17 ms·

Why ActivityPub is the future

399 points by gargron 8y ago

gavreh 8y ago
ActivityPub W3C Recommendation: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
rainbowmverse 8y ago
The real value of federation, and the value of a standard like ActivityPub, didn't fully click for me until I realized I could follow Blender's PeerTube experiment from my Mastodon account. If enough sites start supporting it, you could get many of the benefits of RSS with the few benefits of massive silos like Twitter and Facebook.
- mtgx 8y ago
  Anti-censorship has always been the #1 benefit of federation and peer-to-peer connectivity. I don't think any other benefits come even close, and they are usually overshadowed by how much more difficult it is to build a well-working federated or P2P network. But when you start having global monopolies in various industries that don't care about automatically banning the "little guy" from which they make little money to begin with and when you have governments that are increasingly more interested in let's say "curating" the internet, then that anti-censorship benefit starts to become a lot more appealing to a lot more people. It's why I'm glad Firefox is not only finally a decent competitor to Chrome but also starting to adopt all sort of anti-censorship protocols and technologies, too (and hopefully there are more to come).
  - rainbowmverse 8y ago
    >> "Anti-censorship has always been the #1 benefit of federation and peer-to-peer connectivity. I don't think any other benefits come even close, and they are usually overshadowed by how much more difficult it is to build a well-working federated or P2P network." The rank of benefits is, of course, highly subjective. I'm speaking for myself.
  - snissn 8y ago
    Your comment resonates with Maslow's hierarchy of needs on a digital level. Society's primary benefit is safety and decentralization creates the internet's base offering of security
    - CNJ7654 8y ago
      >Society's primary benefit is safety This is subjective, my favorite benefit from society is guaranteed freedoms. Luckily decentralization also offers a great deal of freedom on the internet :)
  - apotheon 8y ago
    "a decent competitor" How did it do that? It threw away all the technical and usability benefits it had over Chrome, so I guess it's "a decent competitor" instead of "a clear winner" for some purposes, like it once was. Is that what you mean?
  - detaro 8y ago
    A non-empty set of Mastodon users probably picked precisely for it's "censorship" abilities, unhappy with how Twitter handles it and wanting a space where their instance can enforce its own policies.
    - fenwick67 8y ago
      The real benefit of federation is that anywhere on the moderation spectrum is possible on a per-instance basis.
  - ajconway 8y ago
    Banning federated networks is actually much easier than dealing with an important centralized entity like Facebook or Google. Just ban every node that provides access to illegal content.
    - incompatible 8y ago
      China is happy to ban both, difficulty doesn't seem to be an issue.
- jesse_m 8y ago
  How do you subscribe from mastodon? I see the video.blender.org is their instance right?
  - rainbowmverse 8y ago
    Put @blender@video.blender.org in the search box.
    - donpdonp 8y ago
      The search box can be easy to miss - its the text field above the new-toot-box and below the menu bar in the left-most column.
      - jesse_m 8y ago
        Thanks I was using Tusky but had the wrong format for the name
      - ktosobcy 8y ago
        This definitely should be better highlighted... I knew I should be able to follow ActivityPub but: nothing was on blender/peertube website nor I saw any field to search for blender...
    - jesse_m 8y ago
      Ahh thank you. I had the format wrong there
- mgummelt 8y ago
  I think you've hit on the actual end user benefit - aggregation. The article is either pitching abstractions like "compatibility" or solutions to non-problems like the risk that Facebook might vanish. Though I'm not convinced aggregation is a big problem.
xez 8y ago
>If Twitter shuts down, you’ll lose your followers. If Facebook shuts down, you’ll lose your friends. For some platforms, it’s not a question of “if”, but “when”. Wouldn't this happen as well if the instance my account was created in shuts down?
- jordigh 8y ago
  It would and it has. In Mastodon-speak, this is called an "extinction event", and I have seen a few of those. Mastodon, however, has already implemented take-out feature where you can download all of your data at any time, including your friend list. It's not perfect, because although you can keep your followee list, your followers don't have an automatic way of knowing where your new presence may have moved to. Also, the stuff that has already been tooted lives on in the fediverse in other servers, so it's not like the toots also disappear from other servers after an extinction event, just like an email server going down doesn't delete the email from everyone else's inbox.
  - xez 8y ago
    right, there's that at least, and that's probably better than the alternatives. It just didn't sound like a good analogy. A bit deceiving even.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - s73v3r_ 8y ago
    Unfortunately, it's out there, but you can't associate those previous messages with your new account.
    - PKop 8y ago
      Keybase.io could be a part of solving this I think: https://keybase.io/docs/sigchain https://keybase.io/docs/sigchain
  - PKop 8y ago
    I was thinking that federation still leaves unsolved the issue of knowing the single source of truth for identities, and when instances go down, you can't reference anything to know who/where people are. Couldn't Keybase.io solve this? It could track your identities on these servers, and it would exist outside of any instances or federation, but be the source of identity that would go along with any federated instances you are a part of
amelius 8y ago
But how will they deal with the GDPR? https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/7280 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/7280
- daveid 8y ago
  From the thread: >I don't expect any major changes are needed for compliance, which is why it's been pretty low priority. it's just a matter of getting a document together that better informs admins. Mastodon has all the features needed for compliance, and does not collect or store any data that's not for its primary purpose.
  - amelius 8y ago
    Does that mean that in ActivityPub, I can't share messages with a restricted group of people?
    - rainbowmverse 8y ago
      You can do DMs, but it's possible for admins with sufficient access on each recipient's instance to read them. edit: I didn't see that this was in the context of GDPR.
      - amelius 8y ago
        Ok, that sounds like they don't comply with the GDPR then. Also, doesn't ActivityPub allow closed groups?
        detaro 8y ago
        Just as GDPR-incompliant as e-mail then, or any social media platform that's not e2e encrypted?
        Kiro 8y ago
        Yes, which is why you can't use email to send sensitive personal data anymore.
rogerbraun 8y ago
Some background information on ActivityPub in Pleroma: https://blog.soykaf.com/post/activity-pub-in-pleroma/ https://blog.soykaf.com/post/activity-pub-in-pleroma/ https://blog.soykaf.com/post/what-is-pleroma/ https://blog.soykaf.com/post/what-is-pleroma/
edhelas 8y ago
ActivityPub is built by the W3C and therefore relies on Web related technologies (lost of HTTP and JSON exchanged) :) Does this scale properly and how does it compare to existing solutions like XMPP Pubsub (https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html) that is basically built to deliver content, in real-time (trough TCP sockets) and can handle thousands (millions?) of delivered packets per seconds? I'm building a federated social platform that is fully relying on XMPP (Movim https://movim.eu https://movim.eu) and I'm wondering about the limits and different usages of this fresh new protocol.
- xj9 8y ago
  the AP spec is actually, a bit more abstract that you would expect. JSON and JSON-LD are required, but transport and actor resolution are not well specified. current-gen AP servers do have an implicit dependency on HTTP and DNS. i've spoken with several people about creating a proof-of-concept AP server that supports gossip-based replication and a few other ssb-inspired features.
  - oelmekki 8y ago
    This sounds interesting. Does it mean an AP server could exist that would not be based on the federation model? Or to make my question more precise : would the gossip model be used only for data distribution and we would still have to register on a node, or would it allow to keep and reuse our data and identity should our usual node disappear?
    - xj9 8y ago
      the goal is to decouple users from servers. the idea is to move the key that AP uses to sign JSON-LD objects to the client and do all of the crypto operations there. a server in this model is an always-on relay for replicating data. you can submit a message to any relay and expect to have it show up on all interested servers. unfortunately, this will also break compat with HTTP/DNS-based AP servers, but hopefully this is something that the maintainers will be open to supporting. relevant threads: https://b.9chan.lol/notice/279590 https://b.9chan.lol/notice/279590 https://b.9chan.lol/notice/226866 https://b.9chan.lol/notice/226866 https://b.9chan.lol/notice/212397 https://b.9chan.lol/notice/212397 https://shitposter.club/notice/9830850 https://shitposter.club/notice/9830850
froasty 8y ago
Mastodon and other federated platforms are to social media what suburbia historically has been to cities. People think it'll resolve or at least mitigate the issues of digital privacy, digital harassment, and digital overpopulation, but in reality will just create ever more wasteful and unaccountable digital sprawl while inevitably recreating the exact same problems (e.g. HOA discrimination, nosey neighbors, hiding all non-conforming traits lest your cohabitants judge you, etc).
- bhhaskin 8y ago
  You are comparing apples to oranges. Self hosting a service will of course mitigate all of the issues you listed. The control shifts from a company like Facebook into the hands of the server owner.
  - froasty 8y ago
    Yes, and nominally so did homeownership in suburbia vs rental in overcrowded cities. What it actually meant is that instead of being beholden to "The Man's" cultural standards, they were now beholden to the Homeowner's Association's. Instead of overt racism and segregation, they got redlining, blockbusting, and racial steering. Instead of razor thin walls leading to informal surveillance, they had to Keep Up with the Joneses. Of course, the forces are now politically/socially based rather than fundamentally racially based, but the principle remains the same. It's another digital White Flight by any other name.^1 --- 1 https://www.technologyreview.com/s/419843/did-whites-flee-the-digital-ghetto-of-myspace/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/419843/did-whites-flee-th...
    - prepend 8y ago
      You’re assuming that urban is always superior to suburban. There are many who prefer the problems you call out vs the problems with urban centers.
  - s73v3r_ 8y ago
    No it won't. You might not have to see harassment directed at you, but that doesn't mitigate it. Especially if part of that harassment is doxxing.
mankash666 8y ago
The tech and applications have existed for a while now, but adoption hasn't been comparable to large, centralized rivals. I'd argue activityPub isn't the future, until it root causes the reason for anemic adoption. Also, the best use case might not be in transferring an existing centralized app onto activity pub
- amelius 8y ago
  What if there was a well-maintained library that continuously scrapes a given user's Facebook account, and publishes it to AP?
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    How about browser extensions?
  - dane-pgp 8y ago
    Or we could go one better and use the GDPR's "data portability" requirement to force Facebook to effectively offer such an API: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/ A regulator / court would have to look at what is "technically feasible" for Facebook to implement, but given that there are multiple interoperating projects supporting ActivityPub (with much smaller resources than Facebook) I think it would be hard to argue that Facebook couldn't add ActivityPub support. At a stretch, Facebook might argue that data portability only requires them (as data controllers) to publish your Facebook posts to specific accounts on other services, and doesn't require Facebook to accept inbound posts from competing platforms, but I don't know whether Facebook would want to be in a situation where their competitors have access to data on Facebook but Facebook doesn't have similar access to data from their users.
    - amelius 8y ago
      To be honest, the only data I would want to export out of Facebook would be "events" (event name, time, location, description, rsvps, image/video data, comments). Would that also be possible using the GDPR directive?
fiatjaf 8y ago
Who's going to host thousands of petabytes of videos on behalf of others if not YouTube or a similar service?
- mnkmnk 8y ago
  I would totally host it if I got some money out of it. Maybe get paid for ads served through my computer.
- Mediterraneo10 8y ago
  As anyone involved on the major torrent communities knows, at least some people are willing to share the great artistic achievements of mankind, worthwhile documentary material, etc. You will usually find seeders for the great canon of films, ebooks, all manner of musical genres, etc. So, I assume that for videos that really matter to some loyal audience, at least some people will set aside storage space for that. However, most of Google’s petabytes of video are inane "cat videos", people’s personal uploads that only ever attract one or two of their friends to look, or shills, and would it really be such a shame if their content couldn’t be hosted somewhere?
  - s73v3r_ 8y ago
    Yes? Aside from YouTube shows, one of the big things YouTube brought about was the ability for anyone to post a video online, even if it was just for friends and family. Saying, "Too bad, you're not popular so you don't get to have video hosting" is a huge step backwards.
    - kaishiro 8y ago
      Couldn't the original poster of said video be the one to seed it if it was so important to them that it be viewable to others. Why is the onus on a company or organization to host personal videos for free? (If I'm misrepresenting your stance feel free to call me on it - but that's what I'm taking away from your comment)
      - 8y ago
marknadal 8y ago
Mastodon is a great Federated protocol, but the problem with /any/ federated protocol is that it is federated. I've commented about this before, email is federated, and we saw what happened there: Everybody moved to gmail. Federation will lead to all the same systemic issues. A better approach is to use P2P/decentralization, rather than a hosted instance owning your account/identity, you own your account/identity and you can reuse it across any/all services. Even if those services die or go away, you will always exist. This isn't just "talk" though, we've spent the last 4 years of our lives working on giving away truly Free and Open (MIT/Zlib/Apache2) software to help people build stuff like this: https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-with-e2e-encryption-f90505b2ff8 https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-wi... Now there are dApps in production that have pushed terabytes of daily traffic. We're still working through some scaling up kinks, but we're making fast progress.
- needz 8y ago
  That's a very interesting project! I hope it catches on.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  I've commented about this before, email is federated, and we saw what happened there: Everybody moved to gmail. Federation will lead to all the same systemic issues. What are the systemic issues? Why did everybody move to gmail? I liked the ability to just let my email collect and search it. I liked the spam filtering. That's why everybody moved to gmail. The systemic problems I saw with email had to do with server security and spam. How is it that those problems aren't solvable federated, but solvable P2P?
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    Everyone moved to gmail because it was free with a really high storage limit, which was unheard of at the time, and your email address would stay the same when your ISP changed. Hotmail was the hotness before that for pretty much the same reasons, minus the high storage limit.
badrabbit 8y ago
Let me just say this - both mastodon and activitypub are terrible names. I say that as a consumer not as an expert on anything. It's not a dealbreaker for me but platform popularity by the masses depends on color schemes and catchy names. I feel the same way about duckduckgo. Great products though.
- daveid 8y ago
  What would be a better name?
  - kovacs 8y ago
    Nearly anything that's ideally one or two syllables, phonetically easy to say, and can have a reasonable brand built around it. Not that these are awesome but just examples off the top of my head so I'm not just saying "they suck" without providing alternatives... Ivy - Naturally grows and spreads and often is seen climbing walls. Maybe in this case it climbs and covers a FB wall :-P Also a play on FB being started at an ivy league school. Greenfield - Maybe a reasonable name for the protocol that those apps can be built upon? "Ivy's built on the greenfield protocol" Anyway, that's what I came up with in 10-15 minutes of brainstorming and I would pose that those are much easier, approachable, and just better names than these others that simply don't elicit any sort of emotion (or negative ones). Names matter, a lot. You need to be able to tell a story that moves people to action. That's what marketing folks do that adds a ton of value. Most open source projects don't have marketing folks so... :-)
    - briandear 8y ago
      Pied Piper is the best name.
    - type0 8y ago
      The better name to Mastodon would be Pleroma!
      - kovacs 8y ago
skybrian 8y ago
Okay, it sounds plausible that it could be a good thing. But it seems that everything good on the Internet eventually gets weaponized by the bad guys, and these days it seems to happen faster than ever. So maybe we should talk about the downsides of ActivityPub?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ziftface 8y ago
  Well the bad guys have shown that they can make as many fake accounts as they want on facebook/twitter. If anything, they're encouraged to do so. I don't see how a decentralized network would be any worse in that regard at least.
- Kinrany 8y ago
  This statement can be generalized to all of science and technology.
  - skybrian 8y ago
    Yes, of course.
- alex_duf 8y ago
  I think spam is going to be a problem to control, it's also a matter of time before fake accounts are a thing.
remir 8y ago
Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter: they grew to what they are today because each of them had people behind the wheel with a product mentality. This mentality attracted the capital and talent necessary to create products that resonated with people. Now, some would say that, these services had the goal to make money and that's why they attracted capital and could hire top talent, but it doesn't change the fact that they had to have a strong product mentality to get to where they are today. Most decentralized software I see have a project mentality based on idealism, but idealism is not enough. That's why desktop Linux failed to capture significant market share even if it costs zero to Joe Average to install it: it stayed at the level of idealism, of a project, while proprietary platforms like Windows an OSX had serious money and talent behind them because they weren't just projects. On the other hand, Firefox and the Linux kernel are good example of successful open source softwares with a strong product mentality. Mozilla had a vision and they realized they need a strong product to fulfill that vision, so they needed to be able to pay their developers well, meaning they had to generates money. Same thing with the Linux kernel, which is backed by a lot of big companies. So I guess what I'm saying is; if ActivityPub is to be the future, then there should be more than idealism behind it.
- ixxie 8y ago
  While I see your point about product mentality, and agree to a large extent, I am not sure it applies to ActivityPub. Its like saying email needed to be productized; it didn't, we just needed productized implementations of email servers and clients to get the network going.
  - albertgoeswoof 8y ago
    Exactly- email would be nothing without outlook and gmail, http might have fallen without netscape. We need products on ActivityPub that beat real products
    - johnchristopher 8y ago
      Email was there before outlook and Gmail and will still be long after Gmail sunsets it and Microsoft rebrands outlook to something like "Microsoft xbox delayed chat system".
TekMol 8y ago
You can be certain that regardless what happens with Mastodon, the network will live on and flourish. Newer and better software will be born within this ecosystem, but you will never have to drag all your friends and followers someplace else again–they’ll already be where they need to be. What is a 'friend' here? A follower? If mastodon.social is shut down tomorrow, a user - say joe@mastodon.social - would lose all his followers, no? First of all the followers that were on mastodon.social too - their data is gone just like Joes data. And the ones not on mastodon.social - yes, they would still exist. But Joe would have to make a new account somewhere else and ask each and every one to follow him again. And he would have no proof that he is the same joe that they knew under the account joe@mastodon.social. Or am I missing something? Is there some public key that is Joes real identity and only he knows the private key?
- QualityReboot 8y ago
  Could I have me@mydomain be accepted by mastodon.social somehow? Similar to how I point my MX records to Gmail?
  - deft 8y ago
    Not right now and maybe not ever. People have been asking for an account migration tool for quite awhile.
  - detaro 8y ago
    If you install an ActivityPub compatible software, or if someone starts to offer one with custom domain support as a service. Account discovery most commonly is done with a HTTP request in /.well-known/, but the application that points to doesn't have to be at the same domain.
- type0 8y ago
  > And the ones not on mastodon.social - yes, they would still exist. But Joe would have to make a new account somewhere else and ask each and every one to follow him again. But it's the same with gmail and everything else like that, I don't see it being a problem of ActivityPub or Mastodon. There's keybase or having your own domain with some index.html where you can direct your followers to a new account is not that big of a deal nowdays. If having to host it somewhere is too much for you - use dot tel tld (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tel). People that really want to read your ramblings will find you anyway.
1wd 8y ago
Is ActivityPub-based federated Git part of that future? https://github.com/git-federation/gitpub https://github.com/git-federation/gitpub
k__ 8y ago
In Germany we have rather socialism like structures like the "eingetranger Verein/eV" (membership association) or the "eingetragene Genossenschaft/eG" (incorporated cooperative) These are made for things like that. The idea with a eG is, the owners are also the customers. For example, if there is need of appartments, people found a eG to pool the money to build multi-appartment houses where they self live in later. Since the customers are also the "stock owners" they elect the board. I think this fits perfectly for these federated social networks.
jancsika 8y ago
I get it from a developer standpoint, but I don't get it at all from a user standpoint. For example: joinmastodon.org gives me two dropdown boxes at the bottom of their frontpage. One asks what my interest is, the other asks what language I speak. Then it ajaxes in some links to different instances which (I suppose) are geared toward the interest I chose. Does this mean that for each interest I must sign up on a different instance, controlled by a different entity with their own terms of service? Edit: clarification
- ohtwenty 8y ago
  I've been using mastodon for a few months and it depends on your instance, really. A lot are more "this is the type of people you'd expect here" (tech people, lgbt people, art peopl, etc) but everything that isn't specifically related to that topic is OK. I'm on a semi-political one, because that's what I'd use a platform like that for. But it's not limited to that at all. Some are stricter, some aren't pegged down to a topic, but might be related to a "type" of person. I know some people who have a few accounts, to only share stuff related to that instance. Some people end up running their own instance (although that's easier with pleroma, you could probably run it off a toaster if you wanted to) or just with one or two friends. there's added value to the local timeline, especially in smaller instances when you've just joined, because it allows you to find like-minded people. If you could do without that the easiest option might be to join a large instance or start your own, but both come with discoverability issues. In short, no, you don't need to, but you could (just like you can make multiple emails) if it helps you separate stuff
- ripdog 8y ago
  No, thanks to federation it doesn't matter which instance you sign up on, you can follow people on any instance. You're choosing your home instance there, so basically the group of people you're closest to.
est 8y ago
activitypub needs some kind of a badge/logo for recognition. Like the RSS button.
rayalez 8y ago
Unfortunately, at the moment it's impossible to rename/move your account to a different domain, and if your mastodon instance is shut down(which, let's face it, is likelier to happen than twitter shutdown), you still lose your followers. You can host your own instance, of course, but that requires time/money for maintenance, and not everyone will do this.
rayalez 8y ago
Does anyone know if there are some good ActivityPub implementations in Node?
deklerk 8y ago
Was it necessary to change the title of this post a half dozen times?
yausername 8y ago
My buzzword antibodies have been circling "federation" for quite a while, but the email analogy in this article has made me reconsider. Ever since quitting social networks I've been looking for a way to push content to close friends and I really had to fall all the way down to email before anything worked. So I'm hopeful for some slightly more tailored technologies to step in.
dingo_bat 8y ago
Nice tech! So where's the peer tube website I can watch and upload videos? Couldn't find it on Google or in TFA.
- albertgoeswoof 8y ago
  https://peer.tube/ https://peer.tube/
  - dingo_bat 8y ago
    Thanks, I had found this. But you cannot upload here. But I figured it out now. You can create an account and upload stuff on peertube.social.

399 points by gargron 8y ago

ActivityPub W3C Recommendation: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

The real value of federation, and the value of a standard like ActivityPub, didn't fully click for me until I realized I could follow Blender's PeerTube experiment from my Mastodon account. If enough sites start supporting it, you could get many of the benefits of RSS with the few benefits of massive silos like Twitter and Facebook.

mtgx 8y ago
Anti-censorship has always been the #1 benefit of federation and peer-to-peer connectivity. I don't think any other benefits come even close, and they are usually overshadowed by how much more difficult it is to build a well-working federated or P2P network. But when you start having global monopolies in various industries that don't care about automatically banning the "little guy" from which they make little money to begin with and when you have governments that are increasingly more interested in let's say "curating" the internet, then that anti-censorship benefit starts to become a lot more appealing to a lot more people. It's why I'm glad Firefox is not only finally a decent competitor to Chrome but also starting to adopt all sort of anti-censorship protocols and technologies, too (and hopefully there are more to come).
- rainbowmverse 8y ago
  >> "Anti-censorship has always been the #1 benefit of federation and peer-to-peer connectivity. I don't think any other benefits come even close, and they are usually overshadowed by how much more difficult it is to build a well-working federated or P2P network." The rank of benefits is, of course, highly subjective. I'm speaking for myself.
- snissn 8y ago
  Your comment resonates with Maslow's hierarchy of needs on a digital level. Society's primary benefit is safety and decentralization creates the internet's base offering of security
  - CNJ7654 8y ago
    >Society's primary benefit is safety This is subjective, my favorite benefit from society is guaranteed freedoms. Luckily decentralization also offers a great deal of freedom on the internet :)
- apotheon 8y ago
  "a decent competitor" How did it do that? It threw away all the technical and usability benefits it had over Chrome, so I guess it's "a decent competitor" instead of "a clear winner" for some purposes, like it once was. Is that what you mean?
- detaro 8y ago
  A non-empty set of Mastodon users probably picked precisely for it's "censorship" abilities, unhappy with how Twitter handles it and wanting a space where their instance can enforce its own policies.
  - fenwick67 8y ago
    The real benefit of federation is that anywhere on the moderation spectrum is possible on a per-instance basis.
- ajconway 8y ago
  Banning federated networks is actually much easier than dealing with an important centralized entity like Facebook or Google. Just ban every node that provides access to illegal content.
  - incompatible 8y ago
    China is happy to ban both, difficulty doesn't seem to be an issue.
jesse_m 8y ago
How do you subscribe from mastodon? I see the video.blender.org is their instance right?
- rainbowmverse 8y ago
  Put @blender@video.blender.org in the search box.
  - donpdonp 8y ago
    The search box can be easy to miss - its the text field above the new-toot-box and below the menu bar in the left-most column.
    - jesse_m 8y ago
      Thanks I was using Tusky but had the wrong format for the name
    - ktosobcy 8y ago
      This definitely should be better highlighted... I knew I should be able to follow ActivityPub but: nothing was on blender/peertube website nor I saw any field to search for blender...
  - jesse_m 8y ago
    Ahh thank you. I had the format wrong there
mgummelt 8y ago
I think you've hit on the actual end user benefit - aggregation. The article is either pitching abstractions like "compatibility" or solutions to non-problems like the risk that Facebook might vanish. Though I'm not convinced aggregation is a big problem.

xez 8y ago

>If Twitter shuts down, you’ll lose your followers. If Facebook shuts down, you’ll lose your friends. For some platforms, it’s not a question of “if”, but “when”. Wouldn't this happen as well if the instance my account was created in shuts down?

jordigh 8y ago
It would and it has. In Mastodon-speak, this is called an "extinction event", and I have seen a few of those. Mastodon, however, has already implemented take-out feature where you can download all of your data at any time, including your friend list. It's not perfect, because although you can keep your followee list, your followers don't have an automatic way of knowing where your new presence may have moved to. Also, the stuff that has already been tooted lives on in the fediverse in other servers, so it's not like the toots also disappear from other servers after an extinction event, just like an email server going down doesn't delete the email from everyone else's inbox.
- xez 8y ago
  right, there's that at least, and that's probably better than the alternatives. It just didn't sound like a good analogy. A bit deceiving even.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  Unfortunately, it's out there, but you can't associate those previous messages with your new account.
  - PKop 8y ago
    Keybase.io could be a part of solving this I think: https://keybase.io/docs/sigchain https://keybase.io/docs/sigchain
- PKop 8y ago
  I was thinking that federation still leaves unsolved the issue of knowing the single source of truth for identities, and when instances go down, you can't reference anything to know who/where people are. Couldn't Keybase.io solve this? It could track your identities on these servers, and it would exist outside of any instances or federation, but be the source of identity that would go along with any federated instances you are a part of

amelius 8y ago

But how will they deal with the GDPR? https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/7280 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/7280

daveid 8y ago
From the thread: >I don't expect any major changes are needed for compliance, which is why it's been pretty low priority. it's just a matter of getting a document together that better informs admins. Mastodon has all the features needed for compliance, and does not collect or store any data that's not for its primary purpose.
- amelius 8y ago
  Does that mean that in ActivityPub, I can't share messages with a restricted group of people?
  - rainbowmverse 8y ago
    You can do DMs, but it's possible for admins with sufficient access on each recipient's instance to read them. edit: I didn't see that this was in the context of GDPR.
    - amelius 8y ago
      Ok, that sounds like they don't comply with the GDPR then. Also, doesn't ActivityPub allow closed groups?
      - detaro 8y ago
        Just as GDPR-incompliant as e-mail then, or any social media platform that's not e2e encrypted?
        Kiro 8y ago
        Yes, which is why you can't use email to send sensitive personal data anymore.

rogerbraun 8y ago

Some background information on ActivityPub in Pleroma: https://blog.soykaf.com/post/activity-pub-in-pleroma/ https://blog.soykaf.com/post/activity-pub-in-pleroma/ https://blog.soykaf.com/post/what-is-pleroma/ https://blog.soykaf.com/post/what-is-pleroma/

edhelas 8y ago

ActivityPub is built by the W3C and therefore relies on Web related technologies (lost of HTTP and JSON exchanged) :) Does this scale properly and how does it compare to existing solutions like XMPP Pubsub (https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html) that is basically built to deliver content, in real-time (trough TCP sockets) and can handle thousands (millions?) of delivered packets per seconds? I'm building a federated social platform that is fully relying on XMPP (Movim https://movim.eu https://movim.eu) and I'm wondering about the limits and different usages of this fresh new protocol.

xj9 8y ago
the AP spec is actually, a bit more abstract that you would expect. JSON and JSON-LD are required, but transport and actor resolution are not well specified. current-gen AP servers do have an implicit dependency on HTTP and DNS. i've spoken with several people about creating a proof-of-concept AP server that supports gossip-based replication and a few other ssb-inspired features.
- oelmekki 8y ago
  This sounds interesting. Does it mean an AP server could exist that would not be based on the federation model? Or to make my question more precise : would the gossip model be used only for data distribution and we would still have to register on a node, or would it allow to keep and reuse our data and identity should our usual node disappear?
  - xj9 8y ago
    the goal is to decouple users from servers. the idea is to move the key that AP uses to sign JSON-LD objects to the client and do all of the crypto operations there. a server in this model is an always-on relay for replicating data. you can submit a message to any relay and expect to have it show up on all interested servers. unfortunately, this will also break compat with HTTP/DNS-based AP servers, but hopefully this is something that the maintainers will be open to supporting. relevant threads: https://b.9chan.lol/notice/279590 https://b.9chan.lol/notice/279590 https://b.9chan.lol/notice/226866 https://b.9chan.lol/notice/226866 https://b.9chan.lol/notice/212397 https://b.9chan.lol/notice/212397 https://shitposter.club/notice/9830850 https://shitposter.club/notice/9830850

froasty 8y ago

Mastodon and other federated platforms are to social media what suburbia historically has been to cities. People think it'll resolve or at least mitigate the issues of digital privacy, digital harassment, and digital overpopulation, but in reality will just create ever more wasteful and unaccountable digital sprawl while inevitably recreating the exact same problems (e.g. HOA discrimination, nosey neighbors, hiding all non-conforming traits lest your cohabitants judge you, etc).

bhhaskin 8y ago
You are comparing apples to oranges. Self hosting a service will of course mitigate all of the issues you listed. The control shifts from a company like Facebook into the hands of the server owner.
- froasty 8y ago
  Yes, and nominally so did homeownership in suburbia vs rental in overcrowded cities. What it actually meant is that instead of being beholden to "The Man's" cultural standards, they were now beholden to the Homeowner's Association's. Instead of overt racism and segregation, they got redlining, blockbusting, and racial steering. Instead of razor thin walls leading to informal surveillance, they had to Keep Up with the Joneses. Of course, the forces are now politically/socially based rather than fundamentally racially based, but the principle remains the same. It's another digital White Flight by any other name.^1 --- 1 https://www.technologyreview.com/s/419843/did-whites-flee-the-digital-ghetto-of-myspace/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/419843/did-whites-flee-th...
  - prepend 8y ago
    You’re assuming that urban is always superior to suburban. There are many who prefer the problems you call out vs the problems with urban centers.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  No it won't. You might not have to see harassment directed at you, but that doesn't mitigate it. Especially if part of that harassment is doxxing.

mankash666 8y ago

The tech and applications have existed for a while now, but adoption hasn't been comparable to large, centralized rivals. I'd argue activityPub isn't the future, until it root causes the reason for anemic adoption. Also, the best use case might not be in transferring an existing centralized app onto activity pub

amelius 8y ago
What if there was a well-maintained library that continuously scrapes a given user's Facebook account, and publishes it to AP?
- stcredzero 8y ago
  How about browser extensions?
- dane-pgp 8y ago
  Or we could go one better and use the GDPR's "data portability" requirement to force Facebook to effectively offer such an API: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/ A regulator / court would have to look at what is "technically feasible" for Facebook to implement, but given that there are multiple interoperating projects supporting ActivityPub (with much smaller resources than Facebook) I think it would be hard to argue that Facebook couldn't add ActivityPub support. At a stretch, Facebook might argue that data portability only requires them (as data controllers) to publish your Facebook posts to specific accounts on other services, and doesn't require Facebook to accept inbound posts from competing platforms, but I don't know whether Facebook would want to be in a situation where their competitors have access to data on Facebook but Facebook doesn't have similar access to data from their users.
  - amelius 8y ago
    To be honest, the only data I would want to export out of Facebook would be "events" (event name, time, location, description, rsvps, image/video data, comments). Would that also be possible using the GDPR directive?

fiatjaf 8y ago

Who's going to host thousands of petabytes of videos on behalf of others if not YouTube or a similar service?

mnkmnk 8y ago
I would totally host it if I got some money out of it. Maybe get paid for ads served through my computer.
Mediterraneo10 8y ago
As anyone involved on the major torrent communities knows, at least some people are willing to share the great artistic achievements of mankind, worthwhile documentary material, etc. You will usually find seeders for the great canon of films, ebooks, all manner of musical genres, etc. So, I assume that for videos that really matter to some loyal audience, at least some people will set aside storage space for that. However, most of Google’s petabytes of video are inane "cat videos", people’s personal uploads that only ever attract one or two of their friends to look, or shills, and would it really be such a shame if their content couldn’t be hosted somewhere?
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  Yes? Aside from YouTube shows, one of the big things YouTube brought about was the ability for anyone to post a video online, even if it was just for friends and family. Saying, "Too bad, you're not popular so you don't get to have video hosting" is a huge step backwards.
  - kaishiro 8y ago
    Couldn't the original poster of said video be the one to seed it if it was so important to them that it be viewable to others. Why is the onus on a company or organization to host personal videos for free? (If I'm misrepresenting your stance feel free to call me on it - but that's what I'm taking away from your comment)
    - 8y ago

marknadal 8y ago

Mastodon is a great Federated protocol, but the problem with /any/ federated protocol is that it is federated. I've commented about this before, email is federated, and we saw what happened there: Everybody moved to gmail. Federation will lead to all the same systemic issues. A better approach is to use P2P/decentralization, rather than a hosted instance owning your account/identity, you own your account/identity and you can reuse it across any/all services. Even if those services die or go away, you will always exist. This isn't just "talk" though, we've spent the last 4 years of our lives working on giving away truly Free and Open (MIT/Zlib/Apache2) software to help people build stuff like this: https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-with-e2e-encryption-f90505b2ff8 https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-wi... Now there are dApps in production that have pushed terabytes of daily traffic. We're still working through some scaling up kinks, but we're making fast progress.

needz 8y ago
That's a very interesting project! I hope it catches on.
stcredzero 8y ago
I've commented about this before, email is federated, and we saw what happened there: Everybody moved to gmail. Federation will lead to all the same systemic issues. What are the systemic issues? Why did everybody move to gmail? I liked the ability to just let my email collect and search it. I liked the spam filtering. That's why everybody moved to gmail. The systemic problems I saw with email had to do with server security and spam. How is it that those problems aren't solvable federated, but solvable P2P?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  Everyone moved to gmail because it was free with a really high storage limit, which was unheard of at the time, and your email address would stay the same when your ISP changed. Hotmail was the hotness before that for pretty much the same reasons, minus the high storage limit.

badrabbit 8y ago

Let me just say this - both mastodon and activitypub are terrible names. I say that as a consumer not as an expert on anything. It's not a dealbreaker for me but platform popularity by the masses depends on color schemes and catchy names. I feel the same way about duckduckgo. Great products though.

daveid 8y ago
What would be a better name?
- kovacs 8y ago
  Nearly anything that's ideally one or two syllables, phonetically easy to say, and can have a reasonable brand built around it. Not that these are awesome but just examples off the top of my head so I'm not just saying "they suck" without providing alternatives... Ivy - Naturally grows and spreads and often is seen climbing walls. Maybe in this case it climbs and covers a FB wall :-P Also a play on FB being started at an ivy league school. Greenfield - Maybe a reasonable name for the protocol that those apps can be built upon? "Ivy's built on the greenfield protocol" Anyway, that's what I came up with in 10-15 minutes of brainstorming and I would pose that those are much easier, approachable, and just better names than these others that simply don't elicit any sort of emotion (or negative ones). Names matter, a lot. You need to be able to tell a story that moves people to action. That's what marketing folks do that adds a ton of value. Most open source projects don't have marketing folks so... :-)
  - briandear 8y ago
    Pied Piper is the best name.
  - type0 8y ago
    The better name to Mastodon would be Pleroma!
    - kovacs 8y ago

skybrian 8y ago

Okay, it sounds plausible that it could be a good thing. But it seems that everything good on the Internet eventually gets weaponized by the bad guys, and these days it seems to happen faster than ever. So maybe we should talk about the downsides of ActivityPub?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ziftface 8y ago
Well the bad guys have shown that they can make as many fake accounts as they want on facebook/twitter. If anything, they're encouraged to do so. I don't see how a decentralized network would be any worse in that regard at least.
Kinrany 8y ago
This statement can be generalized to all of science and technology.
- skybrian 8y ago
  Yes, of course.
alex_duf 8y ago
I think spam is going to be a problem to control, it's also a matter of time before fake accounts are a thing.

remir 8y ago

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter: they grew to what they are today because each of them had people behind the wheel with a product mentality. This mentality attracted the capital and talent necessary to create products that resonated with people. Now, some would say that, these services had the goal to make money and that's why they attracted capital and could hire top talent, but it doesn't change the fact that they had to have a strong product mentality to get to where they are today. Most decentralized software I see have a project mentality based on idealism, but idealism is not enough. That's why desktop Linux failed to capture significant market share even if it costs zero to Joe Average to install it: it stayed at the level of idealism, of a project, while proprietary platforms like Windows an OSX had serious money and talent behind them because they weren't just projects. On the other hand, Firefox and the Linux kernel are good example of successful open source softwares with a strong product mentality. Mozilla had a vision and they realized they need a strong product to fulfill that vision, so they needed to be able to pay their developers well, meaning they had to generates money. Same thing with the Linux kernel, which is backed by a lot of big companies. So I guess what I'm saying is; if ActivityPub is to be the future, then there should be more than idealism behind it.

ixxie 8y ago
While I see your point about product mentality, and agree to a large extent, I am not sure it applies to ActivityPub. Its like saying email needed to be productized; it didn't, we just needed productized implementations of email servers and clients to get the network going.
- albertgoeswoof 8y ago
  Exactly- email would be nothing without outlook and gmail, http might have fallen without netscape. We need products on ActivityPub that beat real products
  - johnchristopher 8y ago
    Email was there before outlook and Gmail and will still be long after Gmail sunsets it and Microsoft rebrands outlook to something like "Microsoft xbox delayed chat system".

TekMol 8y ago

You can be certain that regardless what happens with Mastodon, the network will live on and flourish. Newer and better software will be born within this ecosystem, but you will never have to drag all your friends and followers someplace else again–they’ll already be where they need to be. What is a 'friend' here? A follower? If mastodon.social is shut down tomorrow, a user - say joe@mastodon.social - would lose all his followers, no? First of all the followers that were on mastodon.social too - their data is gone just like Joes data. And the ones not on mastodon.social - yes, they would still exist. But Joe would have to make a new account somewhere else and ask each and every one to follow him again. And he would have no proof that he is the same joe that they knew under the account joe@mastodon.social. Or am I missing something? Is there some public key that is Joes real identity and only he knows the private key?

QualityReboot 8y ago
Could I have me@mydomain be accepted by mastodon.social somehow? Similar to how I point my MX records to Gmail?
- deft 8y ago
  Not right now and maybe not ever. People have been asking for an account migration tool for quite awhile.
- detaro 8y ago
  If you install an ActivityPub compatible software, or if someone starts to offer one with custom domain support as a service. Account discovery most commonly is done with a HTTP request in /.well-known/, but the application that points to doesn't have to be at the same domain.
type0 8y ago
> And the ones not on mastodon.social - yes, they would still exist. But Joe would have to make a new account somewhere else and ask each and every one to follow him again. But it's the same with gmail and everything else like that, I don't see it being a problem of ActivityPub or Mastodon. There's keybase or having your own domain with some index.html where you can direct your followers to a new account is not that big of a deal nowdays. If having to host it somewhere is too much for you - use dot tel tld (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tel). People that really want to read your ramblings will find you anyway.

1wd 8y ago

Is ActivityPub-based federated Git part of that future? https://github.com/git-federation/gitpub https://github.com/git-federation/gitpub

k__ 8y ago

In Germany we have rather socialism like structures like the "eingetranger Verein/eV" (membership association) or the "eingetragene Genossenschaft/eG" (incorporated cooperative) These are made for things like that. The idea with a eG is, the owners are also the customers. For example, if there is need of appartments, people found a eG to pool the money to build multi-appartment houses where they self live in later. Since the customers are also the "stock owners" they elect the board. I think this fits perfectly for these federated social networks.

jancsika 8y ago

I get it from a developer standpoint, but I don't get it at all from a user standpoint. For example: joinmastodon.org gives me two dropdown boxes at the bottom of their frontpage. One asks what my interest is, the other asks what language I speak. Then it ajaxes in some links to different instances which (I suppose) are geared toward the interest I chose. Does this mean that for each interest I must sign up on a different instance, controlled by a different entity with their own terms of service? Edit: clarification

ohtwenty 8y ago
I've been using mastodon for a few months and it depends on your instance, really. A lot are more "this is the type of people you'd expect here" (tech people, lgbt people, art peopl, etc) but everything that isn't specifically related to that topic is OK. I'm on a semi-political one, because that's what I'd use a platform like that for. But it's not limited to that at all. Some are stricter, some aren't pegged down to a topic, but might be related to a "type" of person. I know some people who have a few accounts, to only share stuff related to that instance. Some people end up running their own instance (although that's easier with pleroma, you could probably run it off a toaster if you wanted to) or just with one or two friends. there's added value to the local timeline, especially in smaller instances when you've just joined, because it allows you to find like-minded people. If you could do without that the easiest option might be to join a large instance or start your own, but both come with discoverability issues. In short, no, you don't need to, but you could (just like you can make multiple emails) if it helps you separate stuff
ripdog 8y ago
No, thanks to federation it doesn't matter which instance you sign up on, you can follow people on any instance. You're choosing your home instance there, so basically the group of people you're closest to.

est 8y ago

activitypub needs some kind of a badge/logo for recognition. Like the RSS button.

rayalez 8y ago

Unfortunately, at the moment it's impossible to rename/move your account to a different domain, and if your mastodon instance is shut down(which, let's face it, is likelier to happen than twitter shutdown), you still lose your followers. You can host your own instance, of course, but that requires time/money for maintenance, and not everyone will do this.

rayalez 8y ago

Does anyone know if there are some good ActivityPub implementations in Node?

deklerk 8y ago

Was it necessary to change the title of this post a half dozen times?

yausername 8y ago

My buzzword antibodies have been circling "federation" for quite a while, but the email analogy in this article has made me reconsider. Ever since quitting social networks I've been looking for a way to push content to close friends and I really had to fall all the way down to email before anything worked. So I'm hopeful for some slightly more tailored technologies to step in.

dingo_bat 8y ago

Nice tech! So where's the peer tube website I can watch and upload videos? Couldn't find it on Google or in TFA.

albertgoeswoof 8y ago
https://peer.tube/ https://peer.tube/
- dingo_bat 8y ago
  Thanks, I had found this. But you cannot upload here. But I figured it out now. You can create an account and upload stuff on peertube.social.