New Social Web Working Group at W3C

One Community Group document that will be moving into the Working Group is LOLA, the live data portability spec that originated in the CG’s Data Portability Task Force. LOLA lets users move from one ActivityPub server to another while retaining all their social connections, their content, and their reactions. It’s a great improvement for data portability on the social web.

Exciting stuff!

Awesome!

Are the Lemmy and piefed devs going to be a part of this? We need some representation so its not all addressing micro blogging things

To my knowledge, one must be an "invited expert" in order to join these discussions.

However, the working group is only one aspect. The community group has been in existence for a number of years. I am part of that group (although I admit I don't go to as many meetings as I ought to), and try to represent the threadiverse as best as I can.

While LOLA is great, I'd really love an established handshake mechanism for having two accounts on two bespoke services represent the same user.

For example, I want to have a pixel fed and mastodon presence that can be authored between the two. However, you currently can't make two accounts that are effectively linked to each other. I feel like this linking is important for further decentralizing the fediverse (by effectively decentralizing the user itself)

This is something I believe the ActivityPub API can tackle...

That's because AP as it is implemented today is crap, it's a superficial compatibility layer on top of a proprietary (as in, doing non-standardized stuff) platform. We need to take it on its head and make AP the actual core then build on top but that requires some work

What is this proprietary layer you speak of?

The mastodon api, or the lemmy api, or the xyz api. Eagh platform has its own. Being public doesn't make it standard, hence the "proprietary" qualifier

Oh I see. Yes, AP first apps would be great, but getting older apps connected via AP is important too.

NodeBB predates ActivityPub (or came around the same time), and so we added it recently. It works quite well with our existing code. Not much of a compatibility layer.