There's a joke in movement politics that if you have one Trotskyist (and you can replace "Trotskyist" with any number of other denominations), you have one Party; if you have two Trotskyists, you have two Factions; and if you have three Trotskyists, you have a party split.
It feels like that's the vibe the open social media space is in nowadays. People feel that they need to pick a side and defend it, preferring to eat one another's face rather than make sure the leopards don't. I guess in a way that's very social media. It's also very stupid.
I would like to relieve the tedium of this posturing by making a suggestion that everyone can hate together. Or, more seriously, I would like to go through a short exercise to demonstrate that it might not be the dumbest thing to pay a little bit more attention to interesting architectural details. This can set the stage for a broader discussion of social media on the Web.
This is just a sketch and it has issues. I initially wanted to prototype this but the situation at work is such that I have precious little bandwidth for prototyping (so I'm mostly dumping my notes onto this blog). Think of it as a design provocation , and the provocation is this:
With relatively little work, we could run ActivityPub atop an AT Protocol PDS.
I won't try to convince you that we could do that without making some modifications to the current state of either or both, but I would like to draw your attention to why this is something worth thinking about and, with any luck, convince you that we should be moving in that direction (even if not necessarily this exact combo). Note that I find it hard to believe that I would be the first person to think of this, but I failed to find anything. Maybe you think that I ought to be the only person to ever have this idea.