@woozle the article was described as "fairly long thinkpiece" by @Profpatsch which with 53 min. read time is an understatement of "fairly long" where it comes to typical online content.
Thank you for taking the time and ponder things! I think that is the most important. We are all so pragmatic and want to have quick results. And our society is asking to be hurried. Everything is urgent. All is in peril. But giving in to that urge is a trap, that makes us weaker as mankind to face our wickedest problems.
Besides "Hammock driven development" mentioned in the article, #Emergence is key. And emergence is WEIRD and fascinating. I just tooted about it in..
@woozle the article was described as "fairly long thinkpiece" by @Profpatsch which with 53 min. read time is an understatement of "fairly long" where it comes to typical online content.
Thank you for taking the time and ponder things! I think that is the most important. We are all so pragmatic and want to have quick results. And our society is asking to be hurried. Everything is urgent. All is in peril. But giving in to that urge is a trap, that makes us weaker as mankind to face our wickedest problems.
Besides "Hammock driven development" mentioned in the article, #Emergence is key. And emergence is WEIRD and fascinating. I just tooted about it in..
I used #SolidProject just to contrast a totally opposite approach to how fedi evolves: Fully formal #OpenStandards driven, but with risk to evolve into a 'standards maze' without ecosystem support.
#Mastodon Foundation is a new development. Hopefully they care beyond the app.
Can you influence and steer emergence and evolution? Some people like me, with Social experience design think so. Another person is Richard D. Bartlett known from #Loomio who also is behind #Microsolidarity, which I was reminded of the other day. Have a look for yourself..
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
I just noticed that #SolidProject website after many years still does not clearly communicate what Solid is, other than "something something advancing the web".
Luckily inventor of web and key driver of the technology effort, TBL, is quoted saying it has something to do with control of own data. Somewhere we lost "that human-first approach" that was so prevalent in the early days. And now we must go back to the roots again.
TBL even staked the whole company Inrupt he co-founded on it. Inrupt offers a *checks notes* ..
> #ChatGPT knows a little about a lot of your customers' lives. The AI you build will know everything that really matters to your customer relationships.
Ah, I see now. We must go back to our roots. Well before the #DystopicWeb. Nom nom nom 🥕🥕 what a clear vision.
@smallcircles @FinchHaven Hi, author of some things here. I can assure you that that is more of that big bad "semantic web" stuff baked into #ActivityPub than there is to #SolidProject but people spin things as they want to for a narrative. That said, totally agree with you that do x and y will come is not enough. Folks conflate various variables or attempt to boil things down to a single perspective. The reality is far more strange and unpredictable.
@FinchHaven For the sake of further clarity I should point to your starting post and this text:
> we need domain-specific applications that leverage ActivityPub’s full semantic potential
And remark that in my opinion and by observation, tapping the sign "Reminder: #ActivityPub is #JSONLD, folks!" isn't enough. Much more is needed than pointing to the #OpenStandards to win back developers minds to adopt #LinkedData. There is a high reluctance and resistance to adoption that must be overcome.
Referring again to that adoption chart I drafted the other day - which is about #SolidProject, but this is where LD is strong(est?) today - "build open standards, and they will come" isn't going so well. I hope that changes, as I have always been a fan of the *notion* of the semantic web. Yet in role of a technology decision maker, not ready to bet on it for a social networking environment.
Thank you. Yes, indeed. As it happens I was just in chat with Sébastien yesterday. They'll give a presentation at the #Solid Practitioners Meetings on the 5th of March.
#ActivityPods is positioned to bring "app development" to the intersection of the #ActivityPub and #SolidProject ecosystems, and that is very valuable. And also an #OpenStandards focused initiative.
I have revamped the #fediverse delightful lists to de-emphasize app domains and apps that have already established themselves, to highlight the innovative projects that can bring fedi to higher levels. @activitypods is on the developer list..
#ActivityPods is positioned to bring "app development" to the intersection of the #ActivityPub and #SolidProject ecosystems, and that is very valuable. And also an #OpenStandards focused initiative.
I have revamped the #fediverse delightful lists to de-emphasize app domains and apps that have already established themselves, to highlight the innovative projects that can bring fedi to higher levels. @activitypods is on the developer list.. delightful.coding.social/delig…
They are well positioned to offer the 'Solution developer' stakeholders an attractive set of tools. And the opportunity is to marriage the best of 2 worlds. Which is at the same time the big challenge, coping with the worst of 2 worlds. The other day I tooted about this here: social.coop/@smallcircles/1161…
I recreated an old diagram in Excalidraw that I spread about a couple years ago, and made it a bit more informative. Explanation can be found in the #AltText
Alt-text Diagram. Interoperability in practice. A chart with a horizontal axis that goes in 2 directions. On the left it moves towards chaotic grassroots growth, and on the right side towards open standards adoption.
Semantic web always was "if only all information on the web were semantic and machine-readable, then...". And there it stopped. Presumably magic would happen.
And perhaps it would. But to make such a big leap, a paradigm shift of the entire web, along the way you have inspire a whole lot of people to set the (r)evolution in motion and keep it going.
Semantic web always was "if only all information on the web were semantic and machine-readable, then...". And there it stopped. Presumably magic would happen.
And perhaps it would. But to make such a big leap, a paradigm shift of the entire web, along the way you have inspire a whole lot of people to set the (r)evolution in motion and keep it going.
If you look at what linked data is, it is a very low-level format. Nice if you have it, but now what are you going to build with it? There are some good application areas, but the case for linked data elsewhere is not a given.
Still today there are regular discussions on 'what would be the killer app for Solid' or linked data in general. Saw some interest for LLM's fed semantic data to make them more deterministic. I'm not interested.
I recreated an old diagram in Excalidraw that I spread about a couple years ago, and made it a bit more informative. Explanation can be found in the #AltText
Alt-text Diagram. Interoperability in practice. A chart with a horizontal axis that goes in 2 directions. On the left it moves towards chaotic grassroots growth, and on the right side towards open standards adoption.
@stuartyeates I think a critical mass of apps for a smaller number of users would also be ok - data sovereignty advantages can be obtained without network effects. There's still enough dev activity that the jury is out on whether this will be achieved. #SolidProject
In the past I've been very active on the Solid forum, and tried to get a collab going with #SocialHub community. A number of points that existed then, are still issues today I think.
Like, though anyone could participate in the standards process via chat, the Solid team and Inrupt were not really interested in their community, hardly giving attention while people were building interesting stuff there.
Also at the time basically all available code was Javascript, making Solid uninteresting or hard to access for other language devs.
But I think biggest issue was that Solid didn't know what it was. It was positioned as 'personal data vault' on the landing page then (but not using this term), but was 'secretly' TBL's desire to reboot the #SemanticWeb. The new web would be all 'Solid apps'. But the adoption strategy for that didn't exist.
@david_megginson Though with regards to progress, there's a difference in both approaches.
At the #SolidProject side you have inertia by the slow standardization process. But should they figure things out in a good way, eventually the ecosystem catches up and the inertia can quickly decrease.
While at #ActivityPub side, since AS/AP remains stagnant, the ever increasing protocol decay and tech debt non-linearly increases inertia and progress. And on top of that, you are never done once you implemented the 'ad-hoc specs' of the installed base, and you have to account for continuous whack-a-mole development and maintenance burdens to fix #interoperability breakages.
The AS/AP based fediverse devolves into effectively no interoperability, and a situation that is more comporative to NPM dependency hell.
@david_megginson Yes, I agree. Though the diagram is too simple to capture it well, it is important to identify the forces that are at play, and the mechanics that drive them, and to subsequently monitor where you are and where you want to be in the future. So timely action can be taken to make corrective actions.
For the #SolidProject ecosystem for instance they might have identified a minimum set of standards to adopt, with which reasonably powerful "MVP's of the Semantic web" could be approximated with. And focus on strong library and tool support for that in multiple programming environments. Instead you enter a jungle of open stardards in various stages of completion, and good luck go figure it out. Also they might've focused on actual movement building. Far-reaching innovative standards - a new paradigm for the web - aren't adopted by the boardroom of a company, but are introduced by devs who get excited by what see and how they are empowered. And persuade management.
I recreated an old diagram in Excalidraw that I spread about a couple years ago, and made it a bit more informative. Explanation can be found in the #AltText
Alt-text Diagram. Interoperability in practice. A chart with a horizontal axis that goes in 2 directions. On the left it moves towards chaotic grassroots growth, and on the right side towards open standards adoption.
It needs concerted effort, as argued in my blog post, to set all of this up. Things can start small and pragmatic, and then gradually evolve and mature, but we should take care it evolves in the proper direction.
There are trade-offs to consider every step of the way. If there'd more capabilities to introspect the functionality that an #ActivityPub actor offers, it would diminish the need for an upfront design-by-consensus process, but it would increase the complexity of the specifications.
Here you see the fediverse devolve into non-interoperable app-by-app whack-a-mole development, keeping track of all the moving-target #FOSS projects one took a dependency on. Versus the #SolidProject that tries to hammer out full-blown specs upfront, which became a huge package to deal with, with high complexity to implement.
This topic is a starting point to consider best-practices for the design and evolution of open standards by the commons and tailored to the grassroots environment’s social dynamics.
The first is more note/tutorial/primer like, because a large part of the content is just redescribing ActivityPub for a Solid audience.
The second assumes prior knowledge of ActivityPub and primarily describes what is needed to integrate ActivityPub with Solid, based on three architectures:
- Server support - External processing - External endpoints
I believe the wording in the specification will be different if the objective is to help a Pod provider implement ActivityPub, or if it is to help develop an ActivityPub agent. At the moment, we do...
The web we know is efficient—but fragile. Power and innovation have drifted away from users and into platforms. A new generation of open architectures—ActivityPub, Solid, and beyond—offers a way to take control back.
The web we know is efficient—but fragile. Power and innovation have drifted away from users and into platforms. A new generation of open architectures…
On the train to FOSDEM I quickly but finally bashed out a long-planned post on the Solid app I wrote that allows you to post to the Fediverse from your Solid Pod.
Main takeway: cool experiment, but @activitypods have the more feasible approach for now.
Happy New Year! Next month, I'll be speaking in the #geospatial devroom at #FOSDEM on February 1st at 11:00 about how to make indoor positioning systems and environments more discoverable and accessible, using local/global discovery methods, linked data, and our SemBeacon specification. fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event…
one of the goals of #SolidProject is to make one protocol by which all linked data can talk to each other, so you could say "so i the mastodon person here am the same person as this author on this citation graph website" and a smart client could male good use of the combined data from all the linked sources
