Mastodawn

FinchHaven sfba Feb 16

@strypey

Clicked through on that @ naturzukunft2026 link for some reason

"The spec is ActivityPub, but federation is unfortunately Mastodon."

#ActivityPub is a protocol

It requires some sort of implementation via software into some sort of distribution/app

Mastodon (for one) is only *one* distribution/app

There are others

These others may

--> or may not <--

"federate" with each other to varying degrees

They are all *different* and "varying" implementations of the ActivityPub protocol

I don't know why this is so hard to understand, but it sure seems to be...

cc @naturzukunft2026

🫧 socialcoding..Feb 16

@FinchHaven @strypey

I do not think that @naturzukunft2026 misunderstands this.

There's a difference between #ActivityPub the protocol and #fediverse the on-the-wire reality, and in the latter #Mastodon is the post-facto interoperability leader.

For there to be interoperabiity in a particular domain there needs to be agreement on data formats and msg exchanges, and the specs don't provide full coverage nor clear guidance on this. Though #ActivityStreams has a section on use cases it was designed to handle, they aren't fully specified.

Of course it is perfectly fine, and highly encouraged to model a domain in the best possible way, but you won't be "part of the fediverse" until you implement enough of the post-facto Mastodon microblogging interop quirks.

We don't have a good ecosystem-level extension approach, and the #FEP constitutes a best-effort. A bandaid that allows to present a best-practice in hopes it gets further adoption.

I'm not sure that JSON-LD offers solace though.

@FinchHaven @naturzukunft2026

Strypey Mar 2

@smallcircles
> I'm not sure that JSON-LD offers solace though

My impression is that JSON-LD is a Semantic Web implementation of JSON. As such, it enables a lot more machine-readable information to be packaged along with data.

IIRR the Semantic Web was shouldered aside by "Web 2.0" (AJAX, pseudo-REST, etc), with the idea that we'd all use platforms in place of richer semantics. We all know how that turned out ; )

@strypey @FinchHaven @naturzukunft2026

🫧 socialcoding..Mar 2

I was around at the time, and a long-time proponent for more linked data uptake in general in IT.

I don't think saying SW was shouldered aside is a fair assessment. As hype cycles come and go as these windows where a technology must prove itself, semantic web had one of the bigger cycles. It overpromised, underdelivered. And at the same time XML got overused where it shouldn't, becoming ever more complex web of standards and de-facto. XML fell in the grasp of corporations, pushing expensive Enterprise service buses, etc. There was a craving for simplicity to create sites and basic webapps. And then along came JSON, and XML quickly fell out of favor. Along with SW, which never got a good tool and library support in the ecosystem.. and that is still true today.

Other than that SW in many areas is a solution seeking for a problem. Some areas see LD uptake. But aboveall the dev community ditched the tech. And they need much convincing to come back.

@smallcircles @strypey @FinchHaven @naturzukunft2026 There are different ways to tell the story. Please consider this: the popularity of JSON stems from the promise of HTML5 that the developer would control the software at both ends of the data transmission. The web browsers taught developers to dismiss any concern for interoperability. json-ld is trying to fix that (and failing because of the external contexts, but it’s a different topic).

@smallcircles If you control both ends of the pipeline, you don’t need any validation or interoperability. XML technologies are thus not needed anymore. The price you pay as a developer is a more and more heavy dependency on a HTML5-compliant web browser. The web as a whole pays an additional cost that the developer becomes the little tyrant of their corner of the web, and the browser ecosystem is collapsing into a monopoly. We can’t build anything useful on top of that.

@gugurumbe

Yes, thank you. It is a bit of everything. Where I worked in Print production at the time we used all the XML standards to max extent and got great benefit from doing so. It all crumbled down very quickly with the take-off of Web where #JSON mapped way better to JS than #XML did, esp. when also honoring the intricate web of (de-facto) standards that had emerged, and how the XML ecosystem got captured by corporations peddling expensive products, such Enterprise service buses and the like.

It would have been great if #XHTML had stuck around. In hindsight the shift to HTML5 may be seen as a move by the WHATWG to establish their dominance over the #browser market.

As for #JSONLD it must see to rewin hearts and minds, must inspire and convince people to take the bet of adopting it.

Strypey

(1/2)

@smallcircles
> As for JSON-LD it must see to rewin hearts and minds, must inspire and convince people to take the bet of adopting

Agreed. But to do that requires explaining to people what it's for, and the potential benefits over vanilla JSON that make it worth the extra dev effort.

Reviving the Semantic Web vision - the *vision* not previous (failed) implementations - seem to me to be the most obvious way to do that.

But as always, I'm open to other suggestions : )

@gugurumbe

Strypey Mar 4

(2/2)

One obvious selling point of the Semantic Web vision, in the age of #MOLE Training hype, is to point out that it's about enabling dumb software to do smarter things with data. By enabling humans to add more machine-readable metadata. Rather than trying to make software smarter, so it can make good guesses about data without such context.

Most of the snake oil people on the "AI" hype train sell as unique benefits of leasing a Trained MOLE can be done with Semantic Web tools.

#SemanticWeb

@strypey

I am not familiar with the term MOLE but AI is highly problematic and disruptive indeed. Ironically enough I've seen interest in LD coming from the LLM field, to help AI output be more predictable and 'smart' based on the semantics of the linked data it is trained with.

Michael Graaf Mar 5

@strypey Exactly! All the "agentic" stuff was possible years ago with browser add-ons, given sufficient metadata.

@strypey @gugurumbe

So what is the Semantic web actually, is the real question to ask. And what is semantic social networking if we apply it to that field. What does it bring in terms of value and benefits, new opportunities that didn't exist before. To LD proponents these may be very clear and obvious, but to many others hearing it is saying nothing to them. And also, when they are enticed to take a deeper look they find an every increasing amount of inter-related standards and skills to master around them. Aggregate linked data in data store, now what? How do I query it? Oh, XQuery you say, but I already do everything in SQL.

@smallcircles @strypey you can convert a SQL database into a quad store easily: just have a big table with 4 indexed string columns (subject, predicate, object, graph), and boom, you have a quad store.

@smallcircles @strypey The main benefit I see is, you can introduce new applications on an existing social graph, without anyone else having to care about your thing. For instance, you publish your software contributions on your microblogging platform, and your followers that have a code review application can review them. Publish your papers on a different application, and your followers can review them. You don’t need a separate graph for code and papers reviewers.

@smallcircles @strypey your social media platform does not need to understand what code, or a paper, is. The conference management system does not need to understand what the software forge is doing. If you are dissatisfied, you make your own application that speaks both vocabularies and it works with your followers’ existing applications. This is the level of interoperability we could have, but every developer must accept that a document might mean more than what they understand.

@smallcircles @strypey the “json-ld is just json with extra bits you don’t need to care about” discussion is unfortunately false, because you need to understand the external contexts. But it gives you the larger idea: when you process data, the bits you don’t understand can’t change the way you process the bits you do understand, so it’s safe to carry unknown extensions of the data.

https://patterns.dataincubator.org/

@gugurumbe @strypey

Thank you, appreciate the elaboration. I think we all see a path here, and imagine ways how it might work at scale. But such descriptions are far from sufficient to convince the average web dev - where a large audience of would-be cool social network apps & services developers are - since packed in this text is that they need to adopt a whole 'new way of doing things', there's a paradigm shift involve. They need to go deep in linked data before any of the power becomes theirs to wield. There exists a big barrier to entry to get there. AS/AP says "we are extremely extensible because we are linked data", handwaving the practice to to LD field. And linked data says "we are extremely extensible if you embrace all our practices and apply us at scale".

If a web dev decides to check out LD design patterns, they find a new alien world:

Not offering the guidance and support to make the paradigm shift, ailed the semantic web. It ails AS/AP today.

Linked Data Patterns

This book lives at http://patterns.dataincubator.org. Check that website for the latest version. The book is also available as both a PDF and EPUB download. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/uk/. Thanks to members of the Linked Data mailing list for their feedback and input, and Sean Hannan for contributing some CSS to style the online book.

@smallcircles @strypey activitypub is a bit more difficult to get into, but see for instance the indieweb. Ok it’s not proper linked data, although swapping the microformats for rdfa would not surprise anyone. But see the way programs assemble replies fetched across the web to create a discussion. This is what I am talking about: instead of a simple discussion, make it a code review.

@gugurumbe
@strypey

It is not as much the tech holding things back, or just only in part given its maturity level, but the entire adoption path to convince solution developers to join the ecosystem is missing.

A lot of all this fedi is still in pioneer stage, not even early adopter material, not making much progress, and we are asking people to "cross the chasm".

Current fedi evolves by means of post facto interop, whomever comes first owns the design, and we accept the protocol decay and tech debt that causes. But it is never refactored properly and incorporated as standards & practices. There's no one to do that except a handful of volunteers, and with the FEP only a bandaid tool, but not nearly enough.

We need a good Grassroots standardization process, creating Grassroots open standards, and a community who helps guide the much broader audience of solution developers towards a plateau of productivity, and in ways that are long term sustainable and lead to desired outcomes.

@smallcircles @strypey getting everyone to talk to everyone and produce a definitive global model of how people interact with each other is a really hard task.