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Comment by smarx007 | Hacker News Reader

The standard is awesome and looks well-designed. The biggest issue is that it was lead solely by the people around Mastodon/Pump.io/Mediagoblin. While not a bad thing per se (on the contrary, it shows a commitment to a free internet), it means that there is little chance for it to penetrate the general (social) networking scene (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, VK etc.).

Did you try reaching out to each of those major social networking websites to offer collaboration on this standard?

P.S. I understand that ActivityPub represents a radical shift from the centralised social networking, but if I remember correctly Facebook, Google and IBM previously collaborated on open widgets and related functionality until the efforts fell apart: https://github.com/OpenSocial/spec

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> Did you try reaching out to each of those major social networking websites to offer collaboration on this standard?

What possible benefit would it give companies whose entire business value revolves around their data...to just give that data away to anyone?

Here's what I learned from working on the DIASPORA* project: The only people that federated/distributed social networking benefits are the 1% of nerds who know how to use it. Everyone else is hopelessly, and willingly, attached at the hip to their social network of choice. Most of the issues or feature requests fell into the following two categories:

1.) I need $FEATURE otherwise I can't use DIASPORA* at all. 2.) Why doesn't $FEATURE in DIASPORA* work like /Facebook|Twitter|Google/? If we made it work exactly like that, regardless of the fact that it makes no sense on a distributed network, we'd be able to actually compete with a $100bil social network! Wow!

Both of these are pipe dreams. With #1, the person is convincing themselves that they want to use D*, but in reality they just want Facebook without Facebook actually owning their data. #2 is the notion that a company like Facebook or Google, who both simultaneously and independently got rid of the last remaining "interoperable standard" in their business: XMPP. Yes, XMPP...once the golden boy of federated discussion platforms...has been totally deprecated by the top two implementors.

Why? Because building their own, centralized IM service is not only more lucrative, it's also a lot easier and less expensive.

The fact that anyone actually sat down and took the time to build specs for federated social networking is a miracle to me...considering there's practically zero business value in it.

> but in reality they just want Facebook without Facebook actually owning their data

Truer words-. Thank you both for working on diaspora* and also for your subsequent realization that completely-unnecessary-decentralization-just-for-its-own-sake is not actually what 99.9% of people want. They just want to be in control of their data.

Decentralisation provides no benefits to users, only burdens. Federation is there to provide scalability and resilience to admins and designers of the network. The ultimate federated social network is the one that does not need to mention it at all to users because it has zero impact on how they use it.

> What possible benefit would it give companies whose entire business value revolves around their data.

You are right, but inviting them is still worth doing. BTW, diaspora* should have also been invited, but as I understand, they were.

> federated/distributed social networking benefits are the 1% of nerds

I actually tried to understand how can I benefit from a distributed social network and did not (I almost stopped using FB as well, not for the privacy reasons, but because of little utility given the time it consumes).

> Yes, XMPP...once the golden boy of federated discussion platforms...has been totally deprecated by the top two implementors. Why?

For Google it was primarily because Microsoft used their XMPP integration in Outlook but refused to allow Google to have a similar Skype integration. Somewhere on HN Googlers were writing about this. Don't remember, but I think FB also integrated Google Talk as well without allowing reciprocal integration for Google.

> The fact that anyone actually sat down and took the time to build specs for federated social networking is a miracle to me...considering there's practically zero business value in it.

Again, I agree, but there is zero value in a good spec that is followed by a single product. At least diaspora* and GNU Social should agree on this standard so that we can in future use different federated social network distros.

We did reach out to both all the major centralized social networks and also all the distributed social networks. The major social centralized networks didn't seem interested in participating in this round, but they were welcomed and encouraged to become part of the group iirc.

While, I'm W3C staff contact for the working group now, I wasn't involved as staff when the group started, so I'm not sure exactly what happened. By W3C practice, ever member organization is consulted on every new thing we do, though, so Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc were informed and asked for input and invited to participate. The public is also informed, although I don't know how much people pay attention to W3C news, and the framing might not have caught the right people's attention: https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/3958. I still have a hard time understanding what that announcement is talking about.

In any case, as other people have said, perhaps these companies didn't see the business case to participate. This baffles me a little. I can see why as the market leader Facebook wouldn't necessarily benefit financially from helping the effort, but if I were them, I'd want to at least have someone in the room, paying attention. And if I were anyone else, I'd probably see the value in teaming up and helping. But that's not what happened, so I'm clearly wrong about something. It's possible they just thought the problem was too hard and the group would never succeed, so it wasn't worth paying it any attention. My sense is it's done well enough that with more help it might have done great. But it was touch and go at many points, and I personally thought it would go nowhere until our Paris meeting, about 8 months in. It's also possible they just didn't have anyone senior enough to handle the job who had any desire to do it.

And yes, OpenSocial were one of the big motivators for this work starting at W3C (as the news announcement says). But, aside from IBM, they never actually showed up in the group. Someday, I'd like to understand that, too.

I would argue it's also, uh, not in their business model whatsoever to support efforts like this (thinking Facebook especially). Better to develop the spec and forge on now, or we'd be waiting around for a long time.

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