The network effect for #ActivityPub is gaining some serious momentum right now. As more services adopt the protocol, more people, more communities and more content are added to the network making it increasingly more valuable for everyone. This will only accelerate in the coming months as Threads, Wordpress, Tumblr, Flipboard and others federate.
We're still in early innings but there's no way to put this genie back in the bottle. The open social Web / the #Fediverse is going to be huge.
what do we have to do to make the #ActivityPub plugin attractive to more #WordPress users? We are currently at 4000+ active users on WordPress.org + the WordPress.com users.
bto, bcc to not exist or be broadly disabled in AP (edit, to clarify: I want to and cc to take the meaning of bto and bcc in general; the functionality is useful, but in a social network it should be the default behavior and we have other mechanisms to tag people in)
I've been thinking a bit about this post regarding #Mastodon's responsibility to be compatible with the #threadiverse (#ActivityPub thread aggregators like #Lemmy & #Kbin). Right now, a thread from Lemmy or Kbin usually federates to Mastodon with truncated text and a link to the actual thread. However, many want Mastodon to be more compatible with threads so that the people over on Mastodon interact with the threadiverse more.
I was initially in agreement as a Kbin user. But having given it some thought, I think this is an unwise approach that'll only serve to overcomplicate platforms on the #fediverse. Yes, people on Mastodon should promote other parts of the fediverse (and vice versa), but complete interoperability shouldn't be expected of every platform.
As much as many would like it, you can't have long-form video from PeerTube, images from Pixelfed, threads from Kbin, blogs from Writefreely, etc. all neatly fit in a microblog feed. These are different formats made for different platforms, and the people making them are expecting them to be interacted with in completely different ways. When someone makes a thread in a Lemmy community, they're probably expecting that the people who are going to see and interact with the thread are people that want to see threads and are thus on a Lemmy instance (or another thread aggregator). If someone from Mastodon were to interact with it as if it were a microblog post, there'd be a big mismatch. People interact with microblogs differently than they do with threads — that's why they're separate to begin with. You don't see everyone on Twitter also wanting to use to Reddit because people who want microblogs don't necessarily want Reddit-style threads, and vice versa.
The other option, then, is to separate these different formats into different feeds or otherwise make them clearly distinct from one another. Kbin does this by separating threads and microblog posts into two tabs. While you can view both in the "All Content" tab if you'd like, they're styled differently enough that it's very clear when you're looking at a thread and when you're looking at a microblog post. This distinction lets users treat threads like threads and microblog posts like microblog posts, which is really helpful since the two formats serve different purposes and have different audiences. This option — clear distinction — is a great way to solve the conundrum I've been talking about… if your platform is meant for viewing all these different kinds of content to begin with.
And that's what it really comes down to imo. Mastodon is a platform for microblogging. Most people go to Mastodon because they want a Twitter alternative, not a Twitter alternative that's also an Instagram alternative and a Reddit alternative and a YouTube alternative. Even if you put these different content types in separate tabs, it would inevitably make things seem more confusing and thus raise the barrier of entry. Add a Videos tab to Mastodon to view stuff on PeerTube, and people are inevitably going to go, "Wait, what's this? Is this like YouTube? I thought this was just a Twitter alternative! This all seems too complicated," even if you tell them to ignore it.
It's probably best to leave Mastodon as it is: a microblogging platform that has some limited federation with other formats. The way Kbin threads currently display on Mastodon is fine. In fact, when I post a Kbin thread, I'm expecting it to be viewed via a thread aggregator. If people on Mastodon were part of the target audience, I would've made a microblog post.
Now, if you want to make something that lets you view everything on the fediverse via different tabs, feel free. As aforementioned, Kbin supports both threads and microblogs, though it comes with some challenges (e.g., trying to fit magazine-less microblog posts into Kbin's magazine system). However, this doesn't mean every platform on the fediverse needs to seamlessly incorporate everything else. I'd love people on Mastodon to promote and even try out Lemmy & Kbin more, but that doesn't mean Mastodon needs to also become a thread aggregator.
This isn't a hurdle because people typically aren't going to the fediverse with the idea of "I want a single app for all my social media." That's not how social media works outside the fediverse, so it's not really going to be a surprise that the Twitter replacement is a Twitter replacement and not one for 5 other platforms. If someone really wants to view Reddit-style threads, they're straight up better of making an account on a different platform (just like they would make a different account for Reddit) because Mastodon is a microblogging site.
Even the best attempt to incorporate all these different types of content into Mastodon is going to further complicate the platform and make more people dismiss Mastodon as too complicated of a Twitter alternative. This isn't a situation where there's no harm at best. And the potential benefit? Lemmy comments having the occasional Mastodon user?
Mastodon itself is a good enough introduction to ActivityPub without needing to make it support other things. It shows how people on different servers can share & interact with a pool of media through the same protocol. When people learn about other platforms on the fediverse, they can go check those out. Just promoting the platforms will do the job fine without complicating people's entry into the fediverse.
What’s the BBC up to in the Fediverse? What have they learned so far from their experiments? And how is all this like the early days of the internet? In the latest episode of Dot Social, Flipboard CEO @mike chats with @Ianforrester, Senior Firestarter at @BBCRD. (How cool is that title, btw!)
#ActivityPub dev tip of the day: An inbox (or outbox) is not a queue. An inbox is reverse chronological (LIFO-ish) and maintains long-term references to items. A queue has FIFO behavior and items are dequeued/removed for processing. AP is difficult enough without equating the inbox concept with MQ middleware (which could be a useful internal implementation technique).
BlueSkys official #ATProtocol account just highlighted a community developer project to bridge it with #ActivityPub
#BlueSky early on decided not to go with the open #W3C standard in favor of implementating features like account migration. Planning to start federating next year, they've made some decisions I'm skeptical about.
Hello Fediverse. I'm posting this tonight from my federated Flipboard profile! We're now testing our #ActivityPub integration starting with my account. You can follow me here to see all the stories I'm curating about things like startups, photography and of course, the #Fediverse. Curious to hear your thoughts on how this is working. We’ll incorporate your feedback as we make more progress on federating Flipboard. Stay tuned for lots more soon.
I strongly suggest that only stable builds be considered for usage in this flagship instance.
In case of Firefish, making the flagship instance a sandbox was not a good decision. Also, the major database update did not live up to the expectations as timelines still continue to feel buggier.
Though not dead, since Firefish is not fast enough in fixing issues that affect real users and real admins, I see that some Firefish instances are migrating to Sharkey or Iceshrimp.
Otherwise, for the most part, usage of Firefish has been a nice experience.
From a user perspective, both Sharkey and Iceshrimp have good prospects.