this issue is a blocker for mastodon not supporting filtering remote posts by words (which would’ve helped with many spam attacks, which the pleroma family supported just fine for a WHILE via MRF, and more recently misskey has added support for)
if you go to socialhub you’ll find MANY threads of reasonable ideas that are in json-ld representation bikeshed hell as people unnecessarily debate over which exact json-ld representation of the same exact data is the most correctest. the most infuriating recent one i have seen is the emoji reaction fep discussion and FEP-fb2a: Actor metadata both of which does this bullshit ON FEATURES ACTIVELY FEDERATING RIGHT NOW, where changing it would BREAK BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 2 months ago
I recently started looking at socialhub actually. I have even participated in that emoji reaction thread you linked, but I only joined the site recently.
Honestly, I’m a bit confused by the site. There’s kind of a lack of direction in a sense? Everyone is trying to extend the protocol in various different ways and it seems difficult to achieve alignment and agreement. I guess that is to be expected in a decentralized system but still.
What’s the alternative though? I mean nobody has the authority to put their foot down and decide. I agree that the debates go on for way too long, but how else do we find alignment? Then again, the long discussions definitely exhibits a kind of selection bias - only the people who are pedantic enough to keep discussing will do so. Everyone else naturally just get tired of the whole thing and leave.
It’s weird but it almost feels like the fediverse needs a benevolent dictator to kind of get an overview and set a clearer direction, when it comes to the standards.
But these features were totally non-standard extensions right? You can’t expect such things to continue being compatible as the actual standard evolves. It would also be a neat way to strong-arm the standard - just implement an extension in the way that you want it to work and now the standard has to keep your version compatible. That wouldn’t be good. Just because there exists a non-standard implementation does not mean it should be able to dictate how stuff should be done.
ShittyKopper@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
that’s the thing, everything in activitypub is a non-standard extension. hashtags are an extension. post visibility the way it’s commonly done is an extension (more like a convention in that it doesn’t introduce anything new, but still not written down anywhere official), the concept of an un-locked account is a convention (and the marker that marks an account as locked is an extension). pinned posts, marking images as sensitive, they’re all extensions
(surprisingly, this is the second time i’m writing this exact thing today)
this has historically been mastodon. and they have put themselves in such a place that anything they do not approve of gets seen as a “nonstandard extension” and anything they see gets seen as a part of the standard. see the above reply.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 2 months ago
Yea I see what you mean. How do we solve this though? I mean let’s say you were to redesign the protocol from scratch. Do you just need to include all these things into the protocol from the start? That’s a lot of features and considerations to make. An extensible protocol might be for the best? But it does bring a lot of complexity… I’m really not sure.
Yea this is problematic, especially because this pulls AP into a more microblogging-oriented direction, at the expense or at least disregard of all other use cases. I would not call this a benevolent dictator - that’s just a regular dictator.
Where? I’d love to read more about this stuff.