@essentialrandom you can do that, but first you have to design that system, which is an impossible task for any one person or any short timeframe

what i’m saying is that the LOE for implementing OStatus over ActivityPub was much much smaller than the LOE for implementing “some new thing” over ActivityPub, because it’s the designing of “some new thing” which is the actual hard part. i see a lot of people who have this impression that one could “just do ActivityPub differently” because they think because porting OStatus over to AP was “not that hard”, that implementing an entriely new unproven thing without any solid design plans will be equally easy

the current fediverse is a model that has been under development for a decade; you’re not going to create something with equal sophistication without years of effort across multiple parties, and wherever you wind up will almost definitely not be whatever you are imagining right now

@Lady ooooh I see now. That makes a lot of sense, and I agree with your point.

I think it's worth trying, and I think it's important we try (in part because I feel like the needs and shape of the web has changed so much since OStatus and we should strive to rethink some assumptions), but yes, it's a lot more work than people make it out to be, and the solutions are a lot less obvious that they might appear at first glance.

I also especially agree with "wherever you wind up will almost definitely not be whatever you are imagining right now". If you don't build with that possibility and flexibility in mind, you're never going to end up with a system that actually works in practice.

@essentialrandom yes, i’m definitely not saying it isn’t important or worthwhile, i just:

• don’t think that work looks like what a lot of people think it does, and
• don’t think it’s a good basis for criticizing how people use or interact with the tools we DO have today, even though they aren’t ideal

@Lady I'd be curious to get your take on what you think that work looks like.

I also understand that criticizing tools that are in use/interacted with right now without deep understanding of these issues can be infuriating for people these systems are currently working for, but I also feel like it's hard to meaningfully enact change without a little (ok, lot) of hubris and without some level of imagining a different future *before* you fully understand the present. You gotta fuck around and find out, and then gain a different appreciation for the root issues people have been running into for years.

I mean, *obviously* at a theoretical level one should strive to gain that understanding beforehand, but I partly think it's human nature to run your mouth, and it would be somewhat counterproductive to expect people to gain full understanding before doing so. It's not something that's easy to absorb sitting on the sidelines. But it's also hard to know if we're seeing the same things.

@essentialrandom i mean the short answer is “collaboration”

i don’t think you can solve decentralization with whitepapers lol

and i would say like 95% of the “mastodon ActivityPub federation is bad” discourse falls into the whitepaper category

the other piece of this is that i am very unconvinced that it is possible to do this work without a prior frame of reference. mastodon’s frame of reference is obviously twitter, and that has problems, but i think the successful competing solutions will be ones which go “okay but what about THIS OTHER technology which we like, how do we adapt THAT for the fediverse (with changes)” and not “let’s try to completely reimagine human technical social interaction from nothing”. i don’t think that latter thing is really feasible because it means basically ridding yourself of all the experience and lessons that these platforms have accumulated. at the very least it will mean a LOT more fucking around and finding out before you get a usable product lol

@Lady aren't
whitepapers a way towards collaboration? isn't the discussion they create meant to help discuss and converge towards a solution?

I actually am not personally familiar with the right way of doing these things, and I have a lot of blind spots—that i'm working on!—or how to meaningfully achieve collaboration on something like this, so this is the optic I'm asking in.

Agreed about the frame of reference. Personally I think we should be looking at *a lot* of different frame of reference to guide us, because there's a lot of solutions people have hovered around throughout the years, and a lot of gold that can be uncovered simply by mixing together aspects of systems that already exist in new and unique way.

@essentialrandom i think it depends on who is writing the whitepaper haha

if there was an active community of people who were actually, like, having meetings about this stuff, i might feel differently, but in my experience it’s a lot of lone wolf devs saying how THEY think things should work and not really taking feedback

@Lady I would love to get together a community of people that have interesting takes about this, even if it doesn't result in specific meetings. I'd read the heck out of that feed.

But yes, I think the "not really taking feedback" is crucial. If you put an opinion out there, you should be willing to open it up to criticism. Can't criticize others without being open to be called out on your own blindspots and wishful/superficial thinking.

@Lady also thank you for the time you spend discussing this stuff with me, as usual. I'm very grateful for your guidance and thoughts here.