Click to expand alt-text for the image with the TLDR summary of the blog post.
Pillars of Grassroots standardization
I would like to thank @silverpill and @evan for their tireless work on respectively the FEP Process and W3C SocialCG.
Article summary
- Grassroots growth has seen the fediverse gradually diverge from ActivityPub open standards.
- With post-facto interoperability the dominant driver, increasing protocol decay hampers innovation and growth.
- Fediverse as it stands today has limited its application areas, and lost attractiveness to newcomers.
- A shift back to open standards is possible and required for ActivityPub to remain relevant in the future.
- Current technology standardization process is unfit for the social dynamics in fediverse grassroots environment.
- Challenges to standardization are fostering shared ownership, proactive involvement, governance, and recentralization.
- There are four points where recentralization is a risk: server instances, app platforms, the FEP process, and W3C SocialCG.
- While funding is available for individual FOSS projects, it is lacking for any work on healthy technology ecosystems.
- Grassroots open standards allow specification documents to evolve from the bottom up in inclusive commons based ecosystems.
- Grassroots standardization aligns top-down protocol design with innovation in the creative cauldron of the commons.
- The social web offers opportunities to natively support standardization processes, and decentralize specifications.
- Specifications as code that may be bundled with their apps and services, and can be introspected at actor endpoints.
- Decentralized specification hubs can serve the interoperability needs for different interest groups and solution domains.
- FEP may become the fediverse evolution process and be part of protocol design that enables robust solution development.
- Work on the ActivityPub API offers opportunity to reposition the FEP as federated service for Grassroots standardization.
- With ActivityPub as a grassroots standard, fediverse can be the Future of social networking where we Reimagine social.