I don't think it's relevant to this specific instance, but AFAIK ActivityPub doesn't inherently prevent name portability. It's just that almost all implementations currently don't allow it (and I wouldn't expect Forgejo's either).
Of course, the practical downside of Tangled is also that it only has network effects within the ATmosphere, i.e. you still can't reach GitHub users.
First of all, non-standard extensions to federated protocols have a pretty rough history. Even when an extension reaches median adoption (rare, I assert), the long-tail adoption is dismal. For something as fundamental as
Second of all, how could this just be an implementation-specific extension? The failure mode (of a client not supporting the extension) would be outright broken. To have name portability, the client needs a two-step to first discover the name's server before then connecting to that server. Whereas now (afaiu), the server is already identified by the name. That's a fundamental change in what identity means at the protocol level.
I'd love to be corrected by someone more intimately familiar with ActivityPub. But until it has mandatory (and mass-adopted) support for something vaguely like SMTP's MX records or whatever the equivalent for ATProto is, name portability is a distant dream.
I'm not intimately familiar with the spec, so don't take my word as gospel, but as I understand it, current implementations already do name discovery. It's just that every implementation hardcodes the server name. IIRC some people have applied some kludge where they put a .well-known document on their own server to point to their instance's account, but it's still pretty spotty without that server being actively aware of that identifier. But (again, if I'm understanding correctly) servers could be updated/written to support that properly.
Not to split hairs, but that sounds more like plain hackery rather than proper extension. Let alone a viable future. I don't doubt what you say that it's possible in the most technical sense of possibility. But actually possible, in this world where we live? No, doesn't seem like it.
I might be overlooking something, but if Mastodon were to decide to add an input field to your settings page where you could enter your domain, along with instructions on what static file to upload where (ie in .well-known), I wouldn't be surprised if the rest of the ecosystem were to follow.
Didn't sound to me like GP was blaming the user; just pointing out that "the system" is set up in such a way that this was bound to happen, and is bound to happen again.
Makes sense that that's the case: there's usually a limited amount of beginner's knowledge, and then you get to the medium level by arbitrary combinations of that beginner's knowledge, of which there's an exponential number, making it less likely that someone has produced something about that specific combination. Then at the expert level, people can get real deep into some obscure nitty-gritty detail, and other experts will be able to generalise from that by themselves.
I think one problem we have (always had, but worse now that there are so many more opinions to be exposed to) is that we expect "society's" opinions to be consistent, despite being made up of millions of different people.
Of course there are going to be people telling others to be vulnerable and open, and of course there are also going to be people telling others not to complain because that's dumping their problems on other people.
Amazing, I knew trains were way safer than cars, but it's almost hard to believe that hurling folks through the air is even safer than that (or I guess similarly safe now).
At the same time, unplanned engineering time is almost always more expensive than planned engineering time. I'd rather have some regular, expected, upgrade work, than all of a sudden having to scramble because I need something at a moment when I didn't plan for that.
It's extra fun because it's not their own codebase; it's a bunch of upstreams that never planned to support it for that long. If they're lucky, some of them will even receive the bug reports and complaints directly...
IMHO it's a very feasible position to just let those geeks keep criticising while meaningfully raising the bar on privacy for the average user. There will always be geeks who complain, but also plenty of them that see that perfect doesn't have to be the enemy of the good.
Aren’t YOU the one saying perfect (“complaining geeks”) is the enemy of the good-enough (“raising the privacy bar for everyone, but not really that much”)?
I’d go as far as to say good-enough is the enemy of the better.
Yes, I am saying that perfect is the enemy of good enough. I think that if Signal were to keep chasing the complaining geeks, it would cease to be good enough. In the sense that it would be far less widely used, and thus not raise the privacy bar of society even a little bit. Which is why I advocate for not worrying about the complaints too much, i.e. to not let perfect be the enemy of good.
(Obviously there's always room for improvement, but even if there wasn't, the complaining still wouldn't stop.)
You actually probably don't need reasoning, as the old non reasoning models like 4o can do this too.
In the past, the agent type flows would work better if you prompted the LLM to write down a plan, or reasoning steps on how to accomplish the task with the available tools. These days, the new models are trained to do this without promoting
Of course, the practical downside of Tangled is also that it only has network effects within the ATmosphere, i.e. you still can't reach GitHub users.