Re: Reconciling theory and in practice -- do the specs need updating?

Agreed. An attempt to heavily homogenize would be doing the flexibility of the Fediverse a disservice. I can see a case for project leaders to use some sort of more shared schema for things they'd like to support across instances to help better improve support (like if Funkwhale had some normalization around how audio could be shared, PixelFed for photos and videos, Mastodon for short text and maybe Plume for long form), then we'd be an space where projects (ideally also nudged by the community) would be able to shape a set of schemas on top of AS that'd align more to practical use versus a compulsion to homogenize.

Don't wanna have another Google Talk situation.

On Thu, 2023-03-02 at 16:48 -0600, Abdullah Tarawneh wrote:
> There's nothing that needs to be changed about the specs, and Mastodon only matters if you care to interoperate with Mastodon -- same as with any other software. So I guess that leaves the "implementer's guide" option. Currently this is something you will have to obtain from each project's documentation or from things like federation.md.
> 
> More to the point: there is no one "fediverse", and any interoperability requires not only shared context, but also shared abstractions, design decisions, policies, and so on. Consider why Mastodon uses Webfinger at all. Mastodon requires "users", "accounts", "profiles" to have a "username", and for that username to be unique on a given domain, because Mastodon uses this username-domain pair as not only a unique identifier in their internal app logic, but also as part of the human experience in finding and addressing people. Do you share these abstractions of "user", "account", "profile", and "username"? Do you share the design decision of addressing users by their username? Do you share the policy of requiring this even though ActivityPub has its own `id` system based on HTTPS URIs and the World Wide Web? You might not agree with some or all of these!
> 
> Federation is therefore a "best-effort", "open-world" system, where everyone is free to do whatever they need to do for their own purposes, and any "interoperability" must necessarily be semantic.

Received on Thursday, 2 March 2023 23:32:07 UTC