Notices by Tim Chambers (tchambers@indieweb.social), page 4

This is AMAZING, Dan, and it would be a huge win. #ThankYouThankYouThankYou!!!

@dansup @trwnh @ricferrer @evan @julian @rimu

In the end, we need real “share” and “like” buttons for the Fediverse - with as few clicks as possible - wrapped up as easily installable widgets that go next to Twitter and Facebook on every site online.

(That’s step 1)

Once we do this, step 2 is to lobby sites to JUST use Fediverse buttons, and drop the ones for hateful platforms.

@trwnh @ricferrer @evan @julian @rimu

@trwnh @evan @julian @rimu

I think the biggest difference with pdfs, mp4 in your example and an activity is that I most likely want to interact with an activitypub object: either follow, repost/announce, etc for this to work I need to be logged in. So is the solution to include an activitypub client in the browser? Use an external viewer that intercepts through browser extensions?

Now even the experience inside mastodon sometimes opens a webview 🤷🏻♂️

@tchambers I don't think the average user understands Passkeys at all. All of a sudden this word appeared and we're asked if we want to use one without knowing what the heck it is or how to use it. There needs to be a LOT more education for the average user.

@taylorlorenz The open social web brings the same benefit the open web once did: nobody owns it, so nobody can take it away. On centralized platforms, your speech exists at the pleasure of a private entity's business model — they can change the rules, throttle your reach, or shut you down overnight. The fediverse puts that power back in your hands: you own your presence, you choose and build your own community with no intermediaries, and no single entity can pull the plug on you, or them.

So okay, the federation is "message passing" and like email, or physical mail. You have an idea how it works.

Now we need to get to that other thing, a "shared heap" architecture. What on earth does that mean?

You can imagine the physical world version of "message passing" already because you already live in this world. Messages come to your house or apartment building or whatever

For Bluesky's "shared heap" architecture, you'd have to build a whole addition to your house for everyone's mail

There is no "directed delivery" in a "shared heap" system, which means you are stuck with two things: either a "god's eye view" (Bluesky) or "even lossier about replies than ActivityPub" (Secure Scuttlebutt/Nostr)

Users, clearly, think a lot more of Bluesky is decentralized than it is, and realize less of the consequences than they should. This really worries me. Blocks and DMs are both great examples of this.

Look, I know that I've been hitting this nail on the head for a while but: the web is open, blogs are open, but Google isn't open

But you could run your own Google, in theory. You could index the web. So why aren't you?

Ah yeah. Same thing here. That's what I mean, that's why it's centralized

That's exactly why running a Relay or AppView is expensive: you're building an addition to your house for all the world's mail.

Eeep! That ain't cheap. That's why I'm saying: decentralization also means the ability to *scale down*.

If "message passing" is like "mail comes to your house", a "shared heap" system works differently

In a "shared heap" system, all the mail gets dumped at the post office, and in the most naive version, you go over there and read through every single piece of mail to see which one is relevant to you

Oh god Christine said "the lambda calculus" did you know she's into lisp and functional programming, what's she going to talk about next monads?!?!

I am not going to talk about monads. Not TODAY

But we do need to get a better architectural idea of how these systems work because it matters a lot!

Now I can use message passing to send a message to you *directly* and indeed, that's "like email". For one-to-one correspondence, that's enough.

But it's not enough for a followers/following type mechanism. But we can build it on top! Thank *you* computational abstractions!

I actually think this is improvable but I mostly don't care because this isn't as big a complaint as people tend to think it is on the fediverse, the other concerns like "what instance do I pick" tend to be bigger and "oh no my server went down"

That can be improved, we'll talk about that later

"Message passing" is what ActivityPub uses. It's "like email", people say, and that's true.

Actually it's even a lot like physical mail. You write a letter, you say where it should go, it gets delivered to your house.

Message passing. The world runs on it.

On top of "message passing" we will build "publish-subscribe" as a second-layer abstraction

"Your ideas are interesting and I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter."

You send me a letter saying you'd like to hear the things I have to say, okay, you're part of the reader list. That's how it works.

Maybe there is another way to achieve federation, but it's about the power dynamics. It's a technical immersion of power dynamics, the flow and interchange of cooperation between many parts.

So you may say, well, doesn't ATProto have that? After all, messages flow through the different parts!

ActivityPub, as it turns out, follows the actor model of computation. Okay, many people implementing the fediverse don't know about the actor model aspect of ActivityPub but I am here to tell YOU, dear reader, that it is an important thing, not a detail

@_dm That rings true and especially once open source models get good enough to be good enough. It does feel like a lot of this will just be like vanilla ice cream and it doesn’t matter which you choose really and switching costs are near zero.