@reiver @thisismissem @mfru

I made a diagram yesterday that contrasts #ActivityPub and #SolidProject that is I think interesting to consider.

In the past I've been very active on the Solid forum, and tried to get a collab going with #SocialHub community. A number of points that existed then, are still issues today I think.

Like, though anyone could participate in the standards process via chat, the Solid team and Inrupt were not really interested in their community, hardly giving attention while people were building interesting stuff there.

Also at the time basically all available code was Javascript, making Solid uninteresting or hard to access for other language devs.

But I think biggest issue was that Solid didn't know what it was. It was positioned as 'personal data vault' on the landing page then (but not using this term), but was 'secretly' TBL's desire to reboot the #SemanticWeb. The new web would be all 'Solid apps'. But the adoption strategy for that didn't exist.

@david_megginson @ben

Though with regards to progress, there's a difference in both approaches.

At the #SolidProject side you have inertia by the slow standardization process. But should they figure things out in a good way, eventually the ecosystem catches up and the inertia can quickly decrease.

While at #ActivityPub side, since AS/AP remains stagnant, the ever increasing protocol decay and tech debt non-linearly increases inertia and progress. And on top of that, you are never done once you implemented the 'ad-hoc specs' of the installed base, and you have to account for continuous whack-a-mole development and maintenance burdens to fix #interoperability breakages.

The AS/AP based fediverse devolves into effectively no interoperability, and a situation that is more comporative to NPM dependency hell.

@david_megginson @ben

Yes, I agree. Though the diagram is too simple to capture it well, it is important to identify the forces that are at play, and the mechanics that drive them, and to subsequently monitor where you are and where you want to be in the future. So timely action can be taken to make corrective actions.

For the #SolidProject ecosystem for instance they might have identified a minimum set of standards to adopt, with which reasonably powerful "MVP's of the Semantic web" could be approximated with. And focus on strong library and tool support for that in multiple programming environments. Instead you enter a jungle of open stardards in various stages of completion, and good luck go figure it out. Also they might've focused on actual movement building. Far-reaching innovative standards - a new paradigm for the web - aren't adopted by the boardroom of a company, but are introduced by devs who get excited by what see and how they are empowered. And persuade management.

I recreated an old diagram in Excalidraw that I spread about a couple years ago, and made it a bit more informative. Explanation can be found in the #AltText

See also and for discussion: https://discuss.coding.social/t/diagram-interoperability-in-practice/828

Or join the Social experience design chatroom at: https://matrix.to/#/#socialcoding-foundations:matrix.org

Also posted to #SocialHub at: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/activitypub-versus-fediverse-interoperability-in-practice/8498

@ben

#SX #SocialCoding #SocialWeb #ActivityPub #SolidProject #fediverse