@smallcircles @z428 @mike @silverpill
And if you try and get it all right before you release then you end up like bluesky did, just arguing and not releasing anything for half a decade.
@z428 @mike @silverpill @smallcircles
Zot was first released like half a decade before the ActivityPub spec, but I think it'd be fair to call it a minority experimental system on Fedi at the time, even now really.
Not the kind of thing you could get unanimous consensus on without days of arguing about how the protocol should work and which crypto systems to use etc.
You mention half decade ago, and I'd reply by pointing out that concepts like PKI, Web of Trust, and other technologies that would enable nomadic identity have been around since the 80s at least.
These ideas were around for decades.
I really get the sense that ActivityPub developers were so focused on today's web technologies that they didn't go back and learn from past bodies of work that could have made a huge difference.
Regarding scalability, YES! when I read the spec for the first time I had the similar thought, that this system doesn't look like it had any thought about scalability.
I even commented to some developer friends about this, joking that it doesn't seem like anyone did a big-O analysis of this system, and one replied with a sigh that some schools don't even teach big-O anymore.
It just really reinforces my sense that ActivityPub was designed by people with a very superficial background, without much understanding of lessons learned long ago.
I don't mind being openly critical of it :)
@volkris @z428 @mike @silverpill @smallcircles
Still reckon it was likely more about time and the constraints of getting consensus than lack of technical knowledge by those involved.
Email servers never copy your message to your new email provider either FWIW. Switch account and you do indeed lose all the stuff in your inbox and any messages saved to the server's imap boxes. You can't transfer you handle there either like you can move your number on modern phone networks.
@volkris @z428 @mike @silverpill @smallcircles
Certainly agree it scales poorly though. Sending the same message 100 times to your 100 followers on a single server seems pretty wasteful. And not including any meta-data like preview cards so causing inadvertent DDOS attacks on pages, that could do with work.
@z428 @mike @silverpill @smallcircles @volkris
But can you have a standard way to back up posts when not all activitypub servers even will deal with notes at all, and others will have stories-type activities and others will have video-messages like Peertube and others will have future types of activity not even invented yet?
And as soon as you're into that conversation, you're looking at the clock and wondering when the deadline for submission is and if it can all be done in time.
Re-importing messages on a new URL when if anyone has any record of them at all to look for they'll be looking to the old URL seems tricky. Rebroadcasting them to the network sounds spammy.
How long would the conversation to decide a consensus on all that take?
I don't know it well, but it seems to be extensible and people are working on it. Don't expect it'll ever be finished though, no more than http is finished.
@z428 @mike @silverpill @smallcircles @volkris
Heh. Yeah. I get a lot of email I can't read coz I read using Mutt in a terminal. The ones trying to send HTML are mostly spam anyway.
@z428
The worst is the email-verification links that are like half page long and malformed by line-breaks in the terminal.
I have dragged windows many times wider than the screen so I can select the whole thing.
Honestly email folks, you don't need 10000 characters in your validation links!
I just don't see any evidence that this was about compromising in the committee to reach consensus.
Everything I see is consistent with, and more simply explained by, a committee that didn't have a technical depth of knowledge and experience to see the problems that would arise from repurposing off-the-shelf components from web tech.
