FediForum is a virtual conference that starts on June 5. If they had asked me to keynote, this is roughly what I would say. #
Imho this stuff is pretty freaking simple, esp since there are well over 20 years of prior art to use, and not that many ways to do what we're trying to do. I'm impatient, so here's a quick set of observations with my opinion, take it for what it's worth, ymmv, etc. #
You shouldn't be reinventing so much. Always look around for prior art. That will make it possible for you to interop more quickly at both a software level and at a human level. #
Don't invent stuff you think you may need later. Save that for later. You have no intuition for what's needed and more important nothing to test against. You will get it wrong 100 percent of the time.#
Don't invent stuff you think you may need later that makes what you're doing now more complicated. I see a lot of that in ActivityPub. #
The only reason you're doing all this work is for interop. If you've been doing it for years and you don't have much meaningful interop you're doing it wrong.#
Write the software first. Use formats that exist, or if you must invent new stuff, make sure it's simple. Work on its simplicity as you would any other feature. Factor! If there are going to be 100 interoperable products and you make it a little more difficult to implement, that work will be multiplied 100 times. And it be a barrier to entry, so you may not get the most powerful interop possible with the most interesting products. #
Read and follow the Rules for Standards-makers. There aren't that many. But if you're breaking them, you're not going to end up with a standard. If your goal is to appear to be making standards, you should also read RFSM, and don't do anything in it. I've seen people do that btw. #
Have you looked at the world outside the tech stuff to see how important this all has become? All the time we're wasting is very costly in everything that depends on the social web actually existing as opposed to just being talked about.#
Now, what would I request if I could influence you??#
Mastodon and Bluesky should support inbound and outbound RSS, and do it really well. Right now they do outbound only, and the implementations are incomplete at covering the functionality they have now, and there needs to be more (see the next item). #
They'd support the basic features of the textcasting spec, including Markdown because it's a great standard, very much of the same school as RSS. If it had existed when we did RSS 2.0 it would have been part of it. #
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)
