Re: Survey -- observations and ideas

Johannes,
While the survey indicates that "On balance, people here believe there are
things to be done," it is clear that the interest in innovations and
exploring new opportunities is dramatically less strong in the
ActivityPub/Mastodon community than it is in other communities. For
instance, I've been monitoring the BlueSky and Nostr communities, as well
as some others, and it is quite apparent that those other communities are
much more aggressively and passionately pursuing new ideas for addressing
real end-user problems and needs than is the ActivityPub community. Some
might argue that this is simply because, as an older protocol, ActivityPub
has already solved many of the challenges only now being addressed by
others. However, it might also be observed that ActivityPub,
particularly in partial adoption by Mastodon and its forks, has already
accumulated such a high degree of implementation debt that ActivityPub's
most influential supporters are, of necessity, now extremely conservative.
Essentially, that there is complacency in one community, but not in the
others.

As I, and others, have pointed out, even the "millions" of people who use
ActivityPub today are a mere drop in the bucket compared to the billions
who regularly use closed, proprietary systems. Given that, I don't consider
the user counts of existing ActivityPub systems to indicate that they have
sufficient momentum to even eventually displace those proprietary systems.
Given that the non-proprietary, open systems still serve such a tiny number
of users, it seems to me that none of them can claim any particular
long-term advantage over the others. Mastodon may have gained millions of
users since November, but we're just as likely to see BlueSky or Nostr add
"millions" of users over the next year and close the gap, or grow beyond
the number now using ActivityPub. In such a dynamic and unsettled
environment, I find it hard to understand how one could prioritize
"non-breaking changes" over changes which make a system more or better able
to serve its users' needs.. Personally, I would phrase the requirement more
like "break nothing without good cause..."  Certainly, we should not be
casual about encouraging breaking changes, but If good cause exists, then
breakage is inevitable -- either by changes to the protocol or through
displacement by other systems. (Irrelevance and obsolescence are the
ultimate "breakage.")

I am beginning to believe that the real challenge for this particular
SocialWeb community isn't so much a technical one of addressing issues with
or limitations of the current specs, but rather one of figuring out how to
engender an increased sense of the value of addressing issues and
encouraging innovation. I've seen a great many protocols and systems come
and go during the ~50 years that I've been involved in software
development. Although not always the case, I can assure you that the
general pattern is that once a community believes that its specification
task is "done," one can be sure that it will, in time, become an irrelevant
legacy.

bob wyman

On Sat, Apr 29, 2023 at 4:10 PM Johannes Ernst <johannes.ernst@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Some observations from the survey results:
>
> * On balance, people here believe there are things to be done. (I wasn’t
> so sure before this survey!)
> * On balance, people here want to do things.
> * Different people want to do different things — no surprise here.
> * Not too many people are willing and in the position to do “significant”
> work. But many are willing and able to do some work.
> * Some dependencies were identified — e.g. “search” would benefit from
> “terms for content"
> * Some of the potential work areas are controversial — as evidenced by
> votes both for doing it and not doing it at all. But many are not
> controversial.
> * (I also think that some votes and comments are based on
> misunderstandings, but that’s okay)
>
> So I think in the short term, we should pick one or two work areas from
> the list, where
>
> * several people said they could and want to spend some, or a significant
> amount of work on
> * nobody, or few people, objected to the work
> * the work was rated as important/urgent by enough people.
>
> Clearly, non-breaking fixes and clarifications should be done — perhaps
> this can be done with the existing errata process, and Evan is already on
> it.
>
> For new work, to me,
> “improved security and privacy”
> stands out as non-controversial, enough people feel urgency and there are
> some resources. Of course, we would have to determine what exactly
> “improved security and privacy” should actually mean here :-)
>
> Also, lots of people want to find out why not more developers have
> implemented the client-to-server spec.
>
> Perhaps we could create some informal working groups where the people
> participate who want to work on a particular subject? (And also make sure
> that they don’t work in a vacuum and have participation from people who
> would actually implement this.)
>
> Your thoughts?
>
> Cheers,
>
>
>
>
> Johannes.
>
>
>
> Johannes Ernst
> Blog: https://reb00ted.org/
> FediForum: https://fediforum.org/
> Dazzle: https://dazzle.town/
>
>