5 ms·

My first thought: "is this a Mastodon instance?" The answer is "no, but they are using Solid[0]." [0]: https://solidproject.org/ https://solidproject.org/

jacooper 4y ago
What is the advantage of using Solid? Its not exactly successful, and people are already complaining of Mastodons complexity in their Twitter replies. So I dont think would improve the situation at all.
- rektide 4y ago
  The difference is abstract & ehether that makes a difference for users or not depends on what we do with it. Mastadon is a one-off custom protocol. It latter grew some ActivityPub interop but Im not sure how deep that goes. Solid is a layered set of more general protocols. Its good for building vastly unimaginably wider sets of online systems with. We could go reimplement a Mastadon & stop there. But those same layers could/should also give us a strong interoperable basis to do a bajillion other connected online things, & have a wide variety of clients sites & servers possibly interoperate well. The layer cake alsp means its more likely we could reuse part of the stack while improving or retrofitting other parts. There's always a difficult battle, describing to people why architecture matters. It may not. But to a programmer, the architecture bounds the space, shapes what is possible. Some people just care about end user experience, but for the person engaged in bringing out the future- developers- architecture is abstract, but means a lot. I think Solid has very good groundwork & could easily reshape developing online systems quickly. If there is continued push to refine & advance the libraries, toolkits & frameworks available. Having more competition within the solid exosystem would be a good ineicator to me, that there is sufficienct diversity so that the niche can explore & expand & grow effectively. Places where multiple ideas are playing out win, and open source can be great for that.
  - posguy 4y ago
    What about Mastodon isn't interoperable with other ActivityPub services? IIRC Pleroma and other ActivityPub implementations play nice together with Mastodon in a fully federated manner. Its been like this for half a decade already.

jacooper 4y ago

What is the advantage of using Solid? Its not exactly successful, and people are already complaining of Mastodons complexity in their Twitter replies. So I dont think would improve the situation at all.

rektide 4y ago
The difference is abstract & ehether that makes a difference for users or not depends on what we do with it. Mastadon is a one-off custom protocol. It latter grew some ActivityPub interop but Im not sure how deep that goes. Solid is a layered set of more general protocols. Its good for building vastly unimaginably wider sets of online systems with. We could go reimplement a Mastadon & stop there. But those same layers could/should also give us a strong interoperable basis to do a bajillion other connected online things, & have a wide variety of clients sites & servers possibly interoperate well. The layer cake alsp means its more likely we could reuse part of the stack while improving or retrofitting other parts. There's always a difficult battle, describing to people why architecture matters. It may not. But to a programmer, the architecture bounds the space, shapes what is possible. Some people just care about end user experience, but for the person engaged in bringing out the future- developers- architecture is abstract, but means a lot. I think Solid has very good groundwork & could easily reshape developing online systems quickly. If there is continued push to refine & advance the libraries, toolkits & frameworks available. Having more competition within the solid exosystem would be a good ineicator to me, that there is sufficienct diversity so that the niche can explore & expand & grow effectively. Places where multiple ideas are playing out win, and open source can be great for that.
- posguy 4y ago
  What about Mastodon isn't interoperable with other ActivityPub services? IIRC Pleroma and other ActivityPub implementations play nice together with Mastodon in a fully federated manner. Its been like this for half a decade already.