Re: Survey -- observations and ideas

Ben wrote, concerning private communication:

> Bob, I asked you some time ago privately if you wanted to work on a swicg
> note together documenting existing solutions to some of your concerns, and *you
> told me you didn’t want to make time for it.*


I did not say I'm not willing to make time. In fact, I'm quite willing to
devote a great deal of time to helping move things along. Time is not the
issue, what I'm trying to do is figure out how best to use my time. What I
said last month was:


> I'm still in the process of trying to get up to speed with where all this
> stuff has come in the many years since I was previously involved. Writing
> specs takes a great deal of time and effort. I'd like to figure out the
> full spectrum of needs, and how I can best contribute, before I start
> making time allocation commitments. As you do yourself, I suspect that at
> least some of "my current ideas are probably wrong." *I need some time to
> separate the good from the bad. *I just wish there was more discussion on
> either the SWICG list or around the FEPs so that I could better understand
> whatever are the hot issues.


Part of my effort to understand what might be done with AS/AP has been to
catch up with what is happening in other contexts. My earlier note
reflected a major difference that I found between the communities of
interest. I was not attempting to sow FUD, rather I was simply commenting
on a distinct difference that I see between the efforts.

bob wyman

On Sat, Apr 29, 2023 at 8:50 PM ben@bengo.co <ben@bengo.co> wrote:

> > it might also be observed 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.
>
> > 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, I asked you some time ago privately if you wanted to work on a swicg
> note together documenting existing solutions to some of your concerns, and
> you told me you didn’t want to make time for it.
>
> you accuse “complacency”. You might be projecting, and are definitely
> slinging FUD.
>
> I wish you well working on whatever you want, including bsky or NOSTR. I
> wish you would do it without the unfair generalizations and editorializing.
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Apr 29, 2023, at 3:42 PM, Bob Wyman <bob@wyman.us> wrote:
>
> 
> 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/
>>
>>