Comparing substrate formation strategies
There’s a big difference in approach to protocol design that will impact the ecosystem evolution:
| Fediverse AS/AP | Bluesky AT |
|---|---|
| Existing social web protocols try to converge on a common standard and organize a W3C working group. | A greenfield protocol is being developed based on the lessons-learned and best-practices from existing and prior work. |
| Consensus-based open standards process is slow-going, contentious, stressful, political and can only make baby steps by finding compromises that satisfy all stakeholders. | Dedicated team of selected experts work on the company payroll is able to iterate fast, directly on specs and reference implementation. Community engagement is ‘product feedback’. |
| W3C Recommendations are published that define core concepts where consensus exist, but leave many holes with the expectation these will be addressed in future standard versions. | Tightly controlled developer hub is prepared where specifications and documentation mature towards stable release based on initial set of requirements, and with Developer Experience front and center. |
| Grassroots ecosystem takes Recommendations and starts implementing. Missing aspects are coded in project-specific ad-hoc fashion. | Test network is launched where invite-only controlled evolution of draft specifications can take place, before opening the ecosystem further. |
| Grassroots ad-hoc interoperability accrues vast amounts of tech debt and protocol decay. Standards lag big-time to operational reality. | Interoperability and extensibility are safeguarded in the core specs that will only be put up for W3C or IETF standardization once proven in the field. |
| Humongous effort needed to reboot Standards Process, which requires volunteers doing chores to catch up to an ecosystem that is ever more divided and fragmented as it further evolves. | It is likely that once released as open standard, a much more “laisséz faire” approach can be taken to ecosystem evolution, as the stable well-designed foundation will not accrue tech debt as fast. |
Note that neither of these approaches is necessarily better than the other. They were chosen under different circumstances and with different objectives. But the observations do tell that the “greenfield protocol project under corporate leadership” approach in this case provides significant advantages.
That is not always the case. Solid project led by Inrupt is an example of where this approach isn’t working all that well. My assumption is that this is due to, on one hand the enterpreneurial execution: Bluesky has Silicon Valley very pragmatic growth-hacking ‘smarts’ on board and access to many SV connections. And Inrupt OTOH follows a somewhat different approach where they ‘copied’ a formal W3C-like governance structure and work in a more academic setting on the technical side.
Aside: What are your adoption strategies?
Note: Elaboration is off-topic.. If you want to discuss, create a new topic and cross-reference.
It is interesting to reflect upon how a number of our MVF candidate initiatives require their own well thought-out strategies for substrate formation and technology adoption. Some approaches are not that different to Bluesky’s, except fully R&I grant funded.
If I’d take a stab at that I’d say more or less that:
- Librecast (@onepict), Interpeer (@jfinkhaeuser): More like ATProto. Create stable foundation takes priority to substrate formation.
- ForgeFed (@pere), Valueflows (@lynnfoster): More like AS/AP. Specs should evolve based on grassroots ecosystem involvement.
Regardless whether my stab is accurate, it is important that the process followed is deliberate and has sound strategy to it.
State of AS/AP Ecosystem → Unhealthy
If the AS/AP developer ecosystem doesn’t get its act together, and manages to solve the Major (Social) Challenges, then there’s good chance it is disrupted and passed by, by well-designed products based on the AT protocol.
The Fediverse discussion that brought AT Protocol to my attention was:
On the thread there are more sceptics on the future of ActivityPub, like Robin Berjon, author of some great articles like Internet Transition and Reinventing W3C Governance.
In the discussions on AS/AP on developer channels (SocialHub forum and Fediverse Developer Networks chat) there’s more and more consensus that AS/AP isn’t really a comprehensive protocol, but more a framework and saying that one is “AP compliant” is entirely meaningless given the current state of things. Imho ActivityPub requires that:
ActivityPub → Core Foundation + Extension Mechanism
I have this opinion for a long time, stated e.g. in substrate formation challenge and am advocating once more to finally address it: