Egregoros

Random thought: saw the mention of Isso, for a commenting system that can be used on static websites. Had the idea of something similar with ActivityPub instead, but then thought further of something where you could have something essentially proxy and transform content from a static website (given some URL pattern of which pages should be included/exempt, and where to extract content from).

Ergo, you could have some blog or other personal website, that could even be static, while having some secondary service that can transform it to ActivityPub, Nostr, or other representations, and serve an embedded (and moderated) comments section, without needing the content to originally be inside of some natively ActivityPub-based (or extended) platform.

Hell, even stepping even further: maybe could do it for an art gallery system too, that could do automatic cross-posting.

It's just so thoroughly, resoundingly demoralizing how normies keep taking the bait of centralized VC-funded platforms. Once one ship starts to sink, they crowd to the next one that appears on the horizon, like rats, just ever-continuing this cycle, and never learn.

In the time that I've been on the internet, just to keep up with "where everyone's at", I've been on: ICQ, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN/Live Messenger, Google Talk/Hangouts, Skype, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Wire, Signal, Discord, Guilded, and many several others, and the cycle just keeps repeating, just to re-skin much of the same concepts over and over again, with relatively minor variations.

I am so damn tired and have gradually dumped virtually all the above at this point (recently deleted Discord in November, deleted Telegram ~2 years before that, deleted Facebook ~10 years ago, etc).

This may come as a shock to viewers, but when I've dumped prior platforms, some friends have followed over to the alternatives (of those that weren't already there), such as XMPP.

Mentionably, also, nearly everyone has Steam in common, and Steam has actually made the voice calling system reasonably usable, and has a decent 'group' system, that's also filled the gap. For my more neckbeard-y friends, Mumble has continued to work too.

Nonetheless, in all of this, I guess there's another opportunistically new centralized VC-funded platform, that people are trying to crowd-wrangle people to next. I don't even know if some of this crap is some sort of set-up, if these influencers get kickbacks, or if people are just this retarded to keep repeating this cycle.

When I registered on Discord, about a decade ago, I already regretted it. Despite being yet another WebRTC application, that could be used in a browser, they still arbitrary forced people to install an Electron-wrapped version anyway by artificially walling off features you could do in a browser anyway (e.g. screenshare and others).

There was plenty of phobia about it watching all your running processes, but it still got adopted anyway. There's the warehousing of all your data, all your connection history since inception of your account, all your device metrics at every single individual interaction and thing you clicked on, perpetually tagged and catalogued, and much of that ran through neural nets to profile and categorize you, but still people cling to it anyway.

Now the cycle repeats again.

I don't even understand how it reached Recommendation status, but then again I don't know all the W3C internal processes.

The hangup point that was holding it back from Recommendation status was that it lacked a test suite; and so one was written that basically [as far as I understood] was just a questionnaire of whether you implemented something or not (how does that even pass?).

I don't know if it even had anything that actually tested application behavior or validated the format or anything. But all of that's buried to the past, because it was written atop a fickle selection of tools, where the test suite codebase isn't even installable anymore. And nobody has lifted a finger for over ~6+ years now, to write a replacement, while the test suite link on the spec goes nowhere.

It's unfathomable how shallow of effort those that hold official status with the spec are.

Also it was supposed to be entirely optional, but the current spec editors would like you to believe otherwise.

The part I love about the authors to the spec, is that as far as I'm aware, none of them have even made their own complete implementation in any way, and only one of them has made some contributions to Mastodon and Pleroma.

Meanwhile, one of the authors had their own federated microblogging application from the OStatus days (that OStatus was defined from), that they abandoned entirely, and had no interest to even attempt a remake or a fork with ActivityPub at all, despite both being their project.

I don't trust people that can't even follow through implementing their own suggestions/ideas.

My first ActivityPub project was very literally just wasting my time solely on trying to make a JSON-LD-first ActivityPub library to try to abstract away it from the library consumer (within reason), back around the time before ActivityPub had reached W3C Recommedation status.

I would have saved myself some amount of months by just having not get snagged into that trap, and could have instead actually shipped a usable implementation back then.

Everyone else that actually shipped an ActivityPub implementation in the beginning were the ones that treated it solely as static JSON.

I'm not saying JSON-LD is hard, nor difficult to understand (and there are some niche projects where I do want to use it)---some of it's probably even an upgrade from similar things in the XML world, but it piles on more overhead that everything has to be expanded, checked against context, just to handle different representations, all while you'll still invariably have to interop with implementations that treat it as static JSON anyway.