Welcome @ekes! It was nice to meet you at CCCamp19. I wish we had more time to discuss this, but Camp is not really the place for serious discussions. Thank you for unfolding your position with Radar, it’s a great writeup to understand where you came from. I discovered the Radar while I was living at The Fiber, a squat in Ruysdaelstraat 79, Am*dam.
Indeed that’s the point of thinking together about this: most of the time, “federation” is achieved on the client side with a calendar application subscribing to many iCal feeds. Now with the prospect of Mobilizon, a standard way to exchange data exportable to iCal, but hopefully more precise on some confusing specification such as the ones you mention with locations, is on the way and it would be useful for experimented developers to chime in and figure out a collectively satisfying solution to this.
One aspect I’m worried about is the frontend integration of Mobilizon: most of the time people create a monolithic block of code spanning from function to form ; with ActivityPub, we have an opportunity to approach applications in a more modular way, with an API-first approach, plugging in an arbitrary frontend. If this is right, then adding the AP layer to interchange data should be enough to bring all event management applications to par.
But some concepts introduced in the higher bids of the crowdfunding campaign appear problematic to me and might become a technical burden for others to join the game:
- the concept of “multiple identites” seem to me a terrible mistake. First of all, it’s not really about “identities” but rather about different views, or aspects of one’s eventing activity. I see it as something that should be taken care of on the client side, where people can actually separate their “identities”: someone could use a Firefox profile for family events, and a special smartphone for activist events – why would an activist use the same devices for all their activities? The confusion of identities with what I would call workspaces seems to open a rats’ nest…
- the concept of “groups” as presented so far in Mobilizon seem to defeat the idea of subscribers in the ActivityPub approach. Not that groups are not welcome, as you mention in Radar, they do match a real purpose. But I’m concerned that Mobilizon could create a coupled interface mixing events and groups and making it difficult for others to share events with unworkable metadata in them.
What I’d like to see is cooperation to ensure that a minimal “headless” version of Mobilizon can be used and implemented in sister projets without having to dive into questionable concepts coupled with the Mobilizon UI. Does it make sense?
