also i should mention since this is happening kind of simultaneously, this is not about the social web foundation's use of the terms "social web" and "fediverse", although the blog post did go live in the middle of me writing the thread which is a kind of irony i guess. another irony is that even though it's not about that, it could still be kinda about that. if nothing else, it demonstrates that "social web" and "fediverse" are not synonyms.

now available in html form, uri not guaranteed to resolve forever https://trwnh.com/unstable/fedi-vs-web.html

@ anyone who asked for a blog post, this is next closest thing, i don't really have a proper blog set up and i kinda don't wanna think about it right now

@MichaelTBacon@social.coop this has the potential to be like when people kept getting farmville activities in their facebook feeds 😭

@MichaelTBacon@social.coop unfortunately the common response to "can we make things better" is "we need $200k"

@MichaelTBacon@social.coop right, i'm just wondering how to nudge implementers in the "right" direction on here (story of my life for the past 5 years lol)

@MichaelTBacon@social.coop actually my main reservations about it are like

• how much do i base it off of current practices, and how much do i base it off of correct practices?
• is it worth the effort? is any project going to be on board with it?
• no really, is it worth the effort? should i be putting that effort into doing the better thing from the start?

@MichaelTBacon@social.coop i'm rotating in my head the idea of a FEP that defines a conformance profile for a "social networking profile" that basically formalizes what you'd need to implement a "fediverse network", basically as a superset of AS2+AP (because AP is not enough on its own, it says nothing about message shapes or how to interpret specific props in a social network setting)

@MichaelTBacon@social.coop In other words, a "protocol" needs to know everything there is to know, and it is undesirable to have unknowns. Contrast with the viewpoint that it's perfectly fine to have unknowns, and in fact, you can expect unknowns by default. You'll never have a complete view of the universe.

@MichaelTBacon i think you're using closed/open in a different way from how i'm using it, which for formal logic means either "everything is true unless it's false" or "there are some things i don't know, and they aren't necessarily false, i just don't know"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-world_assumption

@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.

@blaine @by_caballero i was thinking more that you could declare a tel: as one of your "aliases" at your authoritative wf and then it percolates through the rest of the system

@by_caballero@mastodon.social yeah i'm not saying AP is "open-world" but rather it straddles the line

AS2 requiring the AS2 context is a bit weird from an LD perspective because it introduces weird "supremacy" conflicts especially with the "MUST NOT override" requirement

i've thought that perhaps jsonld context should only ever be a "progressive enhancement" to json, and that new apis or interchange formats should instead use expanded form, and processors should expand any compacted json(ld) before using it

@blaine yup, more or less. the only difference i'd make is that instead of having multiple feeds for mastodon/pixelfed/etc i'd rather it was all done via the same identity

one of the things that i wish were implemented broadly is support for streams -- arbitrary collections that you could post into and other people could follow. to my knowledge no one other than google+ has done it. and, well... we know how google+ went...

@blaine there might not be an authority for a phone number but i think it can be handled more like a combo of "local dns resolver" + "registry of phone number". sure in many cases with identifiers that have an authority component you can just use their webfinger if they have one, but i think it would also be cool to be able to use your own webfinger and "proxy out" as needed, in the same way that dns does it

@blaine@mastodon.social tumblr made it work so idk if it's "ideal" per se but they definitely had a cultural thing going for quite a while with "dot tumblr dot com" even being a meme at some point

it can't be too hard to manage tbh, the modern version of this is atproto handle services that do nothing but allocate you a subdomain for use on bluesky

@blaine@mastodon.social yeah, the ultimate goal is letting people link with each other in the spaces that they wanna link up

i think "your website" should be like your home, but also you should be able to go to other websites just as if they were "venues". so you go to the local forum to hang out. but you can still have your activity on that forum broadcasted to your followers. or alternatively you can participate in the forum from your own site, just like you can reply to a github notification email!

@blaine i'm wondering to what extent fedi would implement webfinger if mastodon didn't require it

i think if i had to really pick a format for identity then it would be a weak preference for FQDN, but having your id be a pretty-url is also okay i guess. but one other thing that i think would be cool is being able to find your contacts via webfinger if they choose to make themselves findable by other means! so you could do wf?resource=tel: or ?resource=mailto: and still get back useful info...

@polotek@social.polotek.net me personally? i'm not much of a coder, i'm way better at designing a system and describing how it should work, not so much actually building it. although i am in talks with some folks who seem interested, so uh... maybe check back in like 5 years? 😁 or heck, possibly even two if we're lucky!

@oblomov@sociale.network yeah, there's the old "it's like email but for websites!" which isn't terribly inaccurate, but that's honestly more a consequence of "HTTP POST to ldp:inbox" than anything else in AP. the side effects for each activity kinda stray from that model and go into almost RPC-like territory. there's also some potential redundancy with HTTP verbs, but that's because HTTP verbs don't notify arbitrary audiences (although i guess they could do that with a header!)

@acka47@openbiblio.social the core of the complaint is that people want to handle one key and one key only. they don't want to map terms to IRIs, or IRIs to terms. they'd prefer picking exactly one symbol and use that as the property key.