@evan@cosocial.ca
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

evan

@evan@cosocial.ca

He/him. Board member at CoSocial.ca.

Director of Open Technology at Open Earth Foundation (OEF).

Founder of Wikitravel, StatusNet, identi.ca, Fuzzy.ai. CTO of Breather, TRU LUV and MTTR.

Creator of pump.io. Co-creator of GNU social.

Co-chair of the Social Web Working Group at W3C. Co-author of ActivityStreams 2.0. Co-author of ActivityPub. Co-author of OStatus.

Grad student in CS at Georgia Tech.

This network has been my life's work. Thanks for making it.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

atomicpoet, to fediverse
@atomicpoet@mastodon.social avatar

Evan Prodromou (@evan), the co-author of , does not like Bluesky.

He believes it's a setback to the Fediverse and slowing its growth.

https://cosocial.ca/@evan/110300493306700391

@fediversenews

evan,
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

@atomicpoet @fediversenews There's a longer and more detailed thread about my position on Bluesky here:

https://prodromou.pub/@evan/110045336289311841

evan,
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

@sarajw @atomicpoet @fediversenews I agree that this is important.

I also think using your own domain for your ActivityPub identity makes this a lot easier. I'd compare changing web hosting or blog platforms.

But it's hard to use your own domain on the fediverse today. You have to run your own server. It should be easier.

Also, this is functionality that is completely unavailable on the commercial social web. You can't move your Twitter account to Instagram, or your LinkedIn to TikTok.

evan,
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

@sarajw @atomicpoet @fediversenews

Also, moving accounts is something that will happen a handful of times in your life.

I think it's important that it's available, both practically and symbolically.

But we probably shouldn't optimize the entire network for it, if it costs performance or functionality elsewhere.

evan,
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

@dumbo @sarajw @atomicpoet @fediversenews well, I think multihome hosting is pretty common in other areas, like blogging, wikis, and chat.

I don't know a lot about how masto.host works, but I think that's a great model for setting up an enduring place in the fediverse.

I also think it'd be possible for a multi-user installation to treat accounts as if they're on different domains. I'd compare how GitHub pages handles custom domains.

evan,
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

@paulschoe @sarajw @atomicpoet @fediversenews absolutely.

I meant, an architecture that made nomadic identity easy, at the cost of making everyday delivery hard or slow, would not be a good architecture. It's dragging down the frequent tasks in order to optimize a very infrequent task.

I think content addressing would be an example of this kind of architecture.

evan,
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

@Jonathanglick @coachalaiskas @atomicpoet @fediversenews that's it, yes.

It's probably not entirely fair. BS has been a real challenge for the fediverse, and it's raised some important issues.

We'll probably have a better fediverse because of it.

But it would have been more productive if they'd worked with us than against us.

evan,
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

@FeralRobots @atomicpoet @fediversenews I don't think I said I'd be happy to work on bridges.

I'm happy to help the BS team when they're ready to implement ActivityPub and join the fediverse.

tansy, to random
@tansy@wandering.shop avatar

Oh hi

Photo of carousel on beach at Brighton. Yellow and orange carousel with horses. Pebble beach behind. Sky is blue and pink. Saturated colours as used Huji app
Photo of Brighton Pier with blue sky and sea in background. Two workers in orange vests taking a break in the foreground. Saturated colours as used Huji app.

evan,
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

@tansy sounds too good to be true. What's the catch?

tchambers, to fediverse

I'm not sure one side has to win, or lose, I think the long-term play is to interop, and to bridge both networks...

But this is a great snapshot of the changes coming to and its advantages as an inherently open system that can evolve fast.

https://thecanadian.online/?p=330

evan,
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

@tchambers Interop is very possible!

There is a standard protocol, agreed upon at a neutral organization, with numerous implementations and reviews.

Using is a great way for social networks to interoperate.

evan,
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

@tchambers hey, Tim. You shouldn't waste your time making a bridge. That's the BS team's responsibility. The smaller network has to bridge to the bigger network.

evan,
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

@tchambers @mcg so you're allowed to use their "open" protocol only as long as you don't generate too much traffic?

Dude.

evan, (edited )
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

@tchambers

[EDITED] This was a hot enough answer that it caused a lot of controversy. I should not have snapped at my friend @Ronkjeffries .

I don't think the question is technical. It's a question of governance. One is a standard, the other a house protocol.

I think there are features of AT that we can adopt in this ecosystem, like nomadic identity, search, and user-defined algorithmic feeds.

None of them requires changes to ActivityPub.

evan, to random
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

A hard rain.

A view from my front balcony of our small street in the Plateau Mont-Royal. A heavy rain is falling. The camera scans from north to south, across two-story stone and brick townhouses. It pauses on the running gutters.

evan,
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

@martind for construction! And nobody showed up because of the rain.

evan, (edited ) to random
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

Should you get a notification from your server when someone unfollows you?

evan,
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

@kikobar https://evanp.me/pollfaq#qualified

evan,
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

@trebach The question is about you, though.

evan,
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

@smallsco abuse by whom? You, or the people unfollowing you?

evan, to random
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

Eggplant parmigiana for .

evan, to random
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

I've said what I needed to say. Let's go back to the fun stuff.

steve, to fediverse
@steve@social.technoetic.com avatar

So, I start a new under-development server and try to (unsuccessfully) Follow from my self-hosted Mastodon instance. Within an hour, multiple Fedi-crawlers are probing the experimental server endpoint. Are they querying my Mastodon instance for known hosts or is there another way they are finding this new experimental server so quickly?

evan,
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

@steve good luck on it!

CartyBoston, to fediverse
@CartyBoston@mastodon.roundpond.net avatar

"I mean, the ultimate in distribution is that everyone hosts their own instance"

is very, very confused.

Distributed systems are cool and powerful, they are not new.

evan,
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

@CartyBoston so, that's how personal blogs work, though. Most people are on one-person installations.

People go multi-user when they are working on a company blog, or for a publication.

ActivityPub accounts are just weird JSON-LD blogs with push notifications, a built-in comment and reaction API, and some stats.

I think software that multihomes well, like WordPress does, is the next big step for AP. It's hard to set up a new Mastodon instance.

evan, (edited ) to random
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

"The way to fix a mistake here is to edit the original post."

evan,
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

I didn't comment on this.

I'm qualified yes. I think editing small and large mistakes makes sense. But I also think you should just delete posts that have a bad tone or take.

I'm not that attached to keeping mistakes around for some kind of historical record.

evan, (edited ) to random
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

Do you let social apps read your contacts so you can find your friends?

evan,
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

This is a big bummer. I'm a qualified yes; I let security-minded apps use my contact list to find friends.

I think it would be a great way for us to help with bootstrapping new Mastodon users' social graph, especially now that the Twitter friend finders are gone.

evan,
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

@mav well, for example, it could use Gravatar to map an email address to a Mastodon account, to find people you know on the network.

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