as-yet robust enough to be the future of social networking. I'd say the extensibility mechanism is killer feature, and having SDK's and devtools for that.
Right now extensibility of #ActivityPub shapes up as custom app-by-app app-centric development where individual devs just pragmatically throw new stuff on the wire, and when their app gains any popularity or other apps to integrate in a similarish application, things are bolted onto that in random ways. That whole story really constitutes a Big Ball of Mud anti-pattern that only introduces protocol decay, tech debt, and whack-a-mole programming, that is very hard to get rid of once there exists an installed base.
The reason that we do things that way is very understandable. It works in a grassroots environment where indivualist devs find it very hard and not valuable to collaborate at scale in what amounts to a kind of design-by-consensus process. But it comes at a high cost, where interoperability is basically out the door and any app has to be shaped as a pretzel and adopt all the quirks introduced by predecessors in a particular app domain to fit itself on the wire.
It does not need to be that way. I am quite happy after all (after being initially frustrated) by how #ATProto has disrupted things, and opened the eyes of devs in the #ActivityPub ecosystem that we must act or lose out (stay niche, which may be fine too) to the Atmoshpere and how it enables devs to focus on service and product delivery instead of low-level wire plumbing and continuous breakages.
ATProto also shows the way that we can now follow on the #fediverse to catch up again: cocreate a similar robust basis for people to build on. #Bluesky had the advantage of a greenfield start and dedicated team unburdened by past decisions. And they build this whole Lexicon system and ways to introspect functionality.
We can do that too, solve the #LinkedData conundrum, and create an extensibility mechanism that allows devs to focus on service modeling. The more introspection this mechanism allows for, the less design-by-consensus is required, easing expansion to new domains.
@smallcircles @deadsuperhero I've quietly been borrowing ideas from AT Protocol for ActivityPub:
- declaring moderation actors
- supporting content labels (first party abd third party)
- looking at how custom feeds, DIDs and other tech may translate across
I was looking at #ForgeFed which is a very sizable #ActivityPub extension (constituting the "Code forge" app domain in app-centric view, but arguably "Software development" top-level business domain in a service-oriented fedi).
The way that things are modeled here adheres more to the actor model where there's a Factory actor, which in turn creates resource actors that expose various sub-domains. For instance for the management of Issues and PR's there's a TicketTracker actor to obtain via a Factory actor on a forge instance. Though I'm not sure whether I'd modeled that in similar fashion, it is a fascinating direction where we focus much more on good protocol extension design.
All in all AS/AP offers a very granular foundation that allows for very interesting architectures, if only we dare explore them and do not dogmatically stick to some engrained notion how "social media" ought to be. I see #SocialMedia as but a small subset of #SocialNetworking.
Would love to hear what @evan thinks about this.
I am heart to heart with you on this, friend.
@deadsuperhero so, here's my best bet. I can be wrong!
1. Get some servers to implement the API well.
2. Get some must-have clients that run on those servers. This shows the value of the API.
3. Our leading servers shift to supporting it.
That may work; I don't know. It's my best bet right now!
I want to note that WordPress is working on the API!
@evan Yeah, I mostly agree with this. It鈥檚 just that the buy-in is a little bit of a chicken and egg problem. You need servers to adopt it, but you need a compelling first mover. Bonfire, maybe?
The spec definitely needs love, too. I think one of the harder things is building a timeline out of inbox activities. I feel like maybe a future version of the API could specify timelines somehow, whether it鈥檚 an endpoint or some kind of basic query? Maybe there鈥檚 even a way to implement alternative timelines at that level?
These are all just guesses on my part, but I feel like this could be a gateway to universal custom feeds.
@deadsuperhero so, it's a two-sided market -- clients and servers. The traditional mechanism is a "ratchet" -- build up one side, then build up the other, and then build up the first.
So, yes, servers first, then clients, then more servers, more clients, and so on back and forth.
Does the inbox have to map to a timeline, specifically? Mastodon called this out as being difficult to do because you would have to real-time parse the inbox every time you wanted to load the timeline.
Of course one could always reduce the inbox into a single timeline and serve that instead, but then we're braching out with our own proprietary APIs again.
Is that ok?
@julian @deadsuperhero We actually have a meeting tomorrow if either of you wants to come.
https://www.w3.org/events/meetings/3432cf4c-a9fe-4f72-8de5-fa6809b57767/20260219T110000/
@julian @general @evan Again, this is sort of why I鈥檓 advocating for supporting timelines as a concept in the ActivityPub API. Instead of repeatedly parsing the inbox, we could do exactly what you鈥檙e saying with some kind of representation of a timeline. Even if it鈥檚 just plain old algorithmic time-sort.
