Hi @Steffen, thank you for sharing this. I finally took the time to watch your presentation.
Indeed you’re proposal to OFFDEM came late, but I had taken the time to browse through your presentation at rC3, although I cannot get German. I thought the final questions were strongly relevant and that you did not address them properly. Especially two points seem critical to me:
1. Engagement with existing efforts
It’s not clear why you’re trying to “bring people to the table”, or more precisely, what table it is. In your rC3 presentation you were vague at responding to this question, and it’s not clear yet why you’re not engaging with W3C, IETF, or other similar bodies that would be the right place to go. If you think it’s too early to do this, you might as well engage with existing community efforts for the protocols you’re interested in. See also the question of scope below…
2. Licensing
Your licensing FAQ remains vague about this question. You do mention “open source” a few times, but since there’s no engagement on your part as to what license you’re working with, it’s difficult to assess whether you’re going to work for the community or are willing to exit at some point. Given that 6 out of 7 “share icons” link to proprietary companies, including all three of your stated competitors, your statement about “open source” is not convincing at all.
After viewing your presentation, beyond the above two points, I’m left with a number of questions.
First and foremost, I don’t think you convey a technical meaning for interconnectivity. There’s a lot of debate currently about interoperability and interconnection, and you might have seen our take on this. I suggest you engage with the community on those topics where they happen.
One limitation I see in your approach about interconnectivity is the promise you make about A and B being able to communicate across non-interoperable networks while approaching the problem from a perspective of the Web: you mention W3C, and you seem to aim at Web frameworks. But how would you handle XMPP or Matrix in that regard?
This issue shows when you talk about “global addresses”: your slide mentions a number of networks using various protocols, but these addresses remain ambiguous: ‘Ẍp3zlxkrZ45@xmpp.tech’ could be anything from email to Web to XMPP. They probably should include a protocol, but then how do you handle cross-protocol communication? Here again, there are many existing efforts to bridge protocols, maybe you had a chance to discuss at OFFDEM with a few people working on some of those. “Global addresses” should probably be unambiguous URNs.
At some point you mention presentation as being the core functionality of social media. I’m curious about this aspect, especially as A11y is concerned. It seems to me that message passing and data structures are more specifically concerned with interoperability and interconnection than presentation, which remains a last mile function. You insist in pushing for a “consistent user experience”: how would that play with so much variety in what people experience in their lives and especially in front of their computers? That said I proposed something a long time ago that may inform you about something you could want in terms of structuring interconnection: A User Perspective of Free Social Networking.
Now, to respond to your explicit demands…
“Which networks and projects do you think such a concept is useful for? For which not?”
As it is now, I don’t think this concept is useful. It requires a lot more depth as to what can be transmitted and how it should circulate across networks. It also needs to think about power relations, as mentioned in our take on interop linked above, before it can be useful to anyone. There are cases of “bridges” from one protocol to another, but they already experience a lot of difficulty translating concepts from A to B. I guess you could start with the Web and see the existing mess of trying to think along: even if ActivityPub exists, there are many other more or less compatible approaches that do not translate 1:1 from each other, technically and humanely.
“What problems do you see in this approach?”
I hope this long post responds fully to this question.
“What do you require of the standard to include in your favorite tech (especially p2p & other utopias)”
Agnosticism mostly. There are so many angles, it’s often a case-by-case basis for aligning things, when and if they can align. I hope the “user perspective” linked above can contribute to answering this question.
“From your experience: what’s needed to make the process work?”
A lot of dedication and engagement with a lot of communities. A strong determination and a clear position. Excellent technical skills that allow moving from concept to implementation, because “We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code.” Years of patience, infinite humility because you never know enough, and unshakable will to make others succeed.
