Re: Why not AS2? was Re: Getting the group back on track

On 19 October 2015 at 17:27, Christopher Allan Webber <
cwebber@dustycloud.org> wrote:

> Christopher Allan Webber writes:
>
> > Sarven Capadisli writes:
> >
> >> The design of the Social API doesn't need to rely on any particular
> >> vocabulary. People will use whatever vocabulary they deem to be
> >> appropriate to describe their own "social" data. The Social API will
> >> merely enable the data to be passed. The challenge for the Social API is
> >> to lay down some form of a common denominator of the social API-like
> >> things that's needed. IMHO, the API shouldn't be restricted to the
> >> current candidates (with varying degree of quality and coverage):
> >> ActivityPump, MicroPub, SoLiD. Certainly there are other decentralized
> >> approaches out there which should be studied?
> >
> > So I'm of a different opinion.  There's a hodgepodge of federation
> > standards out there.  They exist outside of the group already, and we
> > have multiple within the group, and that's fine, but one of the reasons
> > I joined this group is that despite trying to create a decentralized
> > network, *almost none of these sites can work together*.
> >
> > My goal is to work on a standard so that we can get past this fragmented
> > state of federation.  I think the exploration work is fine and
> > interesting, but is that really defining a standard?  And it's not going
> > to help address the issue above.
>
> To put it another way, we have OStatus, Micropub, Solid, and
> ActivityStreams out there.  None of these sites can work together.  So
> we have a "fractured federation" at the moment.
>

Im unsure this is 100% correct.

Solid and activity streams are close to being able to work together as
evidenced by:

https://github.com/solid/solid-spec#brief-example-of-solid-in-action

There's a few details to iron out, but convergence is at this point close.
The main overriding issue is that Solid is a new spec, and a small team, so
the complexity of the work involved may affect how it it prioritized.

Contingents from the micropub community (known) and Ostatus community
(diaspora) have indicated they would be open to also giving this a try.

So I would say that yes, having a less fractured social web is a goal.


>
> Here is the key question: is this group aiming to solve this problem?
>
> If the answer is yes, *by what mechanism?*
>
> And if the answer is yes, and there is no desire to even agree upon a
> serialization format, please do spell out how this can happen!  "Create
> a new standard" won't solve the problem, because people are already
> entrenched in their existing solutions, to the point where the group
> can't even achieve consensus on adopting its own standard as a
> serialization format.
>
> If the answer is no, then that's okay, but it means I will need to
> re-evaluate my time.
>
>