#Tag · BT Free Social

I think we underrated the power of the actor model and the extent we can incorporate it on the #ActivityPub fediverse. Somehow we got eternally stuck in talking about HTTP plumbing and core protocol capabilities that we never fleshed out thoroughly in order to be able to just focus on the higher-level concerns of app and service modeling.

Actor systems based on loosely-coupled event-driven architecture, delegation, supervision, supervision strategies, inbox strategies, let-it-fail, actors fronting domain aggregates, service-orientation, etc.

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@smallcircles@social.coop · 5 days ago

@thisismissem @eyeinthesky

The biggest folly imho is this idea of "let's cram every domain into #ActivityStreams somehow". Flatten everything and project it onto this small set of social primitives that AS defines.

It is once more a choice of pragmatism: "Hey, I've seen it working with Mastodon, so I copied that. And #LinkedData extension mechanism is a handwaved horror show".

So understandable perhaps that we did it. But now we must overcome this trend which has taken stubborn root and drags the ecosystem down.

Emelia 👸🏻 boosted

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@smallcircles@social.coop · 5 days ago

@deadsuperhero

It does not need to be that way. I am quite happy after all (after being initially frustrated) by how #ATProto has disrupted things, and opened the eyes of devs in the #ActivityPub ecosystem that we must act or lose out (stay niche, which may be fine too) to the Atmoshpere and how it enables devs to focus on service and product delivery instead of low-level wire plumbing and continuous breakages.

ATProto also shows the way that we can now follow on the #fediverse to catch up again: cocreate a similar robust basis for people to build on. #Bluesky had the advantage of a greenfield start and dedicated team unburdened by past decisions. And they build this whole Lexicon system and ways to introspect functionality.

We can do that too, solve the #LinkedData conundrum, and create an extensibility mechanism that allows devs to focus on service modeling. The more introspection this mechanism allows for, the less design-by-consensus is required, easing expansion to new domains.

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@smallcircles@social.coop · 5 days ago

@deadsuperhero

Right now extensibility of #ActivityPub shapes up as custom app-by-app app-centric development where individual devs just pragmatically throw new stuff on the wire, and when their app gains any popularity or other apps to integrate in a similarish application, things are bolted onto that in random ways. That whole story really constitutes a Big Ball of Mud anti-pattern that only introduces protocol decay, tech debt, and whack-a-mole programming, that is very hard to get rid of once there exists an installed base.

The reason that we do things that way is very understandable. It works in a grassroots environment where indivualist devs find it very hard and not valuable to collaborate at scale in what amounts to a kind of design-by-consensus process. But it comes at a high cost, where interoperability is basically out the door and any app has to be shaped as a pretzel and adopt all the quirks introduced by predecessors in a particular app domain to fit itself on the wire.

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@smallcircles@social.coop · 5 days ago

@deadsuperhero