This is a useful and important critique of the #standards process, as applied to #ActivityPub and its precursors. A bit overly bleak, and a bit one-off, as if there are no similar stories like this within established standards. Personally, I take it as a beacon of light that there are successes that •don't• require intervention from large corporate sponsors or celebrity consortium figureheads.
For professional standards moderators like me, this is good discussion and feedback. Expect more.
I'm going to read the whole paper, and think a bit more, before commenting further. HT @rwg@evan
I totally agree that making the standard in the absence of corporate oversight was beneficial.
The problem was a lack of consensus on how to proceed, but because the group just decided to make a lot of standards, they ended up doing some great work.
@rwg another organization I reached out to was Twitter. Their social API was extremely popular at the time, and many Open Source apps like GNU Social had cloned it in order to entice Twitter developers.
@rwg Oh, and most disappointing was schema.org. It's a data standard that covers lots of different areas, including people and organizations, and remains popular to this day. But there were IP disagreements between the W3C and Google over schema.org at the time, and we couldn't use it for our work at the WG.
But Erin, for example, had been a client developer on pump.io and had created AP based on that experience.
Christine and Jessica were working on Media Goblin; this was their first time at the rodeo. They needed a federation protocol. I don't think either of them had done any API or protocol work before at all.
They did great work, but it was a lot to ask of them.
@rwg@torgo having more people from the OpenSocial world involved would have been nice, too. But by this point a lot of the implementers had closed up shop and moved on.
Thank you for this great article. The way that ActivityPub evolved is indeed rather unique and led to emergence of a #grassroots ecosystem.
After standardization it wasn't just Mastodon that introduced #ProtocolDecay. Everyone treading new areas did! Something important is still lacking: Robust way to extend #ActivityPub interoperably.
Providing proper guidance here (and in a 3-stage #StandardsProcess) imho is crucial for #Fediverse future. See:
@rwg really fascinating work! The creation of 7 standards is wonderfully different from the classic xkcd “one ultimate standard” failure mode. The erasure of 1/2 of activitypub reminds me of the lost vision of hypertext and the Semantic Web.
@joelchan86 @rwg
Im curious what the other standards were?! And also I have wondered what it would take to retrofit the AP client -server API into masto, since it already has scoped API endpoints under /v1 and /v2, could there be a parallel /ap set of endpoints???
@jonny@joelchan86 They made Webmention, Websub, Linkded Data Notification, Micropub, Activity Stream 2.0 and Activity Vocabulary (these last two are important for ActivityPub).
@rwg @joelchan86
Oh dang I didnt know linked data notifications also came out of this group. I have also wanted to do a "where are they now" for webmention and websub since they seem interesting but I havent seen em used
@joelchan86 As for Semantic Web, a big faction of the SocialWG were very invested in that — the Solid folks. Their influence does appear on ActivityPub in the form of JSON-LD instead of regular JSON.
How to deal with #LinkedData for defining good #ActivityPub extensions is something that the dev community struggles with for years and led to endless discussions. Meanwhile in practice most impls follow the "just-JSON" path and throw in some @context just for good measure.
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