Chebucto Regional Softball Club

@deadsuperhero @kichae i think we can have healthy sustainable growth but it cannot be as rapid as the strongest proponents want it to be. millions joining overnight is not sustainable. the current protocols are also a major detriment. social infrastructure cannot handle it. things like that

@deadsuperhero @kichae so in the same vein, the negativity is against the erosion or destruction of the future where those ends are achieved. what is desired is a paradigm shift away from “view everything from one website” and a return to that multitude of diverse communities.

i was telling julian the other day that going to other websites isn’t the problem. the problem is that you can’t interact on other websites. imagine if you could!

@deadsuperhero @kichae sure, i broadly agree re: multitudes, though i think the solution is “more explicit contexts” rather than attempting to put everyone and everything in the same space.

put another way, the desire is not “mainstreaming”, it’s the other things — sustainability, communication, and so on. everything else is a means to those ends.

@kichae this all comes to a head when you have talks at SXSW of all places.

@kichae ultimately, it's a simple matter of constituencies. is the protocol going to evolve toward networks of trust, consent, etc... or is it more about reach, publicity, audience? who gets a seat at the table -- the people, or the corporations? well, the corporations are certainly getting their seats at the table, it looks like... and suddenly, there's no room left for anyone else to sit down.

@kichae things like the anti-viral nature of mastodon, which was seen as a major reason for people to use mastodon in the first place, are being rolled back or compromised on by people who have no such qualms with virality. as a consequence, mastodon is going the way of twitter in 2012.

but people are stuck using mastodon because they cannot migrate easily or cleanly. the mastodon protocol is too fragile to allow much more than asking your followers to refollow you elsewhere. your posts gone.

@kichae i don't know how you define "open" but it seems to be missing the point. the point is that people are walking into homes as if they were public parks. i am talking at the level of *people*, not at the level of protocols or platforms. these aren't just "gripes", they're existential questions for these communities. and as those communities are eroded away, as people *leave*, something is lost. those people may reorganize and regroup elsewhere, but needs are no longer considered by devs...

@kichae so we find ourself in a situation where diversity and community are lost, buried underneath new communities that scarcely resemble what used to be.

"you do not fit in here" https://webcomicname.com/post/185588404109

that's really what this feels like sometimes -- some of us quit twitter in 2016 or 2017, way before elon musk. some of us can't ever go back. our fundamental concerns are not simply "egotistical billionaire ruins fun". it's way more than "no ads" or "chronological timeline", nice as those are

@kichae to better illustrate the noise vs signal approach, and to expand on what i said earlier: imagine that, for several years, a vibrant community has built itself in the margins of what these softwares and protocols allow. they came here to get away from the mainstream offerings. and then, almost literally overnight, they are outnumbered by people who came from those mainstream offerings. what was once vibrant is now drowned out or trampled upon, as even the software itself shifts underneath

@kichae no, it's more cultural re: what gets built and how. SXSW has a certain "vibe" that is markedly different than what most people would be going for just 3 years ago. the core of hamish's concern is that "noise vs signal" "echo chamber" approaches where the fediverse must be mainstreamed are... shall we say, not universally appreciated?

it's been said before "protocols not platforms" but the gist of what the opposition amounts to is "people not protocols".

@julian not to buy into the "grassroots vs mainstream" narrative per se, but the emphasis on mainstream adoption at this stage is imo misplaced and only serves to reinforce broken patterns of "social media" and its consequences over the past 15-20 years. asking people to make the leap right now is going to leave a lot of people disappointed. we need to offer more compelling reasons to be here, and a genuinely better experience for multimodal communications that aren't shoved into the square hole

@julian depends on the player, and depends on which people leave or get pushed out as a result.

personally i am not here for "eyeballs", i'm here for whole-ass people 🫠

@julian @johnonolan @angus @evan 301/308 aren’t cacheable/idempotent over the Accept header and are meant to permanently update old identifiers. consider 303 See Other for content negotiation purposes, or consider rel=alternate type=… Link headers otherwise.

@silverpill @julian Yes, you've said as much in those discussions, but everything you've said depends on this idea of an "actor" that isn't coherent. On one hand, you seem to be arguing that outbox+inbox is all you need to duck-type an actor, but then you don't actually do anything with this concept of an actor except saying that "it can perform activities". So an actor is the range of the `actor` property? Okay, so what? No behaviors depend on this. It is a tautological definition.

@silverpill @julian how is "the entire network built around the idea"? why do you have this idea of an actor that necessarily maps to a user?

from https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#actors we see that:

> ActivityPub does not dictate a specific relationship between "users" and Actors

so why introduce the concept of "observers" and then prevent users from knowing what they are following? Why the avoidance of calling a conversation a Conversation, and why the artificial limitation of not being able to follow one?