#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.
For this weekend's coding project, I built a tiny single-user Bluesky→ActivityPub one-way bridge I named “Pinhole”. If there's someone on Bluesky whose posts you want in your Mastodon feed, you can download and run it yourself: :fietkau_software: https://fietkau.software/pinhole
Caveats: 1. I intentionally built it anti-scalable: you can use it to follow one Bluesky account from one fedi account, and that's it. 2. You need experience with web servers.
"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
In a nutshell, we just return an array of delivery reports in addition to an http status. For sites that don't support delivery reports, we manufacture a report holding the http status, and if there are queue retrys, we collect the associated curl logs into a linked queue summary.
🤔 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 😕
Inventaire.io https://inventaire.io/welcome - Manage your physical books or other items (board games perhaps) and keep track of who has what when lending or borrowing items. ActivityPub enabled.
Thedesk.top - A bit overwhelmingly full-featured alternative UI to Mastodon/Firefish/Misskey/*key forks. Some aspects may be very confusing but for some, the workflow and customization it provides are powerful.