Notices by blaine (blaine@mastodon.social)

@evan @boris @darius @snarfed.org not I! Working hard on getting these 1/2 dozen new lexicons out the door. 😅

@evan @boris @darius @snarfed.org maybe it's somewhere in-between, and the translation project is more like translating a scientific textbook from one language to another.

The hard part in any truly decentralized project is going to be that the end-user *experience* of the data is going to differ from one user to another. I've argued in the past that *design and UX* standards are way more important than *encoding* standards, if we want all of this to work for people.

@evan @boris @darius @snarfed.org I feel strongly that this question: "is there a lexicon for long-form text in ATProto? And does it bridge across BridgyFed as `Article`?" is analogous to translation for any human work of translation.

Is FEP-b2b8 a subtle piece of AS2 poetry, whose ineffable metadata simply can't be captured in Lexicon? Maybe. Without wanting to minimize the work, my bet is that it's probably more like ISO-8859-1 vs CP1252.

@evan @boris @darius @snarfed.org as a matter of principle, though, they *could* be bridged as article. I have not looked at the source lexicons, but it turns out it's not complicated to convert from one semantic-and-byte ordering of "title", "author", "body", etc to another.

@evan @wjmaggos reframed, just for fun: making Mastodon etc compatible with atproto would do similar!

@evan @wjmaggos ... but that's not what the question is asking. It's intent, and the #atproto and #activitypub in the question aren't referring to specifications, they're referring to communities.

@evan @wjmaggos you're reading it as a technologist – I agree with you that making atproto and activitypub literally interoperable is ... weird (although, I have argued many times that I think the two protocols will converge in functionality and scope, and also separately that lens-based translation of data structures is basically the best thing and would smooth right over the lexicon/AS differences if we had good tooling).

@evan @wjmaggos I think you've misread the intent of the poll. The end user experience right now is "if you'd like to communicate across party lines, go install a bridge"; the question the poll is asking is "would you like to be able to communicate across party lines without setting up a bridge?"

@evan @wjmaggos it's not my message. My message to technologists was "the key piece of interop for humans is identity" and I was told "webfinger isn't part of activitypub" and "domain names are how we do identity on the internet" (despite the idea that paying $25/year to get to manage DNS isn't an end-user-achievable thing in the world we live in) and after years of this I gave up. It makes me sad that Bluesky went with domain names because consistent format really matters, but 🤷♂️

@evan @wjmaggos where the real "human-level" challenge is is that e.g. Mastodon and BlueSky are different, culturally, and so are "the Fediverse" and "Truth Social" and any combination of separate servers that we can imagine, or even two random servers *within* the Mastodon-running-Fediverse. Mastodon and Bluesky are way more similar than Pixelfed, and it makes much less sense to federate Pixelfed and Mastodon than it does Mastodon and Bluesky, because they serve different social purposes.

@wjmaggos @evan 💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯 I've been banging on about this for sadly, literally decades now. I'm 100000000% convinced that this is the conversation we need to have if we want to make decentralization relevant to people (and it's not going to be framed in terms of decentralization).

@evan @wjmaggos (i.e. not at all)

It makes plenty sense to make BlueSky and Mastodon interoperable, even if it involves protocol-level translation. Doing so is, frankly, easy, and much easier than the very common approach of translating between Spanish and Chinese (which is what we normally do to communicate instead of inventing a Spanish/Chinese pidgin, which is also a thing humans do!).

@evan @wjmaggos you're making a category error, Evan.

People who aren't us don't give even the tiniest shits about which protocols they're using. 5G phones happily talk to 2G phones over SS7, and the only thing anyone knows about "5G" is that it's "fast" – and they don't even know what that means.

You just said approx. "that doesn't make any sense; it's like saying that you want NG-RAN and SS7 to be mutually intelligible" and people will care about as much as someone who literally says that.

@evan @cwebber the discussion of protocols is often deeply embedded in the standards world, and protocols are defined by standards.

Really sorry - one of the documents that is referenced in the link you've shared was the last time I tried to engage, and the experience was *horrendous*. My good-faith contributions were flat-out rejected by an opinionated tech mini-lord, and your name is on the doc. That's not "protocol development" or consensus building.

@evan @cwebber I feel like one day we should have a beer again. My "same picture" take has been (for many, many years) that ActivityPub is two-way RSS with usable identity (even if the standard doesn't admit it). XMPP is the same, and the main innovation from atproto is actually-malleable schemas. Private data will bring it in-line with AP, while perf. optimizations will work the other direction. All asides, though: I care about what the people want, not what the computers want. ❤️

@evan @cwebber nope! Models of technological and social change and cohesion, yes, standards, no. I love the goals that standards seek to achieve, but more often than not I see the governance aspects used as prisons for the mind and capital S-Standards as agents of cultural division, so don't engage on that front anymore. Not good for my mental health. ❤️

@cwebber I restate my case. 😅 https://mastodon.social/@blaine/113420067222026439

New_ Public has been an important voice in conversations about how the internet is broken for several years now. They occupy an interesting space that’s not just focused on technology, and as an organization, New_ Public holds critical but optimistic views as central to their ethos, values that are close to my own heart.

Every once in a while, if you’re lucky, you get to share a “new job” update that’s more like a “life goal ✅” update. This is one of those times.

I’m ridiculously excited to share that I’ve joined @wearenew_public, working with @clockwerks on their small-but-mighty Local Lab team to build a new product to support local communities come together online in healthy ways.

The work is as important to the health of our communities as it is ambitious, and I’m deeply grateful to be a part of it. More soon!