"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."
I don’t think pitching #ActivityPub to existing social media makes sense. Adding federation to a non-federated social media service isn’t a net win.
You have to spend the time and money to implement it. Then you have to spend the time and money to maintain it. Most of the time, ActivityPub support is implemented as mastodon compatibility, not true AP support. This means having to constantly make sure you keep up with masto changes and constantly fielding issues with other implementations because you didn’t fully implement AP.
And after implementation, you don’t just gain access to a ton of new users, you have to take on the burden of moderating all of it (which is a persistent ant recurring time and money cost). And since the #fediverse has a ton of opinions on moderation, you’re always pissing somebody off.
And after all that, what you’ve enabled is an easy way for your users to recreate their social graph without your service. The idea of an interconnected social web is cool, and hopefully it’ll be the futrue, but it doesn’t make sense for profit-driven businesses.
@fediverse Let's face it. When talking about the Fediverse, it is very hard to sell interoperability between different types of instances as a major advantage.
It's just the way it is. Different hosts, different host configurations, different fediverse software, different software configs, and all that.
Few people are aware today but when Google Mail was first beta tested (very early invite days), we did experience a lot of issues. Mails from Y!Mail not arriving. There was also one time when a mail from another server arrives garbled.
Apologies for using the email analogy again.
Let me use the mobile analogy as another example. Here in the Philippines, I don't know in other countries, we've had interoperability issues a decade or two ago. The Philippines is the SMS capital of the world, so imagine our frustration because the two major (and only) SMS providers cannot interoperate reliably.
Two different networks. Two different systems. Trying to federate to each other.
There will indeed be interoperability issues.
They haven't really solved it, but it was at least minimised.
So, yes, we have to accept that it is going to be a long road until we achieve the level wherein these challenges you have mentioned are minimised in the fediverse as well. I'm sure, politics aside, the #ActivityPub developers are finding ways. ^_^
Do not recommend one software and/or one instance.
Using your scenario, would you recommend photography instances based on #Mastodon knowing Mastodon only allows up to 4 “attached” images? Not only that, Mastodon will only display 4 images even if there are more than that?
Or, are you going to recommend #Pixelfed designed for images. Or, maybe #Firefish, #Friendica, #Hubzilla, #Streams, which all allow more than 4 images and will display all the images even if it exceeds their software's attach limit?
Quite frankly, in my opinion, with the image display alone, Mastodon is highly not recommended. So, the number of users and instances Mastodon have does not make it the best #Fediverse software, as you have mentioned earlier, “Mastodon is the level of UX other projects should aim to”. It's not.
The best approach is we understand what the user needs and suggest to them the appropriate software and instances that will suit their needs.
Let's forget about the Fediverse for a while.
We have to remember that not everyone is on Twitter or Facebook. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals who only have an Instagram account. Why? They don't need Twitter and Facebook.
In Korea, for example, they have their own culture and platforms for communication Twitter/Facebook-like, so they don't need those. But many of them have Instagram accounts.
Now, let's go back to the Fediverse.
If those are the users we are reaching out to, then there should be no problem recommending Pixelfed. Because for these target market, their only concern and type of use is to share, well, photos or their latest digital artwork. They don't care about a Twitter/Facebook-like experience or use.
That brings us back to the features of #ActivityPub. It is an “added benefit”.
Users who want to follow this content creator can do so using their existing account.
Okay, you can't do this with #Lemmy, the last time I checked, however, you can do it with #Kbin. That's a Lemmy limitation, not the fediverse.
For the content creator who migrated to the fediverse, in particular, Pixelfed in our scenario, they have a greater reach because they're federated.
(Extra: You can actually turn Pixelfed into a regular Twitter-like software if you are using the web UI. Although, last time I heard it will be removed eventually.)
(Extra 2: BookWyrm also allows Twitter-like feeds and interaction, it's not restricted to just books.)
#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.
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.
When Twitter changed hands and Mastodon had its 15 minutes of fame, on October 2022, it seemed that we were on the verge of a digital revolution based on Act...
I don’t think pitching #ActivityPub to existing social media makes sense. Adding federation to a non-federated social media service isn’t a net win.
You have to spend the time and money to implement it. Then you have to spend the time and money to maintain it. Most of the time, ActivityPub support is implemented as mastodon compatibility, not true AP support. This means having to constantly make sure you keep up with masto changes and constantly fielding issues with other implementations because you didn’t fully implement AP.
And after implementation, you don’t just gain access to a ton of new users, you have to take on the burden of moderating all of it (which is a persistent ant recurring time and money cost). And since the #fediverse has a ton of opinions on moderation, you’re always pissing somebody off.
And after all that, what you’ve enabled is an easy way for your users to recreate their social graph without your service. The idea of an interconnected social web is cool, and hopefully it’ll be the futrue, but it doesn’t make sense for profit-driven businesses.
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).
I've just discovered that lemmy.world (and potentially other) users I've banned from my magazine are still able to comment, comments I can't see on kbin but that do show up on lemmy.world....
@adam thank you for explaining this. Am I correct to understand, then, that this is something about which we ought to approach the #activityPub devs, rather than ernest?
Ernest's comment that ActivityPub tries to federate moderation (but isn't ?why) was very interesting.
It seems to me, on the face of it at least, that moderation is a key part of any social medium.
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 😕
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.
I wanted to be able to search and browse the #ActivityPub Fediverse Enhancement Proposals (FEPs) so I converted them to an Obsidian vault. As a nice side-benefit, I can now view the graph of FEP dependencies and their color-coded status (green=FINAL, yellow=DRAFT, red=WITHDRAWN).
Automattic's Tumblr/ActivityPub integration reportedly shelved (notes.ghed.in)
When Twitter changed hands and Mastodon had its 15 minutes of fame, on October 2022, it seemed that we were on the verge of a digital revolution based on Act...
Magazine bans not federating with lemmy.world (and potentially others) (kbin.social)
I've just discovered that lemmy.world (and potentially other) users I've banned from my magazine are still able to comment, comments I can't see on kbin but that do show up on lemmy.world....