W3C Social WG and federation consensus/collaboration

Hello all,

I'm glad to see that things are moving forward smoothly on several
fronts: ActivityStreams 2.0 is really shaping up, it looks like things
are moving forward quickly, and so on.

There is something I'm actively worried about: I know it's a major goal
of this group to produce a standard around federation that can help
unify the federated web (this is why Jessica and I are excited to
participate!).  Unfortunately, while we have several federation
standards already and real, active implementations of these, the other
federation groups do not seem to be participating.

Who do we have who is actually going to be working on the protocol
layers from:

 - GNU Social (OStatus)
 - diaspora (large and active!  Using something akin to OStatus)
 - tent.io (tent protocol has its own ideas https://tent.io/docs )
 - friendica (has some very similar ideas in Zot:
    https://github.com/friendica/red/wiki/Zot---A-High-Level-Overview )

I think the technical direction that this group is taking around
standardizing something around ActivityStreams is 100% great.  I'm on
board!  Though I do worry that we haven't done enough to bring in people
from other groups.  I think if we don't get implementers from these
other communities, there's a large risk that either fracturing will
continue, or get worse.

There seems to be significant evidence that it might get worse:

  https://pump.saz.im/sazius/note/9jm1rQ9ER5iyihrOjeK_pA
  my reply: https://identi.ca/cwebber/comment/NCXJWo-rTHmVJf8WvjB2aQ
  sazius's blogpost: http://sjoberg.fi/blog/join-the-federation.html
  resulting conversation: https://pump.saz.im/sazius/comment/OLFrnX0LRqKD9tvw3BfHMQ

Neither pump.io nor the Social WG appears on the GNU Social slides:

  https://identi.ca/deadsuperhero/note/rUirnwffRLm5Kpb5buod2Q

(Though strangely MediaGoblin does, and we aren't finished with our
implementation of either... though maybe you could consider that a proxy
inclusion of pump/socialwg.)

Which is all to say: I'd like to get developers from these other groups
involved.  Maybe something to discuss on the call today, if it's not too
late to add to the agenda?

Received on Tuesday, 4 November 2014 17:35:14 UTC