this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2024
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Fediverse stuff
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this is the fundamental divide between #fediverse thinking and #Web thinking, where #ActivityPub straddles the line between both.
i've seen it said that the "open-world assumption" at the foundation of the Web is actually an undesirable thing for a "social networking protocol", and as a consequence, specs built on that open-world assumption are "completely unsuitable" for that "protocol".
but do we need a "social networking protocol"? do we even need "social networks" in the first place?
9/?
to build the #fediverse as its own "social networking protocol" then seemingly requires that we instead go with the closed-world assumption, contrary to the #Web
it requires ahead-of-time communication and coordination, where implementers need to be willing and available to talk to any other implementer, and this load grows with every new implementer.
it requires you to be aware of other extensions, present and future, because your extension might conflict with someone else's extension.
10/?
the way extensibility works in a closed-world #fediverse is that "every implementer talks to every other implementer". or maybe there is a central registry of extensions that everyone submits to their authority, as stewards of the "protocol" that is used to build the "network". this trades out the n:n relation between implementers and other implementers, for an n:1 relation between implementers and the central registry.
the way extensibility works in an open-world #Web is you just do it.
11/?
@trwnh@mastodon.social Hmmm. In the open web we have a thing called a browser vendor whose job is de facto to act as the choke point where they are the ones who have to be aware of every implementation. Then as devs we get to black box it as "this is what web browsers support".
@darius@friend.camp yeah, this is complicated by every fedi thing being its own web browser :( and this is on top of it also being its own mail server... it just ends up doing both poorly.