4 ms·

The thought process behind ActivityPub seems fanciful to me. To paraphrase: Here is a spec for something no one currently uses, please take a risk and invest y

The thought process behind ActivityPub seems fanciful to me. To paraphrase: Here is a spec for something no one currently uses, please take a risk and invest your time to understand ActivityPub, build an impl of ActivityPub, and then build your thing on top of it. Then, if many others also do this, it might have a chance at success. Heed the lesson of OStatus. Open source has killed RFC style development. If the backers of ActivityPub genuinely want people to use it then they should publish a reference grpc microservice porcelain on docker so people can use it from any language, without thinking about it. Otherwise the cost to implement ActivityPub is just too high.

adamnemecek 9y ago
It really hasn’t. RFC is a part of all web standards and even some open source like Rust and React. RFCs are a sign of maturity of open source projects.
gargron 9y ago
Did you miss the part where a million people use ActivityPub via Mastodon? There are already numerous implementations, such as Mastodon, Hubzilla, Pleroma, PeerTube, Kroeg, and more.
- grizzles 9y ago
  Perhaps I should have said "that no one uses directly". I tried out Mastodon but didn't become a regular user. So I'm just curious, are you claiming a million monthly active users or a million accounts created since inception? A million a month is roughly what serverfault.com gets. If you have 1MAU/month, that's a nice achievement, though it's still 1/130th the market share of twitter. I hope Mastodon keeps growing to level out the playing field. That's why I suggested a way to make it easier for other sw engineers to support it.
  - treve 9y ago
    By that logic no one uses email directly either.
fluxdenuit 9y ago
Well, I guess we're wrong then. At Hathi (https://newguard.icei.org/projects/index.html https://newguard.icei.org/projects/index.html) we're using ActivityPub as our data exchange protocol. It's well thought out, and saves us a lot of trouble. It's easier to discuss architecture with something on hand to refer to. As for the investment of time.. yes, but we figure it'll be worth it. We're not satisfied with any of the current platforms. We want to be able to collaborate without distractions, and we figure others will join us along the way.
detaro 9y ago
Alternative paraphrase: Here is a spec based on our experiences building federated social networks, here are several implementations of it working together, if you want to join your users to this existing network you can implement it or adapt on of the existing solutions. If your goal is actually different implementations and not just "an open source project", standards are important. The space was quite fragmented, ActivityPub is a chance to have more stuff talk with each other.

adamnemecek 9y ago

It really hasn’t. RFC is a part of all web standards and even some open source like Rust and React. RFCs are a sign of maturity of open source projects.

gargron 9y ago

Did you miss the part where a million people use ActivityPub via Mastodon? There are already numerous implementations, such as Mastodon, Hubzilla, Pleroma, PeerTube, Kroeg, and more.

grizzles 9y ago
Perhaps I should have said "that no one uses directly". I tried out Mastodon but didn't become a regular user. So I'm just curious, are you claiming a million monthly active users or a million accounts created since inception? A million a month is roughly what serverfault.com gets. If you have 1MAU/month, that's a nice achievement, though it's still 1/130th the market share of twitter. I hope Mastodon keeps growing to level out the playing field. That's why I suggested a way to make it easier for other sw engineers to support it.
- treve 9y ago
  By that logic no one uses email directly either.

fluxdenuit 9y ago

Well, I guess we're wrong then. At Hathi (https://newguard.icei.org/projects/index.html https://newguard.icei.org/projects/index.html) we're using ActivityPub as our data exchange protocol. It's well thought out, and saves us a lot of trouble. It's easier to discuss architecture with something on hand to refer to. As for the investment of time.. yes, but we figure it'll be worth it. We're not satisfied with any of the current platforms. We want to be able to collaborate without distractions, and we figure others will join us along the way.

detaro 9y ago

Alternative paraphrase: Here is a spec based on our experiences building federated social networks, here are several implementations of it working together, if you want to join your users to this existing network you can implement it or adapt on of the existing solutions. If your goal is actually different implementations and not just "an open source project", standards are important. The space was quite fragmented, ActivityPub is a chance to have more stuff talk with each other.