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I wish something like this would work, but there's no way this one will take off. I don't actually have any idea what it's for. Is it a twitter replacement? fa

I wish something like this would work, but there's no way this one will take off. I don't actually have any idea what it's for. Is it a twitter replacement? facebook competitor? Message board for fantasy nerds? There's no way mainstream users would go for this. It looks like an 90s fan site for some YA fantasy series. They're going to scoff at this if they stumble on this. As a technical user looking for something I could setup for small groups to use as an alternative to facebook, I can't even tell if this would work or not. I'm still not 100% this isn't some kind of cute indie mmo...

ionforce 6y ago
Completely agree. It's like engineers consistently fail to recognize that users generally don't care about the internals. If it doesn't LOOK like FB why use it?
- eitland 6y ago
  It is a careful balance isn't it? Maybe theya are just trying to recruit early techy users for now?
egypturnash 6y ago
Yeah this does not do a good job of explaining itself. Maybe the video does but I haven't watched it. From what I can tell it seems to be a project with the long-term goal of building a federated VR world atop the Fediverse, with a bunch of building blocks for that split out as separate projects: running untrusted programs from federated sources, storing files on federated sources, transferring money via federated sources, etc. From a higher level I feel like, you know how there's a whole bunch of projects/companies/VC sinks whose description is "here is a familiar function but ON THE BLOCKCHAIN"? This is a bunch of those but ON THE FEDIVERSE instead. And with cute painterly mascots instead of weird little single-color abstract logos.
paroneayea 6y ago
When I started working on standardizing ActivityPub in the W3C Social Working Group, the main thing I heard from everyone (including here on Hacker News was): "You're wasting your time. There's no way you're going to get all these projects to talk to each other, everyone building distributed social software is too stubborn to do that." Now ActivityPub is the most widely adopted federated social network standard on the web ever, with dozens of projects using it, thousands of servers, and millions of users. I did sometimes feel like giving up when I heard that kind of feedback then, but I'm glad I didn't. I'm not going to give up here either. The project is ambitious. It's broken into many subprojects so that even if the larger goal doesn't succeed, we might still get a number of useful pieces out of it. But I've learned not to let comments like this dissuade me. If I had, ActivityPub wouldn't have happened. We might fail, but more likely, we'll have a partial success, which is still useful. And it's worth trying.
- ehutch79 6y ago
  Wait. I thought we were talking about something called spritely, which seems to be an end user product? Not a w3c standard?
  - paroneayea 6y ago
    ActivityPub is indeed a W3C standard; it's what connects together what's called the "federated social web" today. (Mastodon, Pleroma, Peertube, etc etc etc...) I am co-author of the standard. Spritely is a series of subprojects, ultimately building on top of, and extending the capacities of, the federated social web. But my point was that when beginning work on ActivityPub as a standard, the kinds of comments on here were similarly negative. Of course you're not going to get a universal social network standard! Nobody's been able to do it, it's just out of reach. Might as well give up now. Of course, now that ActivityPub has succeeded, people take it as a given that it was going to succeed. Criticism instead moves to certain design decisions, and that's fair and warranted. But hindsight makes those things that have been done seem as if they were always going to be done. But at a time, it looked like ActivityPub itself, the thing we do have, could not possibly succeed, and people told me as such in many places, especially on here. Nobody questions that it happened now of course. So now I am proposing a multitude of layers in which we can make things better. But it hasn't happened yet, and so of course the response is going to be, once again, that of course it's not possible... So, Spritely isn't just an end-user thing because it's multiple layers, though a few of them are end-user layers (it's more of a laboratory for advancing the federated social web). It's true that it isn't a web standard itself, even though it aims to enhance the ecosystem that uses that web standard. But the point is: it's really demoralizing to get these kinds of comments, but they're the most common kinds of comments one gets on HN. Sometimes I did think about giving up on ActivityPub standardization. Ultimately I'm glad now that I didn't. So I think we can do cool and interesting things here with Spritely, and my lesson from the past is to not give up now either.
    - cxr 6y ago
      This is all well and good, but it's not really the right response to the person you're replying to. There's about as much connection between this response and the comment you're replying as there is between that comment itself and what Spritely actually is. They're not coming at it from a place where they grok what you're trying to do and saying that you're doomed. The issue is that they've failed to satisfy the precondition of understanding things well enough to have an opinion about whether you're doomed. They think that whether "mainstream users would go for this" is somehow in scope.
detaro 6y ago
I think at the current stage you are looking at an early draft of the HTML spec and wonder where to put the tweets in. Waaay ahead of any point to tell anything about what "user would go for".
- ehutch79 6y ago
  It's unclear that this is a protocol spec and not an end product then.
  - detaro 6y ago
    The top entry in the list is clearly labeled as just a library that's "working alpha", everything else with even less developed stages.
    - ehutch79 6y ago
      I honestly glossed over it because it looked like a list of developers
rektide 6y ago
I for one feel extremely sympathetic to this work. As Jobs said, it's not about personal computing, it's about interpersonal computing. You seem, to me, very focused on applications & products, but to me, there is a missing layer of tools & technologies that are available to begin to make applications & networks. While you "don't actually have any idea what it's for", I can picture dozens, hundreds of applications that could be built on the basis of Spritely. I'm not sure why you are so imagination starved? In contrast, you could put me on stage & I could enumerate different applications & systems that could use this tech for 15 minutes. The realm of what is possible with better connected computing primitives, that are available off the shelf, seems near endless. And my hope is, it's friendly to users. That people appreciate the spirited presentation. I don't see that "[mainstream users are] going to scoff at this if they stumble on this," I see a means to give people far more powers & to upt them in control.
- Cilvic 6y ago
  I'd love to hear some of those ideas here.
  - rektide 6y ago
    I have a hard time thinking of software that would not be easier to develop, if one could take this infrastructure for granted. Data storage & networking are a huge part of the lift, that we can sometimes reach for tools on but which are always in large part artisinally crafted per application, & getting these concerns well implemented, and implemented in a user-empowering fashion is a huge leg up for any kind of app development. The more networked you want to get, the clearer it seems Spritely is a win. If there's only some networking- a todo application shared between devices- your advantage is significant. If you want to share that todo list between a bunch of family members, & delegate tasks, you go from using the data-storage system & some modest networking to relying much more heavily on other aspects like Goblins distributed programming/ocap, Brux contact management, Mandy activitypub for sharing. Basically I'd just be standing on stage listing different apps. All apps need many of these components, for almost all apps are connected apps these days: the assumption is that the data will be available across systems, across devices. We have surprisingly little to bring to bear here; most apps end up doing an enormous amount of artisinal hand-craft work to build their own back-end infrastructure layers. The few couple platforms targeting general app-dev like AWS AppSync & Google Firebase have very limited scope & goals, less concern with our public, standardized multi-user network tech like ActivityPub & ocap, & only provide what they provide, are not open enough to themselves be enhanced & extended & experimented with, only atop.

ionforce 6y ago

Completely agree. It's like engineers consistently fail to recognize that users generally don't care about the internals. If it doesn't LOOK like FB why use it?

eitland 6y ago
It is a careful balance isn't it? Maybe theya are just trying to recruit early techy users for now?

egypturnash 6y ago

Yeah this does not do a good job of explaining itself. Maybe the video does but I haven't watched it. From what I can tell it seems to be a project with the long-term goal of building a federated VR world atop the Fediverse, with a bunch of building blocks for that split out as separate projects: running untrusted programs from federated sources, storing files on federated sources, transferring money via federated sources, etc. From a higher level I feel like, you know how there's a whole bunch of projects/companies/VC sinks whose description is "here is a familiar function but ON THE BLOCKCHAIN"? This is a bunch of those but ON THE FEDIVERSE instead. And with cute painterly mascots instead of weird little single-color abstract logos.

paroneayea 6y ago

When I started working on standardizing ActivityPub in the W3C Social Working Group, the main thing I heard from everyone (including here on Hacker News was): "You're wasting your time. There's no way you're going to get all these projects to talk to each other, everyone building distributed social software is too stubborn to do that." Now ActivityPub is the most widely adopted federated social network standard on the web ever, with dozens of projects using it, thousands of servers, and millions of users. I did sometimes feel like giving up when I heard that kind of feedback then, but I'm glad I didn't. I'm not going to give up here either. The project is ambitious. It's broken into many subprojects so that even if the larger goal doesn't succeed, we might still get a number of useful pieces out of it. But I've learned not to let comments like this dissuade me. If I had, ActivityPub wouldn't have happened. We might fail, but more likely, we'll have a partial success, which is still useful. And it's worth trying.

ehutch79 6y ago
Wait. I thought we were talking about something called spritely, which seems to be an end user product? Not a w3c standard?
- paroneayea 6y ago
  ActivityPub is indeed a W3C standard; it's what connects together what's called the "federated social web" today. (Mastodon, Pleroma, Peertube, etc etc etc...) I am co-author of the standard. Spritely is a series of subprojects, ultimately building on top of, and extending the capacities of, the federated social web. But my point was that when beginning work on ActivityPub as a standard, the kinds of comments on here were similarly negative. Of course you're not going to get a universal social network standard! Nobody's been able to do it, it's just out of reach. Might as well give up now. Of course, now that ActivityPub has succeeded, people take it as a given that it was going to succeed. Criticism instead moves to certain design decisions, and that's fair and warranted. But hindsight makes those things that have been done seem as if they were always going to be done. But at a time, it looked like ActivityPub itself, the thing we do have, could not possibly succeed, and people told me as such in many places, especially on here. Nobody questions that it happened now of course. So now I am proposing a multitude of layers in which we can make things better. But it hasn't happened yet, and so of course the response is going to be, once again, that of course it's not possible... So, Spritely isn't just an end-user thing because it's multiple layers, though a few of them are end-user layers (it's more of a laboratory for advancing the federated social web). It's true that it isn't a web standard itself, even though it aims to enhance the ecosystem that uses that web standard. But the point is: it's really demoralizing to get these kinds of comments, but they're the most common kinds of comments one gets on HN. Sometimes I did think about giving up on ActivityPub standardization. Ultimately I'm glad now that I didn't. So I think we can do cool and interesting things here with Spritely, and my lesson from the past is to not give up now either.
  - cxr 6y ago
    This is all well and good, but it's not really the right response to the person you're replying to. There's about as much connection between this response and the comment you're replying as there is between that comment itself and what Spritely actually is. They're not coming at it from a place where they grok what you're trying to do and saying that you're doomed. The issue is that they've failed to satisfy the precondition of understanding things well enough to have an opinion about whether you're doomed. They think that whether "mainstream users would go for this" is somehow in scope.

detaro 6y ago

I think at the current stage you are looking at an early draft of the HTML spec and wonder where to put the tweets in. Waaay ahead of any point to tell anything about what "user would go for".

ehutch79 6y ago
It's unclear that this is a protocol spec and not an end product then.
- detaro 6y ago
  The top entry in the list is clearly labeled as just a library that's "working alpha", everything else with even less developed stages.
  - ehutch79 6y ago
    I honestly glossed over it because it looked like a list of developers

rektide 6y ago

I for one feel extremely sympathetic to this work. As Jobs said, it's not about personal computing, it's about interpersonal computing. You seem, to me, very focused on applications & products, but to me, there is a missing layer of tools & technologies that are available to begin to make applications & networks. While you "don't actually have any idea what it's for", I can picture dozens, hundreds of applications that could be built on the basis of Spritely. I'm not sure why you are so imagination starved? In contrast, you could put me on stage & I could enumerate different applications & systems that could use this tech for 15 minutes. The realm of what is possible with better connected computing primitives, that are available off the shelf, seems near endless. And my hope is, it's friendly to users. That people appreciate the spirited presentation. I don't see that "[mainstream users are] going to scoff at this if they stumble on this," I see a means to give people far more powers & to upt them in control.

Cilvic 6y ago
I'd love to hear some of those ideas here.
- rektide 6y ago
  I have a hard time thinking of software that would not be easier to develop, if one could take this infrastructure for granted. Data storage & networking are a huge part of the lift, that we can sometimes reach for tools on but which are always in large part artisinally crafted per application, & getting these concerns well implemented, and implemented in a user-empowering fashion is a huge leg up for any kind of app development. The more networked you want to get, the clearer it seems Spritely is a win. If there's only some networking- a todo application shared between devices- your advantage is significant. If you want to share that todo list between a bunch of family members, & delegate tasks, you go from using the data-storage system & some modest networking to relying much more heavily on other aspects like Goblins distributed programming/ocap, Brux contact management, Mandy activitypub for sharing. Basically I'd just be standing on stage listing different apps. All apps need many of these components, for almost all apps are connected apps these days: the assumption is that the data will be available across systems, across devices. We have surprisingly little to bring to bear here; most apps end up doing an enormous amount of artisinal hand-craft work to build their own back-end infrastructure layers. The few couple platforms targeting general app-dev like AWS AppSync & Google Firebase have very limited scope & goals, less concern with our public, standardized multi-user network tech like ActivityPub & ocap, & only provide what they provide, are not open enough to themselves be enhanced & extended & experimented with, only atop.