One of my favorite parts of this interview with @tchambers is when he wraps up with his 2024 predictions for the #Fediverse and #ActivityPub including the things he's looking for as this crucial election year plays out. He gives a sweeping and insightful summary of the most important efforts now underway which will bear fruit this year.
@tchambers, author of the Twitter Migration report and admin of indieweb.social, is an internet steward everyone should know. In this podcast with @mike, Tim expounds on social media’s thorniest issues and explains how the Fediverse offers a better social home than anything we've had before.
What I personally want more than a good test suite in #ActivityPub, and possibly a lower bar, is a good reference implementation.
Specifically, I'd want something that:
Implements all nontrivial requirements of the spec.
Implements a significant percentage of the data vocabulary
Can handle a nontrivial amount of traffic. It doesn't need to be optimized for it, but it can't fall over in a stiff breeze—analysis should be comparable to analysis of a prod system, just at smaller scale
I think in many ways a test suite would be more generally useful, but part of what I personally find challenging is simply determining what it even means to "handle a response."
A reference implementation would solve this.
I know of a few efforts in this regard, but most of them seem to have an iron triangle around the three criteria above:
One or two of the three only. Never all three together.
So far I have developed some heuristics when looking at implementations here.
So, how is #ActivityPub implementation in #GitLab going? Steadily, if a bit slowly!
In the last four months, we've been working on implementing the first ActivityPub actor, the one allowing to subscribe to projects releases. The ActivityPub part is already written, but there will still be a couple month before it's fully merged. Turns out that the most time consuming part is code review : there is no dedicated team to this (but there is a dedicated developer assisting me, thanks Patrick!), so people reviewing code discover ActivityPub at the time they have to review it (and, by the way, it's incredible how they get out of their way to help a contributor on such a complex subject, they rock). For that reason, we have to make smaller than usual merge requests, splitting the feature as much as possible, and then some again, to make it as easy to understand as possible. And even then it usually takes about a month to get one chunk merged.
I'm interested in hearing from #ActivityPub developers who've successfully mapped #OpenGraph properties from <meta> tags in Web pages onto the Page type and its properties in AS2.
@evan yes, and it creates a sort of "thundering herd" unintentional ddos for web sites on underpowered providers. there have been ideas on how to solve the trust issue, like randomly verifying some small subset and tracking reputation, or like deferring to a semi-centralized pre-trusted "link preview provider" that is shared between several instances, or even simply ignoring the issue and depending on people to report misleading links. (i prefer the provider approach)
@trwnh another option is accepting the sender-provided metadata to start, and then verifying on a schedule that recognizes that thundering herd problem -- say, a randomized delay between 1 and 300 seconds, with an exponential backoff. And I definitely think having a trusted shared caching server can help immensely.
@datacequia@evan is currently working on one now and there have been a few published in Japanese over the years and one was published in Catalan last year
@darnell This is so awesome! Thank you for putting the time to pull this together Darnell. I've already sent this to my board in email and flipped it into the Flipboard Team Magazine which is our private mag where we share posts together as a team. Will come back to you with thoughts next.
Now that for-profit tech companies are beginning to implement #ActivityPub, I think it's important to establish what we want with the #fediverse and whether federation with #Threads, #Flipboard, Tumblr, and the like bring us closer to or further from those goals.
With that in mind, I've come up with a few statements (in no particular order) that describe what I think is an "ideal fediverse" — a fediverse that's not necessarily realistic but that we should aim for:
No actor controls a large portion of visible activity.
Users can move between instances without penalty.
Creating and running an instance requires minimal effort.
People on or entering the fediverse understand the variety of available options.
There is no downside to using free and open-source platforms over proprietary ones.
These definitely aren't comprehensive, and if you have anything you'd add, let's discuss that! They're currently helping me reassess my stance on Threads now that Flipboard is also entering the stage, and I hope they're helpful for others as well.
I'll elaborate on these five statements in the comments.
The whole point of the fediverse in general is that there is no single “we”. There are those ActivityPub servers that one federates with and those ActivityPub servers that one does not federate with. Lack of consensus is built into the technology by design.
but I think it’s still important that everyone at least thinks about what they want the fediverse to grow into
To have wants about the social constructs that sit atop the technology is to misunderstand the technology. The technology enables your enemies/people you don’t like/etc. to communicate and benefit in all the ways you do. By design. You cannot exclude from the fediverse, you can only exclude from your server. If you have wants about excluding then you’ve misunderstood the technology.
@rah Maybe I'm not being clear. When I say that "we" means "the fediverse in general", I don't mean that everyone should gather 'round and come to a consensus on what values they should uphold and who should be excluded. This is obviously something that should occur on an instance or individual level, as (A) there are a large variety of different people and instances on the fediverse with different priorities and (B) as you stated, anyone can implement ActivityPub and tap into the fediverse if they want to, regardless of what anyone else thinks.
What I mean is that people should be thinking about what they think instance owners should aim for and form their opinions on the current situation based on that. My goal with this post is to show what I think an "ideal fediverse" looks like and have others share their thoughts. Having thoughts about what's healthy for people on the fediverse and having wants based on that isn't misunderstanding the technology — it's simply expressing preferences.
"If we do this correctly — if the next phase of how we congregate and communicate online is built for humans and not advertisers — there won’t be a new titanic company to rival Meta or a platform with eye-poppingly huge numbers like Facebook
"What we’ll get instead is something much bigger: an entirely new infrastructure for our online lives that no company or platform controls”