@bonfire @mayel @ivan

What I loved to see in the #ActivityPub documentation is the inclusion of the list of Fediverse Enhancement Proposals #FEP's that are implemented. It will serve a stimulus for other #fediverse devs to adopt them too, and shape the grassroots standardization process. Posted the list to #SocialHub too..

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/bonfire-social-1-0rc3-is-released/8071

Also nudging to add #Bonfire as implementation in FEP docs..

https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/issues/194

And to review @helge https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/pulls/673

@nlnet @ngi

Do people from Meta participate in these discussions about the direction of ActivityPub and the Fediverse? Do people whose orgs are funded by Meta participate in these discussions? Do we approach these discussions with a goal of accommodating Meta, or do we reject Meta?

Does the former CTO of Truth Social (who's an ActivityPUb developer) participate in these discussions?

Is it important to make the environment inclusive and equitable enough that Black and Indigenous people participate in these discussions and their views are listened to? What about disabled people? Trans, queer, and non-binary people? If it is important, how to start moving in that direction?

Do ActivityPub developers adopt fascists' talking points?

And so on and so on and so on ...

These discussions are all inherently political.

@julian @jdp23@socialhub.activitypub.rocks

Hi @julian,
IMO the problem is a social one, the proposed solutions technical. Won't do.

IMO it takes social activities, like conferences, to build bonds. Online that's orders of magnitude more time-consuming, frustrating and brittle.

#SocialHub, as I knew it, lacked interest of the 'big shots'. Their disinterest rendered it a side-show.

@smallcircles I would like it to be on the record publicly that @strypey
was very supporting and encouraging regarding the necessity and promotion of inclusive leadership when it came to our (unsuccessful) attempts to build momentum for #socialhub online events

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/widening-the-talent-pool-for-our-upcoming-fediconference-initiative

Such opinions and sentiments may have become lost through bilateral communications and from passages of time.

However, that does not permit such serious fingerpointing.

1/N

@jdp23 @laurenshof

Thanks for the conversation, @smallcircles.

I'm not just in it for a fight. If you go back through the thread, you'll see I've made several suggestions as to what you could do -- if you're concerned that you're unintentionally advocating ideas from people who are aligned with the Peter Thiels and Curtis Yarvins of the world, if you want to cut down the chance that your actions unintentionally but predictably lead to racists showing up on people's threads, and if you personally want to get involved in improving diversity and equity on SocialHub in ways that will have an impact. It doesn't sound like any of those are resonating with you right now, but these are areas you want to make progress in, perhaps my suggestions will spark other ideas.

Also, it was also a good opportunity to help people who aren't on SocialHub understand how the anti-Blackness (and other aspects of equity there) impacts safety via who participates in the FEP process. I've said multiple times directly on #SocialHub that I think it's an anti-Black space and that it's up to the white active participants there to do something about it. So if anybody there seems me talking about it here as "behind their back" ... oh well, so be it. Still, I am planning on posting something about this there now that the discussion here has wrapped up.

And @laurenshof, sorry if you feel like this hijacked your thread!

"Anti-Black" doesn't imply intent. 5 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people has a definition and links to a bunch of references.

"Anti-Blackness – beliefs, attitudes, actions, practices, and behaviors of individuals, institutions, software, and systems that devalue, minimize, and marginalize the full participation of Black people across the world"

But impact > intent. Active participants on #SocialHub have created an environment where Black people almost never participate. Similarly whether or not the guy who showed up in this thread intended the things he was saying to be anti-Black, they are.

It's frustrating because Hellekin clearly intended SocialHub to be an anti-racist space -- and devoted some real effort to it, working with Rhiaro and the community in a grassroots process to refine and get adoption of a very strong Values statement even though some people left as a result. And Hellekin continues to take real and concrete actions in aid of it -- kicking out Alex Gleason, actively supporting my intervention last fall in the How to make progress on the almost complete absence of Black people in SocialHub and SWICG discussions? thread.

But, alas, alnosst none of the white active participants on SocialHub make a similar effort. There were plenty of good recommendations in that about concrete straightforward things people could do as individuals and collectively to improve the situation ... but they chose not to.

And tying it back to the "centralized substrate" conversation, my guess is that you didn't intend to adopt the perspective of somebody who's advocating for universal adoption of a system grounded in stealing Native Americans property and ignoring treaties, chattel slavery and white supremacy. It's quite possible that you didn't realize the implications of him being a big fan of the white supremacist Curtis Yarvin, or realize that white surpemacists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen are big fans of the guy whose views you're advocating for and amplifying.

But, impact > intent. You're aligning with Thiel and Andreessen to amplifying and advocating these views, without disclosing the politics behind them. You've let these white supremacist-friendly views shape your thinknig about decentralization, and probably other issues in general. Like I said in an earlier post

"fascist tech oligarchs and their minions aren't all just stopped clocks, some are quite good at using apparently politically neutral "insights" to warp people's thinking by disguising their pro-fascist framing -- and at getting people who don't agree with their politics to amplify their propaganda. "

@smallcircles @laurenshof

I copied the above from a #SocialHub discussion for its close alignment to #SocialCoding commons vision of a #peopleverse ..

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/improve-following-of-discourse-categories-on-the-fediverse/5471/6?u=aschrijver

Yes very well formulated re #SocialHub and the larger challenges!

its vital that the people involved in the ecosystem look beyond their own project's scope and tend to foundational tech they rely on.

Yep. Fedi as a whole doesn't have a great track record with collective action and contributing to or fundraising for shared / shareable infrastructure.

That said I'm not sure that a centralized substrate is the only approach.

EDIT: the rest of this post (and several of the followon posts including @ophiocephalic important point here) refers to the earlier version of the parent post, which quoted from a 2021 article by Byrne Hobart about the so-called "paradox of decentralization": "decentralized order requires a centralized substrate". I appreciate @smallcircles's removing the original quote and reframing it in terms of open standards rather than a centralized

The article says

"money can only flow and deals can only be made if everyone has a consistent sense of property rights and contracts, and the definition of those concepts will typically be determined by whichever participant in a transaction has the more sophisticated financial and legal system"

That's very much the kind of thing a white American guy would say. For one thing it reflects complete ignorance of the history of money flowing and deals being made between different countries and cultures which despite having very inconsistent legal systems somehow made it work. But also white American guys assume our system is the most financially and legally sophisticated (because American exceptionalism) -- so evertybody will adopt the US sense of property rights and contracts, grounded in stealing Native Americans property and ignoring treaties, chattel slavery and white supremacy, and women as property.

(Also the article goes on to talks approvingly about Urbit, whose creator Curtis Yarvin is racist and fascist as well as a Peter Thiel protege. So take it all with a grain of salt.)

Of course a centralized substrate is the most straightforward path, and it's not easy to imagine other approaches. But a single substrate is inherently power-centralizing and squeezes out diversity. And think about the ecosystem that includes some entities in the ATmosphere and some from fedi. The article talks about protocols as a substrate from the technical sense, fair enough, but here there are two and that is unlikely to change.

@laurenshof

@laurenshof

Well formulated re: #SocialHub and indicative of larger challenges that exists in our grassroots ecosystem.

For #ActivityPub et al open standards its vital that the people involved in the ecosystem look beyond their own project's scope and tend to foundational tech they rely on.

[removed quote]

There is a sort of paradox where the more we decentralise the ecosystem the more important it is that we can rely on open standards to guarantee good levels of interoperability.

See also this topic on #SocialHub #ActivityPub dev community, with links to various #ForgeFed related issue trackers to participate in:

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/call-for-action-help-draw-attention-to-forgefed/5480

@forgefed @nlnet

@tijl @strypey

As an example, a recent related topic by @lax on #SocialHub mentions clearer layering of the protocol stack..

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/layered-activitypub/5449

In another recent topic on #ActivityPub C2S I mention a need to discern between conceptual architecture and implementation. "Server" and "client" aren't part of the conceptual architecture, and likely need a different place in the domain model on that basis. They are different kind of abstractions than e.g. an "actor".

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/liberating-clients-from-servers-without-throwing-out-baby-with-bathwater/5416/15?u=aschrijver

OK, I'm not going mad (phew!).

"... for a few months we have revived the #SocialHub where developers, implementors, and anyone interested in the present and future of the W3C Recommendation gather, discuss issues, and collaborate with a kind and cooperative spirit to bring forth the best of what our collective intelligence can invent.

The new SocialHub, like the previous one we had to abandon, runs Discourse ..."

@hellekin, 26 December 2019

https://activitypub.rocks/news/let-us-meet-on-socialhub.html (https://archive.is/sp7IA)