I've skimmed over the activitypub overview. It looks interesting. I'd be curious what your thoughts are on it in comparison to two other "recent" decentralized

I've skimmed over the activitypub overview. It looks interesting. I'd be curious what your thoughts are on it in comparison to two other "recent" decentralized social protocols. I feel it shares a lot of similarities with the [matrix spec], though obviously a different vocabulary. Also, matrix is focused a lot more on the concept of subscriptions and eventual consistency. The other recent protocol I'd associate this with (loosely) is [secure scuttlebut]. This uses an append-only log, which users can subscribe to. The protocol lets applications on the same network locate each other and synchronize logs, or they can connect to a pub server which helps with providing more permanence and crossing network boundaries. The latter example is much closer to what I'd like to see in a decentralized social web. You build a self-hosted stream of public and private messages, and those that are subscribed (individuals or pub servers) replicate a copy of that stream. If individual pub servers go offline, others will have duplicates and users will be able to continue receiving your updates. Granted, this setup has some serious issues when you consider abuse. Pub servers currently have no concept of filtering and any approach to that would raise concerns about censorship. I'd also like to see the clients move to a browser based, port 80/443 setup, where perhaps someone can run a self-hosted pub server and web client on a cheap vm somewhere. A sort of web proxy that mobile/desktop clients can sync to. The clients in this scenario would not speak scuttlebut directly, but rather post messages to the web server, which would manage injecting those messages into the ssb log. https://staltz.com/an-off-grid-social-network.html https://staltz.com/an-off-grid-social-network.html [matrix spec]: http://matrix.org/docs/spec/ http://matrix.org/docs/spec/ [secure scuttlebut]: http://scuttlebot.io/ http://scuttlebot.io/