6 ms·

Mastodon and ActivityPub

148 points by daveid 9y ago

jvalleroy 9y ago
Will Mastodon continue to be compatible with GNU social as well?
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
  OStatus is what GNU Social uses, and the OP says it will continue to support OStatus, so yes.
- angristan 9y ago
  Mastodon will support OStatus until version 2.0, so until then, yes, but if GNU Social does not implement ActivityPub, 2.0 will break compatibility.
  - nightpool 9y ago
    No, 2.0 is not changing our support with GNU/Social. 2.0 is removing Mastodon-only OStatus extensions that have been replaced with ActivityPub. Mastodon currently has no plans to remove OStatus support for public posts or stop targeting GNU/Social compatibility as a goal of the porject.
  - daveid 9y ago
    Not quite. Version 2.0 will remove some OStatus extensions that we originally invented to circumvent the limitations of OStatus in regards to privacy. Traditional OStatus support will remain for the foreseeable future.
mintplant 9y ago
Does implementing ActivityPub mean identities can be portable across servers now?
- paroneayea 9y ago
  Hi! I'm co-editor of ActivityPub, so maybe I can answer some things. Identity portability could mean a few things; ActivityPub on its own will let you interact with identities on other servers (though Mastodon could do this before its adoption of AP, through OStatus... it has better private delivery now though). However, maybe what you mean is the ability of an identity to be "nomadic". If you use ActivityPub with https based identifiers, you're still tied to a single instance. However! It will be possible for ActivityPub applications to move in the direction of being more distributed systems... in fact I wrote a paper on this which I will be presenting at Rebooting Web of Trust in October: https://gitlab.com/dustyweb/talks/blob/master/activitypub/rwot/even_more_distributed_activitypub.org https://gitlab.com/dustyweb/talks/blob/master/activitypub/rw... There's a lot of ideas in that paper, but the one that applies to a nomadic identity is Decentralized Identifiers support, or DIDs: https://w3c-ccg.github.io/did-spec/ https://w3c-ccg.github.io/did-spec/ DIDs are being worked on by the W3C Credentials Community Group (which I am also a part of) and will permit having an identity that is "self-soverign". How I imagine this would work in an application like Mastodon, if Mastodon decides to include support for it in the future, is that you would register a DID for yourself and then go to your profile page and associate that DID with your user. You'd then have identity that isn't tied to one specific node... indeed, in such a direction we'd begin to blur the line between the federated client-server web application model and peer to peer networks. That's a ways off though. For now I think ActivityPub brings a lot of benefits to Mastodon (though I'm biased obviously). Still lots of exciting future ahead though!
  - mintplant 9y ago
    Thanks very much for the explanation!
  - willvarfar 9y ago
    Why not just use normal build signing of posts? All posts signed by the same private key have the same author even if published on different modes etc. There is finesse for supporting subkeys and revocation and all the rest, but talking with a security consultant will sort out those kind of details.
apeacox 9y ago
I wonder how 2000 servers can host 800.000 users. It means that, on average, a server can host 400 users. I really appreciate this project for several reasons, but it (sadly) looks like a waste of resources with these numbers.
- detaro 9y ago
  Does, not can. If you look at lists, there are tons of tiny instances: experiments, some people using their own instance as their private homepage, or just one for a few friends. People being able to do that is a strength of a federated system, and it's far from clear it actually is "wasting" something without looking into it in a lot of detail. It's not like all of these instances sync completely with each other. The biggest instance has 250k users, and the top 10 instances together have 600k user (75% of of those 800k). I don't have info how these large instances map to actual servers, but I don't think Mastodon currently has a lot in the way of features to split an instance across machines. (Data from https://instances.social https://instances.social)
  - hugogameiro 9y ago
    You can split Mastodon to several servers easily. Postgres, Redis, Sidekiq, Streaming API, Puma, Nginx and Media Storage can all be placed on different servers. Even multiples for each. You can read here about https://medium.com/@Gargron/scaling-mastodon-1becde463090 https://medium.com/@Gargron/scaling-mastodon-1becde463090 how Eugen had Mastodon.social running a few months ago.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- paroneayea 9y ago
  Systems like Twitter, Facebook, etc use tons of resources scaling up. There may be some duplication amongst it but spreading things out also distributes much of the load. Has the internet really regressed so much that developers would also make the argument that it's a better idea to have one or two email providers, for instance, than have it be a distributed system? What about many wordpress instances, etc?
kiki2121 9y ago
mastodon is going to die. Even us, hackers can't figure it out. Go do something different. Not a copycat!
- Leynos 9y ago
  It's easy. Go to instance, join instance, start tooting. There's nothing complicated about it.
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
  Speak for yourself! This hacker had no trouble using it and I deleted my Twitter account a month ago!
aqsalose 9y ago
Previous discussion about Mastodon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15211074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15211074

148 points by daveid 9y ago

jvalleroy 9y ago

Will Mastodon continue to be compatible with GNU social as well?

TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
OStatus is what GNU Social uses, and the OP says it will continue to support OStatus, so yes.
angristan 9y ago
Mastodon will support OStatus until version 2.0, so until then, yes, but if GNU Social does not implement ActivityPub, 2.0 will break compatibility.
- nightpool 9y ago
  No, 2.0 is not changing our support with GNU/Social. 2.0 is removing Mastodon-only OStatus extensions that have been replaced with ActivityPub. Mastodon currently has no plans to remove OStatus support for public posts or stop targeting GNU/Social compatibility as a goal of the porject.
- daveid 9y ago
  Not quite. Version 2.0 will remove some OStatus extensions that we originally invented to circumvent the limitations of OStatus in regards to privacy. Traditional OStatus support will remain for the foreseeable future.

mintplant 9y ago

Does implementing ActivityPub mean identities can be portable across servers now?

paroneayea 9y ago
Hi! I'm co-editor of ActivityPub, so maybe I can answer some things. Identity portability could mean a few things; ActivityPub on its own will let you interact with identities on other servers (though Mastodon could do this before its adoption of AP, through OStatus... it has better private delivery now though). However, maybe what you mean is the ability of an identity to be "nomadic". If you use ActivityPub with https based identifiers, you're still tied to a single instance. However! It will be possible for ActivityPub applications to move in the direction of being more distributed systems... in fact I wrote a paper on this which I will be presenting at Rebooting Web of Trust in October: https://gitlab.com/dustyweb/talks/blob/master/activitypub/rwot/even_more_distributed_activitypub.org https://gitlab.com/dustyweb/talks/blob/master/activitypub/rw... There's a lot of ideas in that paper, but the one that applies to a nomadic identity is Decentralized Identifiers support, or DIDs: https://w3c-ccg.github.io/did-spec/ https://w3c-ccg.github.io/did-spec/ DIDs are being worked on by the W3C Credentials Community Group (which I am also a part of) and will permit having an identity that is "self-soverign". How I imagine this would work in an application like Mastodon, if Mastodon decides to include support for it in the future, is that you would register a DID for yourself and then go to your profile page and associate that DID with your user. You'd then have identity that isn't tied to one specific node... indeed, in such a direction we'd begin to blur the line between the federated client-server web application model and peer to peer networks. That's a ways off though. For now I think ActivityPub brings a lot of benefits to Mastodon (though I'm biased obviously). Still lots of exciting future ahead though!
- mintplant 9y ago
  Thanks very much for the explanation!
- willvarfar 9y ago
  Why not just use normal build signing of posts? All posts signed by the same private key have the same author even if published on different modes etc. There is finesse for supporting subkeys and revocation and all the rest, but talking with a security consultant will sort out those kind of details.

apeacox 9y ago

I wonder how 2000 servers can host 800.000 users. It means that, on average, a server can host 400 users. I really appreciate this project for several reasons, but it (sadly) looks like a waste of resources with these numbers.

detaro 9y ago
Does, not can. If you look at lists, there are tons of tiny instances: experiments, some people using their own instance as their private homepage, or just one for a few friends. People being able to do that is a strength of a federated system, and it's far from clear it actually is "wasting" something without looking into it in a lot of detail. It's not like all of these instances sync completely with each other. The biggest instance has 250k users, and the top 10 instances together have 600k user (75% of of those 800k). I don't have info how these large instances map to actual servers, but I don't think Mastodon currently has a lot in the way of features to split an instance across machines. (Data from https://instances.social https://instances.social)
- hugogameiro 9y ago
  You can split Mastodon to several servers easily. Postgres, Redis, Sidekiq, Streaming API, Puma, Nginx and Media Storage can all be placed on different servers. Even multiples for each. You can read here about https://medium.com/@Gargron/scaling-mastodon-1becde463090 https://medium.com/@Gargron/scaling-mastodon-1becde463090 how Eugen had Mastodon.social running a few months ago.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
paroneayea 9y ago
Systems like Twitter, Facebook, etc use tons of resources scaling up. There may be some duplication amongst it but spreading things out also distributes much of the load. Has the internet really regressed so much that developers would also make the argument that it's a better idea to have one or two email providers, for instance, than have it be a distributed system? What about many wordpress instances, etc?

kiki2121 9y ago

mastodon is going to die. Even us, hackers can't figure it out. Go do something different. Not a copycat!

Leynos 9y ago
It's easy. Go to instance, join instance, start tooting. There's nothing complicated about it.
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
Speak for yourself! This hacker had no trouble using it and I deleted my Twitter account a month ago!

aqsalose 9y ago

Previous discussion about Mastodon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15211074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15211074