damn, y’all have zero chill 😬

not even half an hour after this was posted ppl will be like nah, without having as much as read the proposal in general terms

i understand your hesitancy, but this approach is super harmful and unproductive…

Like many others these kinds of initiatives trigger an urge with me to be dismissive, write a witty toot, send a meme, etc. And I’m guilty of doing so at various occasions.

But being a passionate advocate for the Fediverse to come to its full potential and thrive, I should avoid doing so. It contributes to a widespread complacency that fedi has established itself, is in a strong position, and will only continue to grow and prosper some more. This is far from where we are. The deeper I dive into all-things-fedi, the more my concerns for its future grows. There are serious threats and major challenges to overcome (I am going to add “complacency” as another challenge).

Though there are various threats for disruption, the currently popular apps - Mastodon in the lead - have least to fear. The ‘microblogging-verse’ is best established and can continue to grow significantly in numbers of fedizens participating. Entrance of new apps, application types, having new kinds of features, is where the biggest pain points are. Here fedi is evolving in a haphazard way that will destroy interoperability in the long run.

And then there are major features that are lacking (or at least not broadly adopted), like distributed / nomadic identity (Zap project have this). I see competing initiatives putting those first on the list, which is smart.

Whatever we think of narcisist billionaires, surveillance capitalist walled gardens, crypto bro-ism, vulture capital-driven startups, etcetera… They may disrupt us, so we better monitor their tech.

A person like Jack Dorsey has a humongous network, could likely easily raise millions of bucks, and formate a group of expert developers that work fulltime on creating something not all too bad, and then create a big media hype to let it gain adoption.

We are millions of fedizens. It may be critical mass to get more good apps in the air and gaining popularity. But in numbers it is nothing, what a well-marketed competitor app + ecosystem might reach in a relatively short time.

This Web5 thing here, is in large part based on open standards that have been in development for a long time. Of course with Jack in the loop there’s blockchain involved (the Ion project). But AFAICS all the DID and Verifiable Credentials stuff could also work without blockchain. I don’t have a good overview of all the identity drafts and projects out there, but these standards may not be the worst to bet on for the future.

Reminds me of Solid (wiki)

Interestingly, there have been some people interested in implementing ActivityPub in Solid servers, but I haven’t seen any demos or success stories yet.

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The two use cases suggested:

Alice holds a digital wallet that securely manages her identity, data, and authorizations for external apps and connections. Alice uses her wallet to sign in to a new decentralized social media app. Because Alice has connected to the app with her decentralized identity, she does not need to create a profile, and all the connections, relationships, and posts she creates through the app are stored with her, in her decentralized web node. Now Alice can switch apps whenever she wants, taking her social persona with her.

• Creating a profile takes what, 2 minutes? And you do it only once per app.
• Connections and relationships: Okay so you want to copy your list of followers? That’s nothing remotely new. Pleroma literally has that (also for blocks and mutes).
• If you want automatic discovery of existing followers, fine, but note that already exists on some platforms via email addresses or phone numbers. All you’d need to extend it to secure, decentralized identifiers is for those platforms to have a metadata field for users to put such an identifier. Hardly revolutionary.

Bob is a music lover and hates having his personal data locked to a single vendor. It forces him to regurgitate his playlists and songs over and over again across different music apps. Thankfully there’s a way out of this maze of vendor-locked silos: Bob can keep this data in his decentralized web node. This way Bob is able to grant any music app access to his settings and preferences, enabling him to take his personalized music experience wherever he chooses.

So you want to import playlists between music apps? That could only work if each song has a globally unique identifier for the playlists which is known to all the platforms. That isn’t the case, and changing that would require every musician to change their workflow.

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No thanks