ActivityPub is indeed a W3C standard; it's what connects together what's called the "federated social web" today. (Mastodon, Pleroma, Peertube, etc etc etc...) I am co-author of the standard. Spritely is a series of subprojects, ultimately building on top of, and extending the capacities of, the federated social web.
But my point was that when beginning work on ActivityPub as a standard, the kinds of comments on here were similarly negative. Of course you're not going to get a universal social network standard! Nobody's been able to do it, it's just out of reach. Might as well give up now.
Of course, now that ActivityPub has succeeded, people take it as a given that it was going to succeed. Criticism instead moves to certain design decisions, and that's fair and warranted. But hindsight makes those things that have been done seem as if they were always going to be done.
But at a time, it looked like ActivityPub itself, the thing we do have, could not possibly succeed, and people told me as such in many places, especially on here. Nobody questions that it happened now of course. So now I am proposing a multitude of layers in which we can make things better.
But it hasn't happened yet, and so of course the response is going to be, once again, that of course it's not possible...
So, Spritely isn't just an end-user thing because it's multiple layers, though a few of them are end-user layers (it's more of a laboratory for advancing the federated social web). It's true that it isn't a web standard itself, even though it aims to enhance the ecosystem that uses that web standard. But the point is: it's really demoralizing to get these kinds of comments, but they're the most common kinds of comments one gets on HN. Sometimes I did think about giving up on ActivityPub standardization. Ultimately I'm glad now that I didn't. So I think we can do cool and interesting things here with Spritely, and my lesson from the past is to not give up now either.
This is all well and good, but it's not really the right response to the person you're replying to. There's about as much connection between this response and the comment you're replying as there is between that comment itself and what Spritely actually is.
They're not coming at it from a place where they grok what you're trying to do and saying that you're doomed. The issue is that they've failed to satisfy the precondition of understanding things well enough to have an opinion about whether you're doomed. They think that whether "mainstream users would go for this" is somehow in scope.
That's all true and well, and the Spritely website does explain what it's going to do, but it's in a lot of words and I think that this isn't easy for people to absorb. I did put together a video which does a better job: https://conf.tube/videos/watch/18aa2f92-36cc-4424-9a4f-6f2de...
But I think part of the problem is that it's very hard to explain to people in words how something is going to work. In general people better understand from experiences. That's why Spritely is actually taking a demo-centric approach... people understand better from experiences than from being told. I wrote about this more here recently: https://dustycloud.org/blog/if-you-cant-tell-people-anything...
... which has a really interesting quote in it about how baffled people were about the idea of hyperlinks:
> Years ago, before Lucasfilm, I worked for Project Xanadu (the original hypertext project, way before this newfangled World Wide Web thing). One of the things I did was travel around the country trying to evangelize the idea of hypertext. People loved it, but nobody got it. Nobody. We provided lots of explanation. We had pictures. We had scenarios, little stories that told what it would be like. People would ask astonishing questions, like “who’s going to pay to make all those links?” or “why would anyone want to put documents online?” Alas, many things really must be experienced to be understood. We didn’t have much of an experience to deliver to them though — after all, the whole point of all this evangelizing was to get people to give us money to pay for developing the software in the first place! But someone who’s spent even 10 minutes using the Web would never think to ask some of the questions we got asked.
I think that the level of incredulity that we're seeing here is understandable then, in that sense... human beings are better equipped to understand something in retrospect than to think ahead and try to join you in envisioning it. Oh well... as more demos come out (we've already done a few, a couple are shown in the video but not all), maybe people will believe more and more. When it gets in peoples' hands, even more so.
My comment wasn't really about Spritely, it was about a comment about Spritely and your response to it.
> I think that the level of incredulity that we're seeing here is understandable
Another issue, I think, is that in your reply the the previous commenter, you're not really replying to their comments so much as you are responding to the gestalt of the overall discussion here and about HN in general.
But my point was that when beginning work on ActivityPub as a standard, the kinds of comments on here were similarly negative. Of course you're not going to get a universal social network standard! Nobody's been able to do it, it's just out of reach. Might as well give up now.
Of course, now that ActivityPub has succeeded, people take it as a given that it was going to succeed. Criticism instead moves to certain design decisions, and that's fair and warranted. But hindsight makes those things that have been done seem as if they were always going to be done.
But at a time, it looked like ActivityPub itself, the thing we do have, could not possibly succeed, and people told me as such in many places, especially on here. Nobody questions that it happened now of course. So now I am proposing a multitude of layers in which we can make things better.
But it hasn't happened yet, and so of course the response is going to be, once again, that of course it's not possible...
So, Spritely isn't just an end-user thing because it's multiple layers, though a few of them are end-user layers (it's more of a laboratory for advancing the federated social web). It's true that it isn't a web standard itself, even though it aims to enhance the ecosystem that uses that web standard. But the point is: it's really demoralizing to get these kinds of comments, but they're the most common kinds of comments one gets on HN. Sometimes I did think about giving up on ActivityPub standardization. Ultimately I'm glad now that I didn't. So I think we can do cool and interesting things here with Spritely, and my lesson from the past is to not give up now either.