NodeBB

@evan@cosocial.ca Can I say something, as someone who is not technical but cares deeply about the fediverse and its future, and who read the whole conversation with great interest?

You might be familiar with the term "desire path". It's when a place, like a park, has pre-designed pathways, but people end up using their own, because they are more convenient. This is not user error - it's a design failure.

I've been hearing complaints about JSON-LD since I was in Firefish. When so many people -including even people who co-wrote ActivityPub!- tell you that it's problematic, that it has ended up not being used, that most projects find their own shortcuts (or desire paths) and we need to find a better way, telling them "you should just use it as it was designed" comes off as arrogant and short-sighted. And these are not people who work for BlueSky or people who want to see fedi fail - they are people who care so much about ActivityPub that they have studied it and built whole applications around it. It's not nice to dismiss them like that.

You have co-written and are largely responsible for something that was meant to be used by people and developers. Clearly, its core is great, or it wouldn't have been relatively successful. But if parts of it were too complicated and have not been adopted, then it's a design problem with these parts. A good protocol should be easy to work with and build on.

I don't think you should be scared of breaking backwards compatibility. This is sometimes an essential part of progress - and if something doesn't progress, it usually dies. For how long will people keep building on a protocol that stays stagnant to not break backwards compatibility? Ten years? Twenty? Yes, you don't want to make big changes very often. But never making big changes also doesn't make much sense. Especially regarding parts that are not used as intended in practice, therefore have proven to have failed. Accept it and find collective ways to improve ActivityPub, or blame everyone else for not following to the letter a spec that obviously doesn't fit well with their needs.
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