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> the fediverse NOW exists! The fediverse is interesting but it's not the only approach. XMPP is similar to ActivityPub/ActivityStreams but has more explicit
by southerntofu 7y ago
> the fediverse NOW exists!
The fediverse is interesting but it's not the only approach.
XMPP is similar to ActivityPub/ActivityStreams but has more explicit specifications, good reference implementations, and the community has gained lots of experience in running federated systems over the years. Also, XMPP works on different transports (TCP, HTTP..) while ActivityPub is constrained to the web.
The Indieweb takes an interesting low-tech approach to web federation, by using standard web primitives (semantic microformats2 classes and POST requests) so that every body can federate their "dumbest" blogs without having to implement a whole complex dynamic social network.
ActivityPub tries to play on the two fields and therefore facing many challenges to come. Namespaced JSON (JSON-LD) could help it grow as a federation, but the specifications are not always very precise (though they keep getting better) and the fediverse community is constantly reinventing the wheel that email/XMPP folks have perfected over the years.
The two main problems with the Fediverse at the moment in my view:
- no proper decoupling of identity/service providers so you have to create many accounts on many services (Mastodon, Peertube, Plume..) where Indieweb uses the `rel=me` and `IndieAuth` protocols to avoid running many profiles, and XMPP has XEP-0070 for 3rd-party HTTP auth (i.e. authenticating XMPP users from your website)
- most implementations rely on client-side DOM generation (i.e. Javascript that outputs HTML), which is far from efficient (running the same calculations many times over every client) or accessible ; Indieweb federation is based on web primitives and plays well with any browser
These problems can of course be addressed, but they have already been in the Indieweb/XMPP communities for some time. If you want to get a grasp of what people build on top of XMPP nowadays:
https://salut-a-toi.org/blog/view/salut-a-toi@libervia.org/@/id/HxQXe4C4iHLtqvKwREESPG/salut-alpha-contributors,-take-your-keyboards https://salut-a-toi.org/blog/view/salut-a-toi@libervia.org/@...