"Joining #ActivityPub would have been a big engineering effort, but federation could have brought in enough interesting content to make sticking around be worth it."
#ActivityPub has a lot of the same characteristics as email. But in email, the duties of each part of the process are split up, and you can mix-and-match software. Fediverse software is more tightly coupled than that.
SMTP is like the ActivityPub server-to-server protocol. Like in email with sendmail/exim/postfix/etc, you could have a program that does just this.
IMAP is like the server-to-client protocol. Like in email, with courier/dovecot/etc, you could have a program that does just this.
One thing the fediverse DOES have is multiple client programs. Like with Thunderbird/Roundcube/K-9 Mail, you can use a few different fediverse client apps, or even a couple that run on the web, like what's that one, Elk?
But a bunch of them, the "user-agents" are tied to the backend. Like, you can't use Mastodon's client with a Firefish server. I think it'd be better for the ecosystem if the clients were split from the servers, and the servers were split into S2S and S2C.
It is nice he thinks ActivityPub is the Internet of the future, calling it "the post-platform" world in which journalists, individuals, organizations all run their own ActivityPub services rather than create accounts on platforms like Ex-Twitter or Facebook. But his perspective is still limited to a world where all applications run on the HTTP protocol with DNS identifying services. He talks about the "Post On (your) Own (host), Syndicate Everywhere" (POSSE) model, and how organizations and individuals can deploy Mastodon instances on their own servers. They also interviewed @pluralistic (Cory Doctorow) which was nice.
They really should have interviewed the @spritelyinst folks to see the real Internet of the future, in which HTTP is replaced with the Object Capability Network (OCapN). But to be fair, this tech is still pretty new and maybe not yet to the point where tech journalists at The Verge would be interested in doing articles about it.
Managing hashtags submitted with an #ActivityPub note is not as simple as you'd think. Hashtags are collected into a separate node in the Note object.
Firefish and Friendica for example, have their hashtag entry below the content. You've got to do cartwheels to combine those with any a user may have added in the note text itself, removing duplicates.
Then ensure you maintain the integrity of the note text but also add any missing tags so they are visible to end users.
"We get exponential growth based on having one protocol, not a half dozen. [..] standards aren’t about competition. They’re about cooperation".
Great article by @evanprodromou . I completely agree, #ActivityPub has to win if we want to have a great social web. Don't get seduced by the shiny marketing of the next VC driven social network (protocol).
Is the Fediverse the start of taking back ownership of the platform? Do we need an ActivityPub for ecommerce, streaming, news articles? What else? #activitypub#technofeudalism#fediverse
🤔 Did you know there’s a W3C Social Web Community Group? @haubles interviewed their latest member in this sit-down with #ActivityPub enthusiast @casey.
#ActivityPub is the default social networking protocol because we took the time to standardise it at the W3C.
You don't have to be part of the W3C to build on top of ActivityPub. You can make extensions and new applications without ever dealing with a formalised standards organisation.
But the benefit of having the W3C behind us is crystal clear. There have been dozens of distributed social networks, and none has gotten as much traction as AP and AS2.
It looks like "youtube" is covered already, but any #scuttlebutt about that is appreciated. The knowledge about what's best or hot at any time is also federated 😕