11 ms·

ActivityPub could be the future

288 points by jaywink 8y ago

jtbayly 8y ago
Can somebody explain how blogging platforms are benefitted by activity pub and why there isn’t a Wordpress plugin?
- StavrosK 8y ago
  As the author says, you can follow my blog from your Mastodon account, so you see my posts as Mastodon toots, and you can reply to them and leave a comment on my post. I don't know why there isn't a Wordpress plugin, I guess nobody wrote one yet.
  - jtbayly 8y ago
    What if I don’t want your comments on my site? And will all of your followers’ comments show up too? Is this essentially just the same as the trackbacks I already get from other Wordpress posts that link to my page, but with every single tweet (or rather, “toot” (oh, pardon me, how rude. Can you please tell me where the bathroom is?)) generating a trackback?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - StavrosK 8y ago
      I wrote another comment, but I deleted it and made a new rule for myself: If I can't avoid being snarky, I'll just not reply at all.
    - andypants 8y ago
      If you don't want a specific person's comments? You'll need moderation or blocking tools. If you don't want any comments from the fediverse in general? Well then activity pub doesn't benefit you at all and you have no need for it. > Is this essentially just the same as the trackbacks I already get from other Wordpress posts that link to my page, but with every single tweet (or rather, “toot” (oh, pardon me, how rude. Can you please tell me where the bathroom is?)) generating a trackback? You can interact with people's content from any interoperable website/service/client basically. It's not just a link on some site or a meaningless metric that gets bumped up. The comments may very well be from people who actually did read your blog post and genuinely want to interact. They just don't have to actually visit your site to do any of those things.
- zaarn 8y ago
  I think some WP Plugins are in the works. The short version would be that AP would mean you could get the benefits of both having an RSS Feed and a Comment Section without having to run either as a seperate plugin. If WP had an AP Plugin, people could follow your blog from their Mastodon Account or Plume or any other platform that allows following. They can share and like your blog and that gets federated back, you get those directly to your blog. People can respond to your blog and it would show up as comments and they could discuss it off and on your blog. Though I don#t think AP is panacea, I do think it could enable a lot of interop between previously disconnected platforms.
  - severine 8y ago
    > I think some WP Plugins are in the works. There's some info here: https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg/2016-06-06-minutes#AS2_implementation_-_WordPress_plugin https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg/2016-06-06-minutes#AS2_impl... https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitystream-extension/#description https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitystream-extension/#desc...
wslh 8y ago
I wonder what is the best practice for building a search engine or mining data around ActivityPub. Centralization comes naturally when a search engine or analytics is needed. I imagine a good search engine can be open sourced and data be available to anyone to analyze but the eyeballs and ads will end up in a search engine like Google.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- mxuribe 8y ago
  Search - or more importantly, discovery of content - in a decentralized/federated ecosystem is where google should experiment on a bit more. This is where there is a gap in the decentralized/federated arena. (I acknowledge this even though I am a proud supporter of decentralization!) If google can bring value in this arena, then they can pivot their G+ product and offer it as an underlying platform to provide ActivityPub clients, etc. It could be used to undercut facebook, etc., and make G+ less of a ghost town. For example, people use GSuite to use the gmail email front-end, but leverage their own domain name. What if google pivots G+ to be an activityPub server, allowing paying customers to leverage their own domain name (on google's infrastructure) to interact with the fediverse? And for those users who don;t know/care about decentralization, they think they're getting their own "instance of a social network maintained by google". I think there is a market for this.
TekMol 8y ago
How is a site like mastodon.social different from a site like Twitter? There is no guarantee that the site will continue to operate or continue to provide API access. I have the feeling that people confuse 'federated' (aka provides API access) with 'distributed' (aka does not rely on specific nodes).
- StavrosK 8y ago
  If it doesn't, you go to mastodon.host or mastodon.whatever or just use your own instance.
  - TekMol 8y ago
    The same holds for Twitter or any other service. You can stop using it and use something else.
    - cjslep 8y ago
      And by "use something else" you mean "host your own Twitter instance"? Edit: meant to say Twitter and not Mastodon, to get the point across.
    - jbb67 8y ago
      The difference is that you can still communicate with your friends on their instances
      - TekMol 8y ago
        Depends on who you define as 'you'. If you are 'jbb67@mastodon.social' and mastodon.social goes away or kicks you off their server, there is no more 'you'. You would lose all subscribers, likes, comments etc. Then you would have to find a way to prove to 'your' old friends that jbb67@someotherodomain.com is the same person as the person that formerly was 'jbb67@mastodon.social'. And have some of them follow you again etc. The same process as if you changed from Twitter to Facebook.
StavrosK 8y ago
I saw the article and thought I'd add ActivityPub support to my site, but it looks like static sites can't really do ActivityPub, is that right? I'd need a server to do the posting/receiving.
- zaarn 8y ago
  To my knowledge, yes. Though in theory it should be possible to cobble together a static file version that is atleast capable of returning enough data that other users can see it as an AP post and share it, though liking or replies won't work.
- cjslep 8y ago
  While that's true of ActivityPub, the data format it uses (ActivityStreams, which a form of JSON) could be hosted on a static site separate from the HTML version people are reading, which would at least make the content reference-able on the ActivityPub federated network.
  - StavrosK 8y ago
    Yeah, that might be worth it. Do you know how easy it would be to output something like that?
    - cjslep 8y ago
      Yes, it's about medium effort if starting from scratch with no background knowledge. Mainly because I'm not sure there's any good existing tooling to convert articles to AS. And it wouldn't be complex to implement, but does require some solid time learning the vocabulary, which is intimidating.
  - pmlnr 8y ago
    Good. Can you please point me at working implementation examples?
    - jfreax 8y ago
ShadowX53 8y ago
I didn't get a clear understanding of what ActivityPub is from your article.
- est 8y ago
  universal API for realtime feeds.
  - jtbayly 8y ago
    Where the feeds are bidirectional, no?
    - andypants 8y ago
      Not necessarily. With the right controls implemented, you can decide how much you want your instance to interact with other instances, but it depends on the implementation. I don't know if masotodon is able to control this, and it might not make sense for them to do it. In Peertube at least, you need to manually specify which other peertube instances you want to 'follow'. Other instances can also unilaterally follow your instance.
est 8y ago
We need a logo/badge for ActivityPub, just like the RSS icon, for awareness.
- pmlnr 8y ago
  We need simple implementations examples for ActivityPub. For example, a how to add ActivityPub to static websites would be a good start.
  - NoGravitas 8y ago
    Gargron has been writing a few basic tutorials on the Mastodon blog lately: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/categories/guides/ https://blog.joinmastodon.org/categories/guides/
- yRetsyM 8y ago
  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ActivityPub-logo-symbol.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ActivityPub-logo-sym... From: https://activitypub.rocks/ https://activitypub.rocks/ And: https://gitlab.com/dustyweb/activitypub.rocks/blob/master/static/images/ActivityPub-logo-symbol.svg https://gitlab.com/dustyweb/activitypub.rocks/blob/master/st...
  - quadrangle 8y ago
    That logo is excellent! Tangent: I hate the use of "rocks" as a generic "is great" trend in our langage.
kickscondor 8y ago
I don’t know. It feels like SOAP - or XML-RPC. These protocols that are just layered on top of HTTP keep coming, but they never seem to gain adoption. In part because - what are static websites supposed to do to participate? This was the beauty of RSS. I didn’t love RSS, because it eliminated all the styling from blog posts - but it did achieve real widespread usage.
- rainbowmverse 8y ago
  I wouldn't mind if AP-using projects like Mastodon also let you subscribe to RSS feeds. That way RSS could keep doing what it's good at while AP handles everything else.
- NoGravitas 8y ago
  You can syndicate static websites with ActivityPub, pretty much the same way as you do with RSS, except you're generating JSON-LD (ugh) rather than XML (ugh). I've seen a proof-by-example, but I don't have the URL where I can easily find it. The downside is that Mastodon, the most used AP server, doesn't provide a way of subscribing to a static AP feed (it might work if you also had a simple webfinger script to point to it). I actually like the 'eliminate all the styling' feature of RSS. It's kind of a pleasure to read blog posts and news articles in my mobile feed reader (tt-rss for android).
  - jtbayly 8y ago
    Except for when the content wasn’t included. That was the problem with RSS. It could never decide whether it was supposed to be distributing the content or distributing notifications of the content. That decision was made by the drive for “pageviews” both by ad-driven pages and others that just wanted to know how many people were reading.
    - NoGravitas 8y ago
      Yeah, RSS feeds that aren't full content annoy me. But it's very few blogs that have them; mainly newspapers.
Vinnl 8y ago
I like Mastodon and ActivityPub, and I like that they're seeing relatively broad adoption. That said, I'm not hopeful for the future. If it ever actually sees broad adoption beyond the tech community, all Facebook or whatever comes next has to do is incorporate ActivityPub posts into Facebook, perhaps even send back Facebook comments to those posts, but not publish Facebook-originated content. At that point, you can either be on Facebook and follow all your Facebook and ActivityPub friends, or use Mastodon or whatever and only follow your ActivityPub friends. And even if Facebook does not do that, if a particular ActivityPub client becomes wildly popular, it could do the same, much like how Google Talk started out as interoperable with XMPP, only to ditch it when Google Talk was popular.
- seibelj 8y ago
  If a major player like Facebook adopted ActivityPub it would be enormous validation and success, and I seriously doubt they would ever do that.
  - tambourine_man 8y ago
    Yeah, if they did, we’d know the had already lost
- wastedhours 8y ago
  Without wanting to fall back on an old trope, but: "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" feels pretty apt here.
  - Semaphor 8y ago
    It's what they both did with xmpp
- librexpr 8y ago
  I think that most instances would block Facebook if they tried to do something like that. They'd have nothing to gain and everything to lose by allowing FB to get away with it. As for your other point, it's also possible it will go the way of GMail, which is still compatible with other email providers. I think a large part of it depends on how big ActivityPub gets before a GMastodon appears. Email is pervasive and decently well diversified on the web, with multiple email providers, and many businesses and users not being on GMail, partially due to inertia (they already had an email before GMail became big). Maybe GMail could afford to cut off emails from external providers, but it would be a big risk, and it would definitely break a large part of the web. If ActivityPub does the same, with websites integrating it into their user experience, and news organizations and businesses self-hosting or joining various instances, I expect it would gain the same kind of resilience as email for when a GMastodon shows up. So I'm not too pessimistic about this. The more pressing concern is increasing adoption, IMO.
edhelas 8y ago
> XMPP spoke XML in an age of JSON Damn, let's ditch all the XML protocols then, XHTML first :D What does "age of JSON" means exactly? Those are two different technologies for different purposes. Even if XMPP tried to move to JSON, how can you do namespaces in JSON for example? You want ActivityPub in XMPP ? Just take Pubsub and put Atom in it, those are two stable and proven technologies, they fits perfectly (it's just one namespace in another) and with many many benefits. Here is a news feed built on top of XMPP Pubsub https://nl.movim.eu/?node/pubsub.movim.eu/Movim https://nl.movim.eu/?node/pubsub.movim.eu/Movim, and yes there's also an Atom 1.0 feed generated from it, because it's easy to just extract the (validated) Atom content from Pubsub and put it back to a proper HTTP page.
- zinid 8y ago
  > age of JSON Yeah, modern and shiny JSON. IT is now a subdivision of the fashion industry. Suck it up ;)
- PurpleRamen 8y ago
  > how can you do namespaces in JSON for example? For what is this neccessary?
  - gmueckl 8y ago
    Nsmespaces allow XML file formats flexible and extensible in interesting ways: each namespace is tied to an independent schema, allowing for a very natural nesting of validatable XML in arbitrary formats. The namespaces avoid name collision between XML tags from different schemas. The grandparent gave a good example of this kind of nesting. JSON is incapable of the same kind of nesting because there are no explicit namespace to identify nested data formats and to avoid name collisions.
    - ekidd 8y ago
      XML namespaces do offer some nice possibilities. But the lack of official JSON namespaces doesn't prevent you from doing something like: { "built_in": "value", "org.example.my_extension": "value" } If you want to validate it, you might need to jump through some JSON schema hoops, of course.
jarym 8y ago
HATEOAS could have been the future too - many people wanted it to be. With all these standards, the successful ones need to find some magic moment to take off - like HTTP did. Too early to tell if ActivityPub (which I like as a protocol very much) will be an HTTP or an XML.
- tbrownaw 8y ago
  The reason behind HATEOAS was that REST was in practice being watered down from how it was originally envisioned, so proponents of the original vision needed a new term. I don't think that your origin story being "well we needed a way to tell all the practitioners they were consistently doing it wrong" is a good indicator of potential success.
  - jarym 8y ago
    Ok, perhaps I picked a poor example - but still, the success of a standard depends on some magic formula that isn't easy to repeat.
- nairboon 8y ago
  What happend with all these Hypermedia ideas? All these HATEOAS, Hydra, HAL, etc. projects don't appear to me as very widespread.
  - jarym 8y ago
    Well the purists lost is my take. The vision was a fine one, just the approach that was being proposed had too many downsides to really take off.
orthecreedence 8y ago
ActivityPub really needs some decoupling of identity from server. If a server I'm using starts acting up, the answer is to move servers, right? But, wait, my 50K followers from Server A won't be following me on Server B. Essentially, you only get to pick your original server once, without having to rebuild your network. So choose wisely! This obviously isn't an easy problem to solve. You'd need to separate identity from hosting, and have some way to look up "identity A is on server D" so peope following identity A know where to get the content. I truly believe it's essential to the success of the protocol, though.
- chipotle_coyote 8y ago
  This is what the whole IndieWeb movement is about -- being distributed rather than merely federated. I'm mildly concerned that the two camps seem to be building their own protocols rather than working together (excepting the existence of Bridgy Fed, perhaps).
  - toomim 8y ago
    Good point -- it would actually be simple to combine IndieWeb + Mastadon and solve this problem. IndieWeb's solution is to own your own domain: https://indieweb.org/personal-domain https://indieweb.org/personal-domain. If you control your DNS, you can move your data to a different back-end provider and just update your DNS entries. To combine this with Mastadon, just make your own domain, like https://chipotle.coyote https://chipotle.coyote, and point it at Mastadon-Server-A. Then if you want to move everything to Mastadon-Server-B, just copy the data and update DNS.
    - type0 8y ago
      I agree with you but for the general social medial user updating the DNS records sounds scary and complicated. And for such user even if the idea of owning their own domain might sound compelling, how many will simply forged to renew the domain, be done with it and move to the next facebook.
    - danShumway 8y ago
davepeck 8y ago
Mastodon reports ~110k weekly active users and 121M "toots" across its 2+-year lifetime. That's impressive for a federated social network but, for comparison, 121M new tweets are generated on Twitter about every six hours. Some more basic Mastodon stats that I recently collected: https://davepeck.org/2018/05/03/mastodon-stats/ https://davepeck.org/2018/05/03/mastodon-stats/
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  How many tweets were generated when Twitter was about two years in? Early growth curves on social networks are exponential, there's plenty of time for Mastodon or an as-yet-to-be-created network to eclipse Twitter as it starts to decline. EDIT: According to https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2011/numbers.html https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2011/numbers.html it took about three years and two months for Twitter to hit a billion tweets. That's well within what Mastodon could hit with "exponential growth", though I'm guessing Mastodon will fall a bit short of that rate.
  - davepeck 8y ago
    It’s a good question and one I didn’t address because I wasn’t able to find super reliable numbers. That’s a good link, though. Thanks!
briandear 8y ago
Off topic, but whatever happened to app.net? That was supposed to be the next new thing.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  On January 12, 2017, the founders announced that the platform App.net would be shut down on March 15, 2017.[13] However, due to a significant number of user data export failures that deadline was extended until March 16, 2017. App.net finally ceased to operate as a social network at 2017-03-17-06:45UTC. The source code for App.net was made available on their Github Page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net
dingo_bat 8y ago
Just signed up on mastodon social. First impressions: - The web app is very well made, although the space utilization could be a bit better - There doesn't seem to be any concept of friends, but there is something called "follows". - Almost every post in my timeline was in a language I couldn't understand. All in all, nice experience but looks identical to twitter. Not really sure of any benefits over twitter.
znpy 8y ago
I started using mastodon after realising that SDF had set up an instance, and I only had to activate my SDF account. So far, so good. Social stuff is neat again, I don't get my bandwidth wasted for ads and I can trust my provider. Hopefully this becomes the norm! This makes me realize that I got my SDF account in 2008 when I was 16, no questions asked, and I was unemployed. Now I've got a job and I can finally sign-up for a recurring payment/support account.
irispanabaker 8y ago
use this tool to check JSON-LD data. https://jsonformatter.org https://jsonformatter.org

288 points by jaywink 8y ago

jtbayly 8y ago

Can somebody explain how blogging platforms are benefitted by activity pub and why there isn’t a Wordpress plugin?

StavrosK 8y ago
As the author says, you can follow my blog from your Mastodon account, so you see my posts as Mastodon toots, and you can reply to them and leave a comment on my post. I don't know why there isn't a Wordpress plugin, I guess nobody wrote one yet.
- jtbayly 8y ago
  What if I don’t want your comments on my site? And will all of your followers’ comments show up too? Is this essentially just the same as the trackbacks I already get from other Wordpress posts that link to my page, but with every single tweet (or rather, “toot” (oh, pardon me, how rude. Can you please tell me where the bathroom is?)) generating a trackback?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - StavrosK 8y ago
    I wrote another comment, but I deleted it and made a new rule for myself: If I can't avoid being snarky, I'll just not reply at all.
  - andypants 8y ago
    If you don't want a specific person's comments? You'll need moderation or blocking tools. If you don't want any comments from the fediverse in general? Well then activity pub doesn't benefit you at all and you have no need for it. > Is this essentially just the same as the trackbacks I already get from other Wordpress posts that link to my page, but with every single tweet (or rather, “toot” (oh, pardon me, how rude. Can you please tell me where the bathroom is?)) generating a trackback? You can interact with people's content from any interoperable website/service/client basically. It's not just a link on some site or a meaningless metric that gets bumped up. The comments may very well be from people who actually did read your blog post and genuinely want to interact. They just don't have to actually visit your site to do any of those things.
zaarn 8y ago
I think some WP Plugins are in the works. The short version would be that AP would mean you could get the benefits of both having an RSS Feed and a Comment Section without having to run either as a seperate plugin. If WP had an AP Plugin, people could follow your blog from their Mastodon Account or Plume or any other platform that allows following. They can share and like your blog and that gets federated back, you get those directly to your blog. People can respond to your blog and it would show up as comments and they could discuss it off and on your blog. Though I don#t think AP is panacea, I do think it could enable a lot of interop between previously disconnected platforms.
- severine 8y ago
  > I think some WP Plugins are in the works. There's some info here: https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg/2016-06-06-minutes#AS2_implementation_-_WordPress_plugin https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg/2016-06-06-minutes#AS2_impl... https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitystream-extension/#description https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitystream-extension/#desc...

wslh 8y ago

I wonder what is the best practice for building a search engine or mining data around ActivityPub. Centralization comes naturally when a search engine or analytics is needed. I imagine a good search engine can be open sourced and data be available to anyone to analyze but the eyeballs and ads will end up in a search engine like Google.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mxuribe 8y ago
Search - or more importantly, discovery of content - in a decentralized/federated ecosystem is where google should experiment on a bit more. This is where there is a gap in the decentralized/federated arena. (I acknowledge this even though I am a proud supporter of decentralization!) If google can bring value in this arena, then they can pivot their G+ product and offer it as an underlying platform to provide ActivityPub clients, etc. It could be used to undercut facebook, etc., and make G+ less of a ghost town. For example, people use GSuite to use the gmail email front-end, but leverage their own domain name. What if google pivots G+ to be an activityPub server, allowing paying customers to leverage their own domain name (on google's infrastructure) to interact with the fediverse? And for those users who don;t know/care about decentralization, they think they're getting their own "instance of a social network maintained by google". I think there is a market for this.

TekMol 8y ago

How is a site like mastodon.social different from a site like Twitter? There is no guarantee that the site will continue to operate or continue to provide API access. I have the feeling that people confuse 'federated' (aka provides API access) with 'distributed' (aka does not rely on specific nodes).

StavrosK 8y ago
If it doesn't, you go to mastodon.host or mastodon.whatever or just use your own instance.
- TekMol 8y ago
  The same holds for Twitter or any other service. You can stop using it and use something else.
  - cjslep 8y ago
    And by "use something else" you mean "host your own Twitter instance"? Edit: meant to say Twitter and not Mastodon, to get the point across.
  - jbb67 8y ago
    The difference is that you can still communicate with your friends on their instances
    - TekMol 8y ago
      Depends on who you define as 'you'. If you are 'jbb67@mastodon.social' and mastodon.social goes away or kicks you off their server, there is no more 'you'. You would lose all subscribers, likes, comments etc. Then you would have to find a way to prove to 'your' old friends that jbb67@someotherodomain.com is the same person as the person that formerly was 'jbb67@mastodon.social'. And have some of them follow you again etc. The same process as if you changed from Twitter to Facebook.

StavrosK 8y ago

I saw the article and thought I'd add ActivityPub support to my site, but it looks like static sites can't really do ActivityPub, is that right? I'd need a server to do the posting/receiving.

zaarn 8y ago
To my knowledge, yes. Though in theory it should be possible to cobble together a static file version that is atleast capable of returning enough data that other users can see it as an AP post and share it, though liking or replies won't work.
cjslep 8y ago
While that's true of ActivityPub, the data format it uses (ActivityStreams, which a form of JSON) could be hosted on a static site separate from the HTML version people are reading, which would at least make the content reference-able on the ActivityPub federated network.
- StavrosK 8y ago
  Yeah, that might be worth it. Do you know how easy it would be to output something like that?
  - cjslep 8y ago
    Yes, it's about medium effort if starting from scratch with no background knowledge. Mainly because I'm not sure there's any good existing tooling to convert articles to AS. And it wouldn't be complex to implement, but does require some solid time learning the vocabulary, which is intimidating.
- pmlnr 8y ago
  Good. Can you please point me at working implementation examples?
  - jfreax 8y ago

ShadowX53 8y ago

I didn't get a clear understanding of what ActivityPub is from your article.

est 8y ago
universal API for realtime feeds.
- jtbayly 8y ago
  Where the feeds are bidirectional, no?
  - andypants 8y ago
    Not necessarily. With the right controls implemented, you can decide how much you want your instance to interact with other instances, but it depends on the implementation. I don't know if masotodon is able to control this, and it might not make sense for them to do it. In Peertube at least, you need to manually specify which other peertube instances you want to 'follow'. Other instances can also unilaterally follow your instance.

est 8y ago

We need a logo/badge for ActivityPub, just like the RSS icon, for awareness.

pmlnr 8y ago
We need simple implementations examples for ActivityPub. For example, a how to add ActivityPub to static websites would be a good start.
- NoGravitas 8y ago
  Gargron has been writing a few basic tutorials on the Mastodon blog lately: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/categories/guides/ https://blog.joinmastodon.org/categories/guides/
yRetsyM 8y ago
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ActivityPub-logo-symbol.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ActivityPub-logo-sym... From: https://activitypub.rocks/ https://activitypub.rocks/ And: https://gitlab.com/dustyweb/activitypub.rocks/blob/master/static/images/ActivityPub-logo-symbol.svg https://gitlab.com/dustyweb/activitypub.rocks/blob/master/st...
- quadrangle 8y ago
  That logo is excellent! Tangent: I hate the use of "rocks" as a generic "is great" trend in our langage.

kickscondor 8y ago

I don’t know. It feels like SOAP - or XML-RPC. These protocols that are just layered on top of HTTP keep coming, but they never seem to gain adoption. In part because - what are static websites supposed to do to participate? This was the beauty of RSS. I didn’t love RSS, because it eliminated all the styling from blog posts - but it did achieve real widespread usage.

rainbowmverse 8y ago
I wouldn't mind if AP-using projects like Mastodon also let you subscribe to RSS feeds. That way RSS could keep doing what it's good at while AP handles everything else.
NoGravitas 8y ago
You can syndicate static websites with ActivityPub, pretty much the same way as you do with RSS, except you're generating JSON-LD (ugh) rather than XML (ugh). I've seen a proof-by-example, but I don't have the URL where I can easily find it. The downside is that Mastodon, the most used AP server, doesn't provide a way of subscribing to a static AP feed (it might work if you also had a simple webfinger script to point to it). I actually like the 'eliminate all the styling' feature of RSS. It's kind of a pleasure to read blog posts and news articles in my mobile feed reader (tt-rss for android).
- jtbayly 8y ago
  Except for when the content wasn’t included. That was the problem with RSS. It could never decide whether it was supposed to be distributing the content or distributing notifications of the content. That decision was made by the drive for “pageviews” both by ad-driven pages and others that just wanted to know how many people were reading.
  - NoGravitas 8y ago
    Yeah, RSS feeds that aren't full content annoy me. But it's very few blogs that have them; mainly newspapers.

Vinnl 8y ago

I like Mastodon and ActivityPub, and I like that they're seeing relatively broad adoption. That said, I'm not hopeful for the future. If it ever actually sees broad adoption beyond the tech community, all Facebook or whatever comes next has to do is incorporate ActivityPub posts into Facebook, perhaps even send back Facebook comments to those posts, but not publish Facebook-originated content. At that point, you can either be on Facebook and follow all your Facebook and ActivityPub friends, or use Mastodon or whatever and only follow your ActivityPub friends. And even if Facebook does not do that, if a particular ActivityPub client becomes wildly popular, it could do the same, much like how Google Talk started out as interoperable with XMPP, only to ditch it when Google Talk was popular.

seibelj 8y ago
If a major player like Facebook adopted ActivityPub it would be enormous validation and success, and I seriously doubt they would ever do that.
- tambourine_man 8y ago
  Yeah, if they did, we’d know the had already lost
wastedhours 8y ago
Without wanting to fall back on an old trope, but: "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" feels pretty apt here.
- Semaphor 8y ago
  It's what they both did with xmpp
librexpr 8y ago
I think that most instances would block Facebook if they tried to do something like that. They'd have nothing to gain and everything to lose by allowing FB to get away with it. As for your other point, it's also possible it will go the way of GMail, which is still compatible with other email providers. I think a large part of it depends on how big ActivityPub gets before a GMastodon appears. Email is pervasive and decently well diversified on the web, with multiple email providers, and many businesses and users not being on GMail, partially due to inertia (they already had an email before GMail became big). Maybe GMail could afford to cut off emails from external providers, but it would be a big risk, and it would definitely break a large part of the web. If ActivityPub does the same, with websites integrating it into their user experience, and news organizations and businesses self-hosting or joining various instances, I expect it would gain the same kind of resilience as email for when a GMastodon shows up. So I'm not too pessimistic about this. The more pressing concern is increasing adoption, IMO.

edhelas 8y ago

> XMPP spoke XML in an age of JSON Damn, let's ditch all the XML protocols then, XHTML first :D What does "age of JSON" means exactly? Those are two different technologies for different purposes. Even if XMPP tried to move to JSON, how can you do namespaces in JSON for example? You want ActivityPub in XMPP ? Just take Pubsub and put Atom in it, those are two stable and proven technologies, they fits perfectly (it's just one namespace in another) and with many many benefits. Here is a news feed built on top of XMPP Pubsub https://nl.movim.eu/?node/pubsub.movim.eu/Movim https://nl.movim.eu/?node/pubsub.movim.eu/Movim, and yes there's also an Atom 1.0 feed generated from it, because it's easy to just extract the (validated) Atom content from Pubsub and put it back to a proper HTTP page.

zinid 8y ago
> age of JSON Yeah, modern and shiny JSON. IT is now a subdivision of the fashion industry. Suck it up ;)
PurpleRamen 8y ago
> how can you do namespaces in JSON for example? For what is this neccessary?
- gmueckl 8y ago
  Nsmespaces allow XML file formats flexible and extensible in interesting ways: each namespace is tied to an independent schema, allowing for a very natural nesting of validatable XML in arbitrary formats. The namespaces avoid name collision between XML tags from different schemas. The grandparent gave a good example of this kind of nesting. JSON is incapable of the same kind of nesting because there are no explicit namespace to identify nested data formats and to avoid name collisions.
  - ekidd 8y ago
    XML namespaces do offer some nice possibilities. But the lack of official JSON namespaces doesn't prevent you from doing something like: { "built_in": "value", "org.example.my_extension": "value" } If you want to validate it, you might need to jump through some JSON schema hoops, of course.

jarym 8y ago

HATEOAS could have been the future too - many people wanted it to be. With all these standards, the successful ones need to find some magic moment to take off - like HTTP did. Too early to tell if ActivityPub (which I like as a protocol very much) will be an HTTP or an XML.

tbrownaw 8y ago
The reason behind HATEOAS was that REST was in practice being watered down from how it was originally envisioned, so proponents of the original vision needed a new term. I don't think that your origin story being "well we needed a way to tell all the practitioners they were consistently doing it wrong" is a good indicator of potential success.
- jarym 8y ago
  Ok, perhaps I picked a poor example - but still, the success of a standard depends on some magic formula that isn't easy to repeat.
nairboon 8y ago
What happend with all these Hypermedia ideas? All these HATEOAS, Hydra, HAL, etc. projects don't appear to me as very widespread.
- jarym 8y ago
  Well the purists lost is my take. The vision was a fine one, just the approach that was being proposed had too many downsides to really take off.

orthecreedence 8y ago

ActivityPub really needs some decoupling of identity from server. If a server I'm using starts acting up, the answer is to move servers, right? But, wait, my 50K followers from Server A won't be following me on Server B. Essentially, you only get to pick your original server once, without having to rebuild your network. So choose wisely! This obviously isn't an easy problem to solve. You'd need to separate identity from hosting, and have some way to look up "identity A is on server D" so peope following identity A know where to get the content. I truly believe it's essential to the success of the protocol, though.

chipotle_coyote 8y ago
This is what the whole IndieWeb movement is about -- being distributed rather than merely federated. I'm mildly concerned that the two camps seem to be building their own protocols rather than working together (excepting the existence of Bridgy Fed, perhaps).
- toomim 8y ago
  Good point -- it would actually be simple to combine IndieWeb + Mastadon and solve this problem. IndieWeb's solution is to own your own domain: https://indieweb.org/personal-domain https://indieweb.org/personal-domain. If you control your DNS, you can move your data to a different back-end provider and just update your DNS entries. To combine this with Mastadon, just make your own domain, like https://chipotle.coyote https://chipotle.coyote, and point it at Mastadon-Server-A. Then if you want to move everything to Mastadon-Server-B, just copy the data and update DNS.
  - type0 8y ago
    I agree with you but for the general social medial user updating the DNS records sounds scary and complicated. And for such user even if the idea of owning their own domain might sound compelling, how many will simply forged to renew the domain, be done with it and move to the next facebook.
  - danShumway 8y ago

davepeck 8y ago

Mastodon reports ~110k weekly active users and 121M "toots" across its 2+-year lifetime. That's impressive for a federated social network but, for comparison, 121M new tweets are generated on Twitter about every six hours. Some more basic Mastodon stats that I recently collected: https://davepeck.org/2018/05/03/mastodon-stats/ https://davepeck.org/2018/05/03/mastodon-stats/

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
How many tweets were generated when Twitter was about two years in? Early growth curves on social networks are exponential, there's plenty of time for Mastodon or an as-yet-to-be-created network to eclipse Twitter as it starts to decline. EDIT: According to https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2011/numbers.html https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2011/numbers.html it took about three years and two months for Twitter to hit a billion tweets. That's well within what Mastodon could hit with "exponential growth", though I'm guessing Mastodon will fall a bit short of that rate.
- davepeck 8y ago
  It’s a good question and one I didn’t address because I wasn’t able to find super reliable numbers. That’s a good link, though. Thanks!

briandear 8y ago

Off topic, but whatever happened to app.net? That was supposed to be the next new thing.

dredmorbius 8y ago
On January 12, 2017, the founders announced that the platform App.net would be shut down on March 15, 2017.[13] However, due to a significant number of user data export failures that deadline was extended until March 16, 2017. App.net finally ceased to operate as a social network at 2017-03-17-06:45UTC. The source code for App.net was made available on their Github Page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net

dingo_bat 8y ago

Just signed up on mastodon social. First impressions: - The web app is very well made, although the space utilization could be a bit better - There doesn't seem to be any concept of friends, but there is something called "follows". - Almost every post in my timeline was in a language I couldn't understand. All in all, nice experience but looks identical to twitter. Not really sure of any benefits over twitter.

znpy 8y ago

I started using mastodon after realising that SDF had set up an instance, and I only had to activate my SDF account. So far, so good. Social stuff is neat again, I don't get my bandwidth wasted for ads and I can trust my provider. Hopefully this becomes the norm! This makes me realize that I got my SDF account in 2008 when I was 16, no questions asked, and I was unemployed. Now I've got a job and I can finally sign-up for a recurring payment/support account.

irispanabaker 8y ago

use this tool to check JSON-LD data. https://jsonformatter.org https://jsonformatter.org