Standards work is about coming together and working on reaching a shared consensus on a thing. We don't do corporate politics, or government politics, at standards meetings nor venues.

Sure, you can disagree on things outside of the standards world, but within, the only thing that matters is advancing the standards and building them right.

Like, when running the ActivityPub Trust and Safety taskforce, we had Meta employees show up to our meetings, and they were genuinely helpful (volunteering for instance to scribe the meeting, which is like one of the hardest jobs to fill at a standards meeting), and when they joined I had to repeat that golden rule of standards: we leave corporate politics and our company's at the door.

We did have one or two people mad that they were present, but luckily I didn't have to explicitly remind anyone of the W3C code of conduct which governs those meetings.

Standards work is truly a bit weird like that. It takes a lot of discipline to separate out those things severance style: an innie and an outie with regards to the standards work.

Finally, we live under capitalism, or at least the vast majority of us do (it's always interesting when someone from the CCP shows up at a standards meeting!), and living under capitalism means everything revolves around money.

W3C membership ain't cheap: membership dues start at like €2,000 and go up to like €60,000 or something.

As an Invited Expert, I'm allowed to participate without paying the W3C. However, I still need to be paid for my time, because time equals money under capitalism for 99% of us.

Bluesky stepping up to fund this work is a genuinely good thing, regardless of what you may think of bluesky as a company or social app.

There weren't really any other companies with an interest in decentralized social that could fund work at this scale. An NLNet grant probably wouldn't be workable for this, and operates at a much slower pace.

Anyway, hopefully that gives you a better idea of how standards are built and funded.

@scottjenson this was instigated from mastodon.social too, because it for some reason did not respect the fact that I'd blocked someone who'd previously engaged in bad faith with me (see discord)

@thisismissem just here to say thank you. To you. And to Bluesky. I have Opinions about them, sure, but funding you through a Grant is an objectively Good thing that helps us (as in the entire web!) move forward in a proper way.

I am grateful for your work, your contributions, your integrity, and your expertise!

Go Open Standards!

@thisismissem I just saw the replies and . I don't even know how these people managed to connect bluesky with nazis, much less made it out like you were being sold into slavery. I swear a lot of people here think they know more about software development and ethics than they actually do

Here's these posts in blog article form: https://writings.thisismissem.social/how-standards-are-made/

@scottjenson I did write up this on how standards are made though: https://writings.thisismissem.social/how-standards-are-made/

Like, I may not agree with Mastodon's own decisions, but if Mastodon (now a W3C Member organisation) shows up to a FedCM meeting, I would be working with them, even though outside of the standards environment, I will not work with Mastodon at the moment.

I’m so glad you’re working on FedCM, Emelia. It’s a tech we’ve needed for a while, and I’m much more comfortable knowing you’ll have a hand in getting it over the line.

Too many people see *everything* as a purity test. It’s exhausting, and nobody here is perfect.

So you go spend BlueSky’s money, block the haters, and make some awesome stuff that moves the rest of us forward.

@thisismissem

@benpate that's the idea! And you've already seen examples of how I can take money and amplify it's outcomes in many positive ways — like, the improvements to Mastodon's OAuth implementation were all directly happening as a result of IFTAS paying me a good amount of money to work on Trust and Safety tooling, I was able to have energy and time to do both those things.

@thisismissem Congrats on the grant/solid income (and sorry to hear people are awful).

Bluesky may not be perfect, but it's absolutely *wild* to see people act like it's some sort of across the red line evil. On the list of companies that run social networks, it has to be well and beyond on the better end of them, and society would be better off if people moved to Bluesky than staying on where most of them are now.

@ocdtrekkie yeah, like, I mean, I would have thought twice about it if, uh, X or Truth Social wanted to fund my work. Those would probably be receiving a "yeah, no thanks, I don't think we're ideologically aligned to make this work well"

@benpate
Now after reading this I have tears in my eyes and I am still very, verry happy for
@thisismissem and for us all. Sometimes things are allowed to fit and to work out.

@thisismissem You trusted Meta to take accurate minutes? Dear God.

@yala @benpate indeed! There's actually a really interesting and strong overlap between all these protocols, and when we work together on our commonalities, we can all achieve new heights. There's this really interesting pattern I've observed of protocols having convergent evolution as they grow and evolve.

Fairly infamously, ActivityPub has inboxes and AT Protocol doesn't, and that sets the protocol apart. Interestingly, there's a small group within ATP who want to see some form of an inbox end point for AT Protocol, even though we like the replication strategy overall, we recognize that with an inbox there's some interesting things you can do at an application layer.

At the same time, there's folks on the ActivityPub side working to figure out using DID's for identity and URL schemes for addressing content, and handles that maybe aren't over webfinger, which are all concepts AT Protocol shipped & popularised.

Same with overlaps between Solid, AT Protocol and ActivityPub (C2S) when it comes to authorization and private data.

So like we can have different protocols that make different trade-offs, but share ideas and work together when it makes sense to. This FedCM is the first strong effort to do that with money behind it. As someone from the bluesky team said to me "in general we try to friends with the activitypub crowd.", that is there's no hostility from their side, they chose to do their own things because they had different requirements that didn't really work within ActivityPub, and that's fine.

The biggest source of hostility that I see is from people trying to pick a winning protocol like they're betting on a horse or their favorite sports team, or people who stand to benefit greatly if a protocol can be deemed the "winner" (vested interests); very commonly people on bluesky come across me working across protocols and go "yeah, I made the jump because of how toxic the AP community are", which is always a loss for AP when I hear their stories.

@MiriShuli they are collaboratively edited and yes, they did take accurate minutes for that meeting. During calls we usually have multiple people editing the notes, but the lead scribe is a hard role to fill, as it means not being as active in talking. Talking and typing what was said (listening actively), are two very different roles.

Within the standards community, we collaborate across companies, and if anyone misrepresents things we absolutely call it out and resolve it.

I also do an edit pass on all notes we publish to make sure my recollection is consistent (and ask others for clarification if the notes are unclear.

That's how standards work works.

@thisismissem my absolute first guess would be people in general are scared of things they don't know, and combine that with a sense of urgency and shoot first...it is incredibly valuable that what may seem opaque can be demonstrated as transparent. You stepping up and giving outsiders insight is priceless.

@thisismissem
I'm not really aware of the second part of the last paragraph, but that is my personal ignorance.

I'd be interested in some interop and overlap comments from @activitypods: How do you see FedCM from your angle?

@benpate

@yala @activitypods @benpate I'm actually attending a Solid meeting tomorrow, first in 3 years after leaving Inrupt

@thisismissem From what I can tell the only standard Meta meets is one of Abuse and Exploitation.

I’m happy to know other people read and collaborated on the notes, but it seems very risky to let them frame how the discussions went. Trusting Meta, Google, Oracle et al is how we got here.

Collaboration with Nazi’s, and Zuck is a card carrying Nazi, isn’t that impressive.

@MiriShuli once again, in the standards community we leave our companies at the door. That's how it works.

There a countless standards you'd be using right now that were lead or contributed to by each of those companies

@MiriShuli While I completely understand having reservations, it's important to remember that there are still amazing, dedicated people working at some of these companies, who put their jobs and livelihoods on the line for the things they believe in.

Google fires 28 workers who protested selling technology to Israel

Employees staged sit-ins at Google's offices this week demanding the company stop selling its technology to the Israeli government. Google then fired more than two dozen of these workers.

NPR (www.npr.org)

‘It’s Total Chaos Internally at Meta Right Now’: Employees Protest Zuckerberg’s Anti LGBTQ Changes

Meta's decision to specifically allow users to call LGBTQ+ people "mentally ill" has sparked widespread backlash at the company.

404 Media (www.404media.co)

@thisismissem