Welcome @Pouhiou, good to have you here. Thank you for taking the time.
It seems that you missed @marcel, the developer of Demosphere. And I didn’t see a mention of @ekes, the developer of Radar. This is part of why we’re here together: we think there’s room for improvement in the communication among teams who are serving communities to help them organize their events together.
I think we’re all on the same when I say that disruption is not a positive word, and that cooperation trumps markets.
Great. I think this is the way. Here is how I envision the situation: both Radar and Demosphere (and Dudle, etc., there are certainly others) have existing communities that rely on them for getting together. They have been developing concepts, usage, and privacy-aware ways to exchange event data. The prospect of Mobilizon, for all these existing communities, is to extend their capabilities towards a standardized way of exchanging event data over ActivityPub, which is what Thomas is working on: here, this step is important to make collectively; with the experience of PeerTube, we already know that Mobilizon will impose a standard on the rest of us, and will de facto define what is an event and how it is shared. Here we want to ensure that such a definition is minimal enough so that others can easily adopt it, complete enough so that all existing use-cases are covered, and compatible enough so that it does not break what already exists – or does so in a concerted way.
Well, when you’re talking about identity online, there is a very clear technical meaning for it, especially when combined with activists. I have nothing against a feature that enables someone to segregate different parts of their life, I think it’s great: but it’s not about identity per se, more like aspects, or facets of one’s focus: to me it sounds like “separate event feeds”, more filters than identities.
I don’t know how far these multiple identities are conceived in terms of identity (e.g., are they linked to a single email address, or are they each linked to a different email address?) but it seems to me there’s a confusion about identity and profile (or facets) – for lack of a better word, but definitely, “identity” is not the right term here, according to 30+ years of technical literature on the topic.
To be clear: multiple identities is not the topic of our conversation, although I would certainly feel better if the term was changed to something less critical that actually describes the intent rather than the appearance.
What is at stake is the continuity of an ecosystem on the one hand, and on the other hand the demonstration of a capacity to walk along a path of emancipation, which is how I understand Contributopia.
One important thing to realize is that the opinionated choices made by Framasoft for Mobilizon have potential consequences on how other developers perceive what an Event is and how it is encoded. Of course, the ActivityStreams vocabulary already defines this a bit, but there’s no implementation that actually makes sense. We’ve seen with Mastodon that keeping on the ActivityPub track may be difficult: the main implementation tends to influence the rest away from the protocol itself (see Mastodon API for most “internal” stuff, Mastodon to Mastodon, that avoids using the actual AP client protocol for example.)
E.g., if the user-centric approach to Events commands that an application should disclose a Person actor rather than an Application actor when submitting events to Mobilizon, that would certainly become problematic for other implementations that do not have, nor want to concept of users attached to events. Still, as far as the Event itself is concerned, there’s no reasons to assume such a link between Person and Event. This example is one of many that shows that among all possible ActivityPub implementations of Events and Places, some may be compossible with the existing ecosystem, and others not.
