Quoting from another toot I just posted:
> What I am talking about is architecture and design, and all the things that allow people to easily form a clear mental picture on how things fit together, wrap their head around the fediverse.
> Never defining this well, and having the documentation be scattered all across the fediverse in 1,001 random locations doesn't help. Meanwhile the dev talk that is going on for years remains very inefficient due to endless Babylonian speech confusion.
Another quote has steps that would then be involved with solution design, and expand fedi's interoperable apps & services:
https://social.coop/@smallcircles/116109322688804011
Without that, with app-centric protocol-decay-ensuring method we have:
0. Deteriorate your domain, reduce ambition
1. Hammer your design until it looks like a microblog, add warts for own features
2. Plug and pray that it works
3. Keep fixing based on daily fedi weather conditions
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4. Discuss fixes in fire-and-forget fleety communication channels
Another issue: Unclear protocol layers.
> I am not a fan of the idea that #ActivityPub is a message-passing system; it's a read-write API.
I'm not sure what a "read-write API" is, really. It 's a fuzzy term, whereas message based systems have well-defined architecture patterns and a body of IT knowledge and practice to apply them in robust communication systems. A 'Message API' has a generic, consistent interface.
The overarching goal of AS/AP should be empowerment of the Solution developer so they can directly focus on building use cases for their application or business domain. They should not have to think about any of the intrinsics of the protocol, like particular GETs and POSTs used to model protocol capabilities in the HTTP transport layer.
Solution design then involves:
0. Model the domain
1. Data modeling, msg formats + validation
2. Define actor msg exchange patterns
3. Document design
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4. Improve these steps. Add native protocol + tool support over time.
