Post #1126417

2026-04-13 11:35 UTC

@smallcircles@social.coop when you say things are my "personal" preference, you make it sound like I am just some guy off the street. I'm not. I wrote StatusNet and pump.io. I developed OStatus, and cowrote AS2 and AP. I wrote the book about ActivityPub. My personal preferences were built into the standard a long time ago.

Replies (2)

@evan@cosocial.ca 2026-04-13 11:44

@smallcircles@social.coop I think the question you are asking is how we let people express their preferences for interacting with different types of automated actors. I think the NoBots solution is fine; it reminds me of robots.txt. "indexable" and "discoverable" are also fine.

Open ##1126497
@smallcircles@social.coop 2026-04-13 16:07

@evan It is not meant that way at all. I mean "any developer's personal choice at time of impl" because the standard allows such versatility. Since in this case you posed it to me its "you as a dev's personal choice". There are 3 options: 1. It is not standardized, everyone is free to choose. 2. There's an informal convention, turning de facto standard. 3. It is formalized, part of the standard. When saying "protocol decay" I always mean as the IETF doc on it defines it: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9413.html#name-protocol-decay On "evolution". Evolution to where? What are the common goals, the shared vision? When is something evolution vs. devolution if people are hemmed into a de facto standard full of app-specific choices made in the past? "I can't have more profile fields". Why? Does Linked Data restrict you, or does some app not handle more than N fields? The latter is protocol decay. I've been tooting about Emergence. Many emergent systems in Nature have no interesting outcome. What fedi is emerging?

Open ##1339721