His team lead (Dmitry Zagidulin) liked what we were doing a lot. But ultimately Tim chose to go in a different direction, spun off "Inrupt" and left MIT. We continued building our open source platform to try to realize the vision he keeps writing about: https://theconversation.com/tim-berners-lees-plan-to-save-th...

I was writing very similar things, but of course I didn't invent the Web: https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-c...

Ultimately, my point is that we tried our best. I even hired Dmitry when he left Tim's project for a while, but very quickly Dmitry got demotivated to work with us because we were putting out working code for customers, instead of conforming to standards. Back then I argued to him that we don't have a ton of funding and executions matters more, after which the winners can help spearhead the standards. After all, Twitter pioneered oAuth, and Meebo+Google pioneered xAuth (if anyone remembers that). Dmitri and I did.

So we went our separate ways, and I realized that standards are an expensive detour that can work if you have extra funds to hire people. We plan to support Matrix, Mastodon and other interoperability. But for the time being, our platform is "just" free and open source.

Whether it's the UBI "movement", or the decentralized web, or other initiatives, everyone seems to go their separate way and it fizzles out (e.g. https://decentralizedweb.net and https://indieweb.org/). I wish people were willing to join forces on projects more, and get each other funded. That's how we can build real open source alternatives to the corporate internet we are all forced to depend on.

0. seek out appropriate, minimum friction standards before reinventing the wheel

1. refuse to implement solutions that harm users

Data canonicalisation is one such example: although the idea has been around for quite a while, a couple of years ago lots of people spontaneously decided it was something they needed (myself included!), and here we are with RDF canonicalisation[1] nearing Candidate Recommendation not even halfway through its WG's charter, along with several mutually independent approaches also in a good state of development. The result of this is that in about one more year from now, software developers will find cryptographic verification of data considerably more consistent, which can be translated into a pretty significant boon for Web users.

The ideal timing of a standard is surely after the limits of the idea have been found by theorising or prototyping, and before anyone with that idea has a large enough commercial interest in it to benefit from a monopoly on it. Trying to build a monopoly first and then 'donating' it by spearheading a standard is a viable technique, but it feels risky to me unless you can be sure that you're really the only party who understands the idea, and so won't be overtaken by someone with equally monopolistic but less altruistic motives.

I think that a good place to start is limiting the scope of a proposed standard very consciously, unless as you say you have the funds to hire everyone you need to implement it entirely at least once. Although I'm not familiar enough with your project to comment on any details, I suspect that most social network or forum applications could implement one way ActivityPub or Matrix support easily, and also proper two-way federation unless the original software makes too many assumptions about identity.

[1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-canon/