Re: Towards a Unified Open Social Web Spec

On Tue, Aug 27, 2024 at 2:01 PM, Melvin Carvalho < melvincarvalho@gmail.com > wrote:

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> Yet, we lack a unified data model to bridge these efforts seamlessly. Some
> promising bridges exist—Alex Gleason’s “Ditto” between Nostr and
> ActivityPub, and Bridgy unifying across systems, even touching Bluesky.
> But there's no consistent, extensible, and interoperable spec that allows
> everything to just work together.
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Are you referring to a data, product, or interface problem? And likewise, what kinds of solutions do you imagine are acceptable?

Rather than (re-)defining protocols, it seems like to make progress you need something like Can I Use? ( https://caniuse.com/ ) but for the social web. But that would require an agreed-upon superset ( https://caniuse.com/ciu/index ) of features and functionality that each implementor could be evaluated against, and that kind of work leads to the test suite work ( https://feditest.org/blog/2024-02-06-what-is-a-test-suite-for-the-fediverse/ ) that Johannes has been engaged in, which currently only focused on the fediverse.

I appreciate other comments that point to ActivityStreams as a go-between/fallback protocol that allows for experimentation and iteration within a federation of nodes that support their own internal transport and functional APIs.

To arrive at the final boss of a universal social web protocol would presume some finality to the iteration and experimentation cycle of the social web (that is, that we have the all the primitives we need to compose novel social interactions and experiences into the future) and I'm not sure we do. ActivityPub, if pushed harder as a format for interop and bridging, could approximate a similar outcome to the one you seek with a fraction of the rancor and cat-hearding.

For the sake of discussion, you've identified the " full benefits of standardization" as:

* backward compatibility

* unihibited development

* an outlet to unlock new waves of creativity

But it seems (at least to me) that the social web is more competitive now than it has been in at least a decade, and that there is more social functionality built into the apps we use everyday than ever before.

I agree that we lack interoperability between heterogeneous systems, but we should make the case for the benefits of that interop that appeal to the massive and diverse range of stakeholders that now exist (including advertisers and business models and trust and safety groups) if there's to be much progress on that front.

With Meta/Threads pushing forward their ActivityPub efforts, it seems to me that that represents an 800-lb gorilla finally getting on board with social web standards in a way we've never seen before; it would be foolish to miss that opportunity to drive standardization of an existing open web standard for something that is merely "cleaner" and "unified". Let not perfection become a precondition for further sewing up and connecting the disparate parts of the social web!

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> Would love to hear your thoughts on this. (yes, I know xkcd!).
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After reading your email, my first thought was xkcd, so honestly I think you already have your answer. 😉