Re: Statement

I read the minutes of the meeting yesterday, and they're very vague around
the discussion of the statement—no substantial arguments either for or
against the statement were minuted. Would someone be able to summarize the
discussion that took place, and specifically which discussions this
statement is responding to?

I think the biggest point of confusion to me is the vagueness of this
statement. If it's responding to published articles from well known public
figures, then we should be comfortable responding to them publicly by name,
and pointing out where we think they fall short of civility. If there
aren't, then I don't think the group should be dignifying what seems to
effectively amounts to social media gossip with such a formal response as
this one.

I also have more ideological concerns with the vagueness of the statement.
Since it takes such a "all approaches are valid" stance on
decentralization, it might be taken as precluding important technical and
social discussion about the relative merits of the protocols and their
practical implementations—for example, the centralization of Bluesky's PLC
identifier system and how the design of account recovery and Bluesky's key
custody makes it easy for governments and non-state actors like credit card
companies to remove users' access to the AT Protocol network through the
single point of legal control. These are important technical discussions
that this group should be able to have when considering technologies for
standardization, and without more specificity and clarity in our statement
I'm worried that it might have a chilling effect on such discussions.

On Sat, Sep 6, 2025, 9:58 AM Eugen Rochko <eugen@zeonfederated.com> wrote:

> Hi Emelia, Evan,
>
> I've been approached with a draft of this statement last night and asked
> for a signature and I've expressed quite the same opinion -- there isn't
> enough time to review this. It's the weekend, nobody is around. I'm also
> not sure why this statement from the Social CG is necessary. People argue
> about IRC vs XMPP, Vim vs Emacs, all the time.
>
> Kind regards,
> Eugen Rochko
>
> On Sat, 6 Sep 2025, at 18:31, emelia wrote:
>
> The statement is co-signed by the following people involved in the
> specification of ActivityPub and ActivityStreams:
>
> - Dmitri Zagidulin (Social CG co-chair) — @dmitri@social.coop
> <https://social.coop/@dmitri>
> - Tantek Çelik (Former Social Web Working Group co-chair) — @tantek.com
> <https://tantek.com/>
> - James (Former SocialCG co-chair) — jamesg.blog (@jamesg.blog@jamesg.blog
> <https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://jamesg.blog/>)
> - Chris Messina (Citizen Agency, creator of ActivityStreams) —
> @chrismessina.me <https://chrismessina.me/>
> - Christine Lemmer-Webber (Executive Director of Spritely, ActivityPub
> co-author/co-editor) — @cwebber <https://social.coop/@cwebber> /
> https://dustycloud..org <https://dustycloud.org/>
> - Darius Kazemi (Social Web CG member) — @darius@friend.camp
> <https://friend.camp/@darius>
>
> (full list here:
> https://github.com/swicg/general/blob/master/statements/2025-09-05-activitypub-and-atproto-discourse.md#co-signed-by-the-following-community-members
>  )
>
> All the statement says is that we can be respectful towards one another,
> stop spreading misinformation about each
> other, and instead work together and learn from one another. That _is_ a
> good thing for the AcitvityPub and the
> entire open social web, in mine, and from what I can tell, their opinions.
>
> You are free to dissent though. So far you're the only voice within the
> people who work on the specifications that I have heard dissenting, though.
>
> Yours,
> Emelia
>
> On 6 Sep 2025, at 18:22, Evan Prodromou <evan@prodromou.name> wrote:
>
> There's a statement published on the SWICG GitHub repo that had neither a
> proposal nor a CFC period.
>
> I strongly disagree with it. Can we take it down until consensus is
> reached?
>
> Evan
>
>
>