10 ms·

ActivityPub Could Be the Future

134 points by rapnie 7y ago

nbrempel 7y ago
If the network of decentralized social websites grows large enough, then it can overtake Twitter and even Facebook. Just as the World Wide Web won over AOL in the early days. The network effect is powerful.
- robjan 7y ago
  The problem is and always will be the friction associated with discovery. If I want to add my friends, colleagues or family on Facebook they have most likely already been suggested to me. One click. I didn't even have to ask for their handle. How can we create a more powerful network effect through a decentralised network without some centralised directory?
  - snisarenko 7y ago
    I posted some thoughts on this in my Show HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22844481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22844481 I'll quote it here > My long term thoughts on aggregators for fediverses: I think aggregation/curation sites (like pixelfed.club) can be a decentralized complement to the fediverse. The fediverse generates the content. Aggregators, can curate the content for specific topics and help new users discover content. Anyone can start a fediverse instance, and anyone can start a aggregation/curation instance.
- holler 7y ago
  What product features does Mastadon offer over twitter/facebook? Because unless it's something useful/significant, 99.9999% of twitters/facebook users do not care about it.
  - moojd 7y ago
    Mastodon can appeal to people who enjoy the idea of twitter but want to be able to have their own cordoned off community version of it with the ability to whitelist other communities that are allowed to interop.
    - holler 7y ago
      that’s great for those users, but forget about mass adoption
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
m52go 7y ago
Can anyone explain, in simple terms, how interoperability and migration works with ActivityPub (or point to resources that do)? If I create an account on a Mastodon instance, and want to move it to another instance, do I lose everything? And how does integration among the various platforms currently out (e.g., Mastodon, Plume, Pixelfed, etc) actually work? Is there some tool to see feeds aggregated from all these implementations? Or does it work differently? I ask these questions as someone used Mastodon for a bit, has explored a handful of ActivityPub implementations. It all sounds very cool to me, but I still don't quite "get it". Personally I prefer the approach of Secure Scuttlebutt, but I realize their P2P workings are probably unrealistic and impractical for the vast majority of people.
- pixelbath 7y ago
  From what I've been able to ascertain, it's just not a _thing_ unless you want to roll-your-own migration tool. There's a few-years-old issue that's now closed: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177 but links to this currently open issue, which mostly reiterates that this is problematic for a number of reasons: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/12423 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/12423 From what I understand, it's fairly trivial to post to _multiple_ ActivityPub accounts, but true _migration_ just doesn't exist per se.
- moojd 7y ago
  I want to see a hybrid federation/p2p approach (Secure Scuttlebutt pubs/rooms are close this). As far as I understand it ActivityPub is just a standard for interop between social network services. The social networks still own your data and while they do offer tools for migrating between them you are still essentially at their mercy. You could run your own instance but you'll run into the same problems as you would running your own email server. Not every one will have to ability to do that and you could still run into the 'gmail problem' where large instances refuse to federate with small user instances. It would be cool if there was a protocol that was fundamentally p2p but with a federated 'tracker' layer that is basically indistinguishable from normal social media sites to casual users. The social media sites would help propagate the content and if one went down or refuses to track your content you can just peer with another one (or just continue to share content with your personal network of followers over a gossip protocol like SSB without the need for a tracker)
smitty1e 7y ago
In support of ActivityPub, what are some good intro/tutorial resources? Any recommendation for a cloud provider to host a Mastdon server? DigitalOcean vs. AWS?
- Kye 7y ago
  The admin of tech.lgbt is working on a collection of resources. You might find something useful in this thread: https://tech.lgbt/@david/103986050103236381 https://tech.lgbt/@david/103986050103236381
- mdszy 7y ago
  I wouldn't go with AWS or anything that advanced for just running a Mastodon server. I personally like Vultr for VPS's, DigitalOcean is okay too. If you want managed Mastodon hosting, I can vouch for https://masto.host/ https://masto.host/ - it's really good, have rarely had issues, and if ever I did, the support is amazing.
  - kixiQu 7y ago
    Unless you're trying to get AWS experience with a side project you'll actually use, in which case it's worth looking into -- people have gone whole hog and set things up to use a managed DB and everything.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  Darius Kazemi's https://runyourown.social/ https://runyourown.social/ is a useful resource, especially toward some of the more non-technical (and thus social) aspects.
mfer 7y ago
ActivityPub isn't the future. Useful things that are built, brought to market, and meet user needs that may happen to use ActivityPub under the hood are the future. Knowing what is useful for whom and how to bring it to market in a sustainable manner for the people it's intended for is a super critical element. One that's often overlooked. Specs are like plumbing pipes. People care about sinks, showers, and stuff like that. The pipe fittings, materials, and sizes enable a lot. But, it's not what the end users tend to care about.
- Frost1x 7y ago
  I wish more developers understood this very basic concept instead of introducing layers of unnecessary complexities in the specs and plumbing that don't necessarily improve a sink or shower "for the better". If you're installing lots of sinks and showers, it's OK if you make the pipe fittings, materials, and plumbing a bit easier to work with. Coming up with dozen of all all new sets of pipe fittings, materials and plumbing designs every other week doesn't make installing sinks and showers easier. Imagine walking into Home Depot and discovering there are about 100 'standard' styles of sinks, faucets, fixtures, pipes, fittings, etc. all with varying degrees of support from none to complete for interoperability. Not only that, every other month, 10 of each of those pieces are no longer manufactured or supported and 20 complete new designs are created with all the same cavets as before. Meanwhile, you install these sinks daily and the customer really doesn't care at all about how elegant the back pieces are from a mathematical or structural view, they just want a functioning sink that they can assume is easy to fix or replace parts on when it breaks. Not only that, they want to be able to call any plumber and have that done without the plumber spending 2 weeks just figuring out what the hell the previous plumber did before they figure out just how to fix it. At which point they decide its easier to just rip everything out, set it on fire, and pick the latest sets of pipes and fittings for no necessarily justifiable reason than it will cost more in time and effort to deal with the previous sink install than to start from scratch.
  - zimpenfish 7y ago
    > Imagine walking into Home Depot and discovering there are about 100 'standard' styles of sinks, faucets, fixtures, pipes, fittings, etc. all with varying degrees of support from none to complete for interoperability [severe emotional trauma flashbacks to previous contracts] I've seen some heroically constructed Gaudi-esque crystal cathedrals of systems and every one of them could have been replaced by a toolshed and done the same job.
jasode 7y ago
Looking at a protocol such as ActivityPub is actually the wrong analysis and will mislead you with false hope. I'm not against decentralization but if we techies want to raise the bar discussing realistic outcomes, we need to break out of the unproductive loop of focusing on technical protocols. I'll copy&paste a previous comment here: >We need a protocol, a specification for completely decentralised, carry-with-us social networks. I know it seems logical that a "social network protocol" is the answer to replace Facebook but after studying the mechanics of social networks, I've concluded that focusing on technical protocols is incorrect. My suggestion to programmers seriously thinking of new solutions in the social networking space: don't get sidetracked into thinking about the protocol because if you do, your new social network will end up in the graveyard of previous failed projects like Diaspora. Instead, think about the database of real names. Also, another previous comment on how focusing on protocols is (inadvertently) analyzing the wrong drivers for success: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20231960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20231960 Another comment explaining why the free protocol "Signal" didn't solve the funding dilemma: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20232499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20232499 My previous comment on why protocols like ActivityPub & Mastodon are not the answer for a general purpose social network adopted by the masses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18727230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18727230
- moojd 7y ago
  In the words of Gucci Mane, "A man can get lost in the sauce, but the same man can be lost without the sauce." It's natural that here on hacker news we spend most of our time discussing protocols and implementation details. No, protocols alone are not a solution but they are important. What's the point of just re-inventing centralized social networks over and over again? That being said, in order for any of these protocols to reach the masses the protocol itself needs to be invisible to casual users. If the marketing for your new social network is "It runs on this cool decentralized protocol!" you will never reach a non-technical audience. The end product needs to be as good and as easy to use as centralized equivalents even if that means making some compromises.
  - holler 7y ago
jasonv 7y ago
Can one easily hook up ActivityPub to WordPress, etc? I've wanted a Twitter/Facebook/Instagram replacement platform with syndication to ActivityPub.
- robjan 7y ago
  It's not perfect but this plugin is an incomplete implementation: https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/
amelius 7y ago
Serious question: in what way does AP provide more privacy than Facebook?
- Kye 7y ago
  There's nothing stopping an implementation from encrypting and locking things down, but so far every popular AP platform is focused on public content.
  - amelius 7y ago
    Ok. But note that "locking things down" might be not that simple, as you'd need good privacy controls. We all know that Facebook's privacy controls are/were lacking in many respects.
- kitotik 7y ago
  It’s obviously not focused on private comms, so it won’t be a replacement for actual e2e private messaging and chat. For the public content, the lack of commercial advertising incentives is probably a big one. IME the client apps and server instances aren’t injecting trackers and selling ads based on user behaviors. If an instance or client went rogue and started introducing such practices, it would likely be moderated out of relevance.
yellowbat 7y ago
ActivityPub is as decentralized as email and RSS feeds. Unfortunately nothing in such protocols prevents the gmail problem.
- yellowbat 7y ago
  At least say why you are downvoting.
  - Hitton 7y ago
    I didn't vote on your comment, but I see two possibilities: 1) RSS feeds are completely unlike email or ActivityPubs, RSS isn't decentralised at all. 2) People have no idea what do you mean be "gmail problem".
    - jerf 7y ago
      How is RSS not decentralized? RSS is typically published alongside the content it is syndicating. There is no central RSS publisher. What central RSS reader there was decided to lay down and die, so there's no centralization there either.
      - Hitton 7y ago
        In the ActivityPub context I meant decentralized and interconnected on server level, same as email. RSS is connected only to the single webserver.
        jerf 7y ago
        I still don't understand. RSS may be sourced from a single server, but it is, like I said, also generally being run from the same entity that is sourcing the content going into the RSS feed. Some sort of additional "decentralization" would be bad. RSS and the content it is syndicating being connected is a good thing overall; AIUI Mastadon ultimately advertises very similar types of control over data in terms of random entities not schlepping whatever data they like around under whatever pretenses they like. (RSS of course has no fine-grain controls, partially by design, partially because no other design was possible at the time.) Let me put it this way: Being specific, how is my RSS feed at http://jerf.org/iri/rss.xml http://jerf.org/iri/rss.xml particularly "centralized"? I mean, yes, I'm the one serving it, but that's what I want, just like my email comes in to a server under my control by my choice. There's no central service, no central registry I had to register that with, no central consumer, no central authority to tell me they won't carry it or that it's going to censor me.
ken 7y ago
There was a link on HN yesterday about how Emacs was a great success for 'malleable software' because despite being less flexible than some other programmable systems, it came with a built-in application that was usable out-of-the-box (i.e., a text editor). HTTP won big because it had the web -- Mosaic and Netscape. Spreadsheets won big after VisiCalc showed the way. Where's the app for ActivityPub? I'm not sure I've ever seen "killer protocol, then killer app". It's always "killer app, then extract killer protocol". You need a carrot.
- kixiQu 7y ago
  Mastodon, FWIW
cryptica 7y ago
It will not work because there is no way for anyone to profit from it. That's the sad but inescapable reality of the internet today. The only way grassroot movements can succeed is through engaging in mass collaborative corruption. Thankfully, cryptocurrencies have proven the effectiveness of this concept. You just need to invent a financial instrument which has no value initially but which can grow in value as it becomes more popular - This gives your financial instrument 'potential value' - This potential value allows your financial instrument to be used to 'bribe' journalists to hype up your product and convert its 'potential value' into 'actualized value'. It is a bit like a pyramid scheme, but everything these days is a pyramid scheme. The only way to compete within the gigantic pyramid scheme that is our financial system is through other even more elaborate pyramid schemes. More concretely, the reason this is necessary is because corporations are constantly 'bribing' journalists by holding ad revenue over their heads and restricting the kinds of things that they are allowed to write about; so it's essential for grassroot projects to have a mechanism in place which can counteract such market forces which intentionally limit the visibility of new 'unproven' products.
- aklemm 7y ago
  There's some truth in this, but you extrapolate too far. 1) UX is a bigger problem than the lack of financial incentives in the system though the two are related somewhat 2) There are audiences in these ecosystems, and I think monetization will find it's way in appropriately somehow. It's not impossible, by my estimation.
alexmingoia 7y ago
Webmention and Microformats2 are the present and the future. They extend blogs with social features. Your blog is your profile. The blogs you follow are your feed. You can send and receive replies, likes, etc. from your own blog with Webmention. Blogs are already a decentralized social network. Webmention and Microformats2 extend what we already have. Check out https://IndieWeb.org https://IndieWeb.org to learn more.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- contravariant 7y ago
  While I can see the appeal, this seems rather blogger centric. And the problem with basing a standard of interaction on that is the 1% rule: 90% of people only read, 9% interact with content and the remaining 1% actually produces new content. Practically it seems more likely that the final method will be decided upon by the 99% of people following blogs, not the 1% making them.
maxwelljoslyn 7y ago
As an IndieWeb participant, I find the ActivityPub-verse confusing. Perhaps one of you can help me understand. At Southern California Linux Expo, I joined a discussion session to learn more about ActivityPub and the Fediverse. What I took away is that the flagship apps supporting ActivityPub are designed to cater to people who want a single app for each type of social media interaction that they have. One app, e.g. Pixelfed, for posting/looking at photos like Instagram. One app, e.g. Mastodon, for posting/looking at text notes or articles like Twitter/blogging. When each of these apps implement ActivityPub, it becomes possible for people to communicate across apps. (Presumably there's one for music listening...) I understand the drive toward cross-app communication, but I don't understand the "one app per use" way of thinking. Perhaps it's because I rarely use FB and have never used Twitter/Insta/Pinterest. To the extent that I want to broadcast my online social activity at all, I want to do all my posting with one UI, in one place (i.e. in one "app", my CMS) , and I don't care whether someone looks at my stuff by reading my website or subscribing to my feed. I think if someone just wants to see photos, or articles, or "tweets", or whatever, why build a separate app? Why not just filter the incoming content? Running e.g. a Mastodon instance requires someone to administer the server. Once that's in place, a community can grow up on that server. This seems to mimic more traditional web forums. Is that part of the draw? A central meeting point for your community -- with ActivityPub letting you use your identity in that community while interacting with people from other communities?
- aklemm 7y ago
  From what I've seen so far, Activity Pub does allow multiple apps per use so individuals can choose an app of their liking. For example, I'm using Pleroma instead of Mastodon and the interop with Mastodon instances has been seamless. It's early days exploring for me, though. This issue of bridging the IndieWeb and the Fediverse is fascinating. I'd think it would be more naturally collaborative, but there's a lot to sort out yet.
- jlelse 7y ago
  IndieWeb and ActivityPub can play well together. I for example am part of the IndieWeb using my blog. But my blog also supports ActivityPub, so that people can follow it using Mastodon for example and ActivityPub replies get translated to webmentions. However, it's a very custom implementation and I need to figure out how to make it available for use by more people. Probably the easiest way to participate in both the IndieWeb and the Fediverse is by using Wordpress with a couple of plugins installed.
anderspitman 7y ago
> I have noticed a tendency for people supporting older, similar protocols to wonder why ActivityPub got so popular while their own stagnated How do ya'll feel about ActivityPub on a technical level? I read the ActivityPub, ActivityStreams, and JSON-LD specs a couple years back, and came away feeling like it was a bit much. Wouldn't JSON RSS with some sort of web push notifications get us 80% of the way there? Are there simpler alternatives already in the wild? Or am I missing something?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- zozbot234 7y ago
  JSON-LD is not specific to ActivityStreams/Pub, it's a general mechanism for expressing any kind of RDF/Linked Data as reasonably idiomatic JSON. It makes sense for a federation-focused spec to use it so that it can be extended seamlessly with other sources of Linked Data. Social Linked Data (SOLID) will most likely rely on these mechanisms to interoperate cleanly with ActivityPub/ActivityStreams, for example.
  - anderspitman 7y ago
    Yes, I mentioned it because it's a (soft?) dependency of ActivityPub
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  My impression, and I've only skimmed through things at the technical level, is that ActivityPub isn't far from where RSS and various web push notifications might have naturally converged if things hadn't jumped tracks to walled gardens for several years in the middle there. Some of that feeling is because my introduction to RDF was itself buried in dealing with the real world complexity of 90s and early 2000s RSS feeds. JSON-LD is no worse than early RDF, and in some ways better, clearer, easier to understand. Especially it feels easier to understand why it is useful to the ActivityPub standard, versus as complicated as RDF was it was sometimes hard to understand the impetus to bolting it on top of RSS, if for no other reason than that ActivityPub was built more directly around JSON-LD as opposed to RDF really was bolted on into the middle of the RSS soup (and its dozens of mostly compatible versions) and it was very confusing what/where/how RDF applied anywhere to RSS. Some of the other parts of ActivityPub similarly seem smarter, simply better versions of now lapsed and/or only half-forgotten "standards" like PingBack/TalkBack or even the original goals of the (real) original OpenID efforts. JSON Feed, the most widely accepted RSS in JSON standard, has so far managed to intentionally avoid depending on JSON-LD so far, but it's also tried to intentionally be a minimalist subset of RSS and all of the RDF in RSS stuff has been out of scope. Presumably should any of that be relevant again, JSON-LD would be the natural successor. (Similar too, that JSON Feed so far has left notifications support out of scope, but if it did expect to move in that direction they would be remiss to entirely avoid looking at what ActivityPub has already standardized.)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
robertheadley 7y ago
I am not even sure ActivityPub is the past, let alone the future. I agree with the philosophy behind it, but people are always going to be more willing to go it alone on this type of thing.
gge 7y ago
If ActivityPub gains adoption, it will end up like email, where there are a few large central providers that 99% of the users use. A crypto based protocol will be the only way to achieve true censorship resistance and decentralization.
- kixiQu 7y ago
  It seems relevant that it's decently easy with Mastodon 3.0 to move from one server to another, and the UX Just Works. Hard to imagine gmail doing the same. If I'm mad at Google there are a lot of factors stopping me from migrating my email because they own my identity.
badrabbit 7y ago
Been hearing this for a while. The future sure comes slow? It's a great protocol and system but not a great product/brand.

134 points by rapnie 7y ago

If the network of decentralized social websites grows large enough, then it can overtake Twitter and even Facebook. Just as the World Wide Web won over AOL in the early days. The network effect is powerful.

robjan 7y ago
The problem is and always will be the friction associated with discovery. If I want to add my friends, colleagues or family on Facebook they have most likely already been suggested to me. One click. I didn't even have to ask for their handle. How can we create a more powerful network effect through a decentralised network without some centralised directory?
- snisarenko 7y ago
  I posted some thoughts on this in my Show HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22844481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22844481 I'll quote it here > My long term thoughts on aggregators for fediverses: I think aggregation/curation sites (like pixelfed.club) can be a decentralized complement to the fediverse. The fediverse generates the content. Aggregators, can curate the content for specific topics and help new users discover content. Anyone can start a fediverse instance, and anyone can start a aggregation/curation instance.
holler 7y ago
What product features does Mastadon offer over twitter/facebook? Because unless it's something useful/significant, 99.9999% of twitters/facebook users do not care about it.
- moojd 7y ago
  Mastodon can appeal to people who enjoy the idea of twitter but want to be able to have their own cordoned off community version of it with the ability to whitelist other communities that are allowed to interop.
  - holler 7y ago
    that’s great for those users, but forget about mass adoption
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]

m52go 7y ago

Can anyone explain, in simple terms, how interoperability and migration works with ActivityPub (or point to resources that do)? If I create an account on a Mastodon instance, and want to move it to another instance, do I lose everything? And how does integration among the various platforms currently out (e.g., Mastodon, Plume, Pixelfed, etc) actually work? Is there some tool to see feeds aggregated from all these implementations? Or does it work differently? I ask these questions as someone used Mastodon for a bit, has explored a handful of ActivityPub implementations. It all sounds very cool to me, but I still don't quite "get it". Personally I prefer the approach of Secure Scuttlebutt, but I realize their P2P workings are probably unrealistic and impractical for the vast majority of people.

pixelbath 7y ago
From what I've been able to ascertain, it's just not a _thing_ unless you want to roll-your-own migration tool. There's a few-years-old issue that's now closed: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177 but links to this currently open issue, which mostly reiterates that this is problematic for a number of reasons: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/12423 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/12423 From what I understand, it's fairly trivial to post to _multiple_ ActivityPub accounts, but true _migration_ just doesn't exist per se.
moojd 7y ago
I want to see a hybrid federation/p2p approach (Secure Scuttlebutt pubs/rooms are close this). As far as I understand it ActivityPub is just a standard for interop between social network services. The social networks still own your data and while they do offer tools for migrating between them you are still essentially at their mercy. You could run your own instance but you'll run into the same problems as you would running your own email server. Not every one will have to ability to do that and you could still run into the 'gmail problem' where large instances refuse to federate with small user instances. It would be cool if there was a protocol that was fundamentally p2p but with a federated 'tracker' layer that is basically indistinguishable from normal social media sites to casual users. The social media sites would help propagate the content and if one went down or refuses to track your content you can just peer with another one (or just continue to share content with your personal network of followers over a gossip protocol like SSB without the need for a tracker)

smitty1e 7y ago

In support of ActivityPub, what are some good intro/tutorial resources? Any recommendation for a cloud provider to host a Mastdon server? DigitalOcean vs. AWS?

Kye 7y ago
The admin of tech.lgbt is working on a collection of resources. You might find something useful in this thread: https://tech.lgbt/@david/103986050103236381 https://tech.lgbt/@david/103986050103236381
mdszy 7y ago
I wouldn't go with AWS or anything that advanced for just running a Mastodon server. I personally like Vultr for VPS's, DigitalOcean is okay too. If you want managed Mastodon hosting, I can vouch for https://masto.host/ https://masto.host/ - it's really good, have rarely had issues, and if ever I did, the support is amazing.
- kixiQu 7y ago
  Unless you're trying to get AWS experience with a side project you'll actually use, in which case it's worth looking into -- people have gone whole hog and set things up to use a managed DB and everything.
WorldMaker 7y ago
Darius Kazemi's https://runyourown.social/ https://runyourown.social/ is a useful resource, especially toward some of the more non-technical (and thus social) aspects.

mfer 7y ago

ActivityPub isn't the future. Useful things that are built, brought to market, and meet user needs that may happen to use ActivityPub under the hood are the future. Knowing what is useful for whom and how to bring it to market in a sustainable manner for the people it's intended for is a super critical element. One that's often overlooked. Specs are like plumbing pipes. People care about sinks, showers, and stuff like that. The pipe fittings, materials, and sizes enable a lot. But, it's not what the end users tend to care about.

Frost1x 7y ago
I wish more developers understood this very basic concept instead of introducing layers of unnecessary complexities in the specs and plumbing that don't necessarily improve a sink or shower "for the better". If you're installing lots of sinks and showers, it's OK if you make the pipe fittings, materials, and plumbing a bit easier to work with. Coming up with dozen of all all new sets of pipe fittings, materials and plumbing designs every other week doesn't make installing sinks and showers easier. Imagine walking into Home Depot and discovering there are about 100 'standard' styles of sinks, faucets, fixtures, pipes, fittings, etc. all with varying degrees of support from none to complete for interoperability. Not only that, every other month, 10 of each of those pieces are no longer manufactured or supported and 20 complete new designs are created with all the same cavets as before. Meanwhile, you install these sinks daily and the customer really doesn't care at all about how elegant the back pieces are from a mathematical or structural view, they just want a functioning sink that they can assume is easy to fix or replace parts on when it breaks. Not only that, they want to be able to call any plumber and have that done without the plumber spending 2 weeks just figuring out what the hell the previous plumber did before they figure out just how to fix it. At which point they decide its easier to just rip everything out, set it on fire, and pick the latest sets of pipes and fittings for no necessarily justifiable reason than it will cost more in time and effort to deal with the previous sink install than to start from scratch.
- zimpenfish 7y ago
  > Imagine walking into Home Depot and discovering there are about 100 'standard' styles of sinks, faucets, fixtures, pipes, fittings, etc. all with varying degrees of support from none to complete for interoperability [severe emotional trauma flashbacks to previous contracts] I've seen some heroically constructed Gaudi-esque crystal cathedrals of systems and every one of them could have been replaced by a toolshed and done the same job.

jasode 7y ago

Looking at a protocol such as ActivityPub is actually the wrong analysis and will mislead you with false hope. I'm not against decentralization but if we techies want to raise the bar discussing realistic outcomes, we need to break out of the unproductive loop of focusing on technical protocols. I'll copy&paste a previous comment here: >We need a protocol, a specification for completely decentralised, carry-with-us social networks. I know it seems logical that a "social network protocol" is the answer to replace Facebook but after studying the mechanics of social networks, I've concluded that focusing on technical protocols is incorrect. My suggestion to programmers seriously thinking of new solutions in the social networking space: don't get sidetracked into thinking about the protocol because if you do, your new social network will end up in the graveyard of previous failed projects like Diaspora. Instead, think about the database of real names. Also, another previous comment on how focusing on protocols is (inadvertently) analyzing the wrong drivers for success: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20231960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20231960 Another comment explaining why the free protocol "Signal" didn't solve the funding dilemma: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20232499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20232499 My previous comment on why protocols like ActivityPub & Mastodon are not the answer for a general purpose social network adopted by the masses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18727230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18727230

moojd 7y ago
In the words of Gucci Mane, "A man can get lost in the sauce, but the same man can be lost without the sauce." It's natural that here on hacker news we spend most of our time discussing protocols and implementation details. No, protocols alone are not a solution but they are important. What's the point of just re-inventing centralized social networks over and over again? That being said, in order for any of these protocols to reach the masses the protocol itself needs to be invisible to casual users. If the marketing for your new social network is "It runs on this cool decentralized protocol!" you will never reach a non-technical audience. The end product needs to be as good and as easy to use as centralized equivalents even if that means making some compromises.
- holler 7y ago

jasonv 7y ago

Can one easily hook up ActivityPub to WordPress, etc? I've wanted a Twitter/Facebook/Instagram replacement platform with syndication to ActivityPub.

robjan 7y ago
It's not perfect but this plugin is an incomplete implementation: https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/

amelius 7y ago

Serious question: in what way does AP provide more privacy than Facebook?

Kye 7y ago
There's nothing stopping an implementation from encrypting and locking things down, but so far every popular AP platform is focused on public content.
- amelius 7y ago
  Ok. But note that "locking things down" might be not that simple, as you'd need good privacy controls. We all know that Facebook's privacy controls are/were lacking in many respects.
kitotik 7y ago
It’s obviously not focused on private comms, so it won’t be a replacement for actual e2e private messaging and chat. For the public content, the lack of commercial advertising incentives is probably a big one. IME the client apps and server instances aren’t injecting trackers and selling ads based on user behaviors. If an instance or client went rogue and started introducing such practices, it would likely be moderated out of relevance.

yellowbat 7y ago

ActivityPub is as decentralized as email and RSS feeds. Unfortunately nothing in such protocols prevents the gmail problem.

yellowbat 7y ago
At least say why you are downvoting.
- Hitton 7y ago
  I didn't vote on your comment, but I see two possibilities: 1) RSS feeds are completely unlike email or ActivityPubs, RSS isn't decentralised at all. 2) People have no idea what do you mean be "gmail problem".
  - jerf 7y ago
    How is RSS not decentralized? RSS is typically published alongside the content it is syndicating. There is no central RSS publisher. What central RSS reader there was decided to lay down and die, so there's no centralization there either.
    - Hitton 7y ago
      In the ActivityPub context I meant decentralized and interconnected on server level, same as email. RSS is connected only to the single webserver.
      - jerf 7y ago
        I still don't understand. RSS may be sourced from a single server, but it is, like I said, also generally being run from the same entity that is sourcing the content going into the RSS feed. Some sort of additional "decentralization" would be bad. RSS and the content it is syndicating being connected is a good thing overall; AIUI Mastadon ultimately advertises very similar types of control over data in terms of random entities not schlepping whatever data they like around under whatever pretenses they like. (RSS of course has no fine-grain controls, partially by design, partially because no other design was possible at the time.) Let me put it this way: Being specific, how is my RSS feed at http://jerf.org/iri/rss.xml http://jerf.org/iri/rss.xml particularly "centralized"? I mean, yes, I'm the one serving it, but that's what I want, just like my email comes in to a server under my control by my choice. There's no central service, no central registry I had to register that with, no central consumer, no central authority to tell me they won't carry it or that it's going to censor me.

ken 7y ago

There was a link on HN yesterday about how Emacs was a great success for 'malleable software' because despite being less flexible than some other programmable systems, it came with a built-in application that was usable out-of-the-box (i.e., a text editor). HTTP won big because it had the web -- Mosaic and Netscape. Spreadsheets won big after VisiCalc showed the way. Where's the app for ActivityPub? I'm not sure I've ever seen "killer protocol, then killer app". It's always "killer app, then extract killer protocol". You need a carrot.

kixiQu 7y ago
Mastodon, FWIW

cryptica 7y ago

It will not work because there is no way for anyone to profit from it. That's the sad but inescapable reality of the internet today. The only way grassroot movements can succeed is through engaging in mass collaborative corruption. Thankfully, cryptocurrencies have proven the effectiveness of this concept. You just need to invent a financial instrument which has no value initially but which can grow in value as it becomes more popular - This gives your financial instrument 'potential value' - This potential value allows your financial instrument to be used to 'bribe' journalists to hype up your product and convert its 'potential value' into 'actualized value'. It is a bit like a pyramid scheme, but everything these days is a pyramid scheme. The only way to compete within the gigantic pyramid scheme that is our financial system is through other even more elaborate pyramid schemes. More concretely, the reason this is necessary is because corporations are constantly 'bribing' journalists by holding ad revenue over their heads and restricting the kinds of things that they are allowed to write about; so it's essential for grassroot projects to have a mechanism in place which can counteract such market forces which intentionally limit the visibility of new 'unproven' products.

aklemm 7y ago
There's some truth in this, but you extrapolate too far. 1) UX is a bigger problem than the lack of financial incentives in the system though the two are related somewhat 2) There are audiences in these ecosystems, and I think monetization will find it's way in appropriately somehow. It's not impossible, by my estimation.

alexmingoia 7y ago

Webmention and Microformats2 are the present and the future. They extend blogs with social features. Your blog is your profile. The blogs you follow are your feed. You can send and receive replies, likes, etc. from your own blog with Webmention. Blogs are already a decentralized social network. Webmention and Microformats2 extend what we already have. Check out https://IndieWeb.org https://IndieWeb.org to learn more.

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contravariant 7y ago
While I can see the appeal, this seems rather blogger centric. And the problem with basing a standard of interaction on that is the 1% rule: 90% of people only read, 9% interact with content and the remaining 1% actually produces new content. Practically it seems more likely that the final method will be decided upon by the 99% of people following blogs, not the 1% making them.

maxwelljoslyn 7y ago

As an IndieWeb participant, I find the ActivityPub-verse confusing. Perhaps one of you can help me understand. At Southern California Linux Expo, I joined a discussion session to learn more about ActivityPub and the Fediverse. What I took away is that the flagship apps supporting ActivityPub are designed to cater to people who want a single app for each type of social media interaction that they have. One app, e.g. Pixelfed, for posting/looking at photos like Instagram. One app, e.g. Mastodon, for posting/looking at text notes or articles like Twitter/blogging. When each of these apps implement ActivityPub, it becomes possible for people to communicate across apps. (Presumably there's one for music listening...) I understand the drive toward cross-app communication, but I don't understand the "one app per use" way of thinking. Perhaps it's because I rarely use FB and have never used Twitter/Insta/Pinterest. To the extent that I want to broadcast my online social activity at all, I want to do all my posting with one UI, in one place (i.e. in one "app", my CMS) , and I don't care whether someone looks at my stuff by reading my website or subscribing to my feed. I think if someone just wants to see photos, or articles, or "tweets", or whatever, why build a separate app? Why not just filter the incoming content? Running e.g. a Mastodon instance requires someone to administer the server. Once that's in place, a community can grow up on that server. This seems to mimic more traditional web forums. Is that part of the draw? A central meeting point for your community -- with ActivityPub letting you use your identity in that community while interacting with people from other communities?

aklemm 7y ago
From what I've seen so far, Activity Pub does allow multiple apps per use so individuals can choose an app of their liking. For example, I'm using Pleroma instead of Mastodon and the interop with Mastodon instances has been seamless. It's early days exploring for me, though. This issue of bridging the IndieWeb and the Fediverse is fascinating. I'd think it would be more naturally collaborative, but there's a lot to sort out yet.
jlelse 7y ago
IndieWeb and ActivityPub can play well together. I for example am part of the IndieWeb using my blog. But my blog also supports ActivityPub, so that people can follow it using Mastodon for example and ActivityPub replies get translated to webmentions. However, it's a very custom implementation and I need to figure out how to make it available for use by more people. Probably the easiest way to participate in both the IndieWeb and the Fediverse is by using Wordpress with a couple of plugins installed.

anderspitman 7y ago

> I have noticed a tendency for people supporting older, similar protocols to wonder why ActivityPub got so popular while their own stagnated How do ya'll feel about ActivityPub on a technical level? I read the ActivityPub, ActivityStreams, and JSON-LD specs a couple years back, and came away feeling like it was a bit much. Wouldn't JSON RSS with some sort of web push notifications get us 80% of the way there? Are there simpler alternatives already in the wild? Or am I missing something?

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zozbot234 7y ago
JSON-LD is not specific to ActivityStreams/Pub, it's a general mechanism for expressing any kind of RDF/Linked Data as reasonably idiomatic JSON. It makes sense for a federation-focused spec to use it so that it can be extended seamlessly with other sources of Linked Data. Social Linked Data (SOLID) will most likely rely on these mechanisms to interoperate cleanly with ActivityPub/ActivityStreams, for example.
- anderspitman 7y ago
  Yes, I mentioned it because it's a (soft?) dependency of ActivityPub
WorldMaker 7y ago
My impression, and I've only skimmed through things at the technical level, is that ActivityPub isn't far from where RSS and various web push notifications might have naturally converged if things hadn't jumped tracks to walled gardens for several years in the middle there. Some of that feeling is because my introduction to RDF was itself buried in dealing with the real world complexity of 90s and early 2000s RSS feeds. JSON-LD is no worse than early RDF, and in some ways better, clearer, easier to understand. Especially it feels easier to understand why it is useful to the ActivityPub standard, versus as complicated as RDF was it was sometimes hard to understand the impetus to bolting it on top of RSS, if for no other reason than that ActivityPub was built more directly around JSON-LD as opposed to RDF really was bolted on into the middle of the RSS soup (and its dozens of mostly compatible versions) and it was very confusing what/where/how RDF applied anywhere to RSS. Some of the other parts of ActivityPub similarly seem smarter, simply better versions of now lapsed and/or only half-forgotten "standards" like PingBack/TalkBack or even the original goals of the (real) original OpenID efforts. JSON Feed, the most widely accepted RSS in JSON standard, has so far managed to intentionally avoid depending on JSON-LD so far, but it's also tried to intentionally be a minimalist subset of RSS and all of the RDF in RSS stuff has been out of scope. Presumably should any of that be relevant again, JSON-LD would be the natural successor. (Similar too, that JSON Feed so far has left notifications support out of scope, but if it did expect to move in that direction they would be remiss to entirely avoid looking at what ActivityPub has already standardized.)

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robertheadley 7y ago

I am not even sure ActivityPub is the past, let alone the future. I agree with the philosophy behind it, but people are always going to be more willing to go it alone on this type of thing.

gge 7y ago

If ActivityPub gains adoption, it will end up like email, where there are a few large central providers that 99% of the users use. A crypto based protocol will be the only way to achieve true censorship resistance and decentralization.

kixiQu 7y ago
It seems relevant that it's decently easy with Mastodon 3.0 to move from one server to another, and the UX Just Works. Hard to imagine gmail doing the same. If I'm mad at Google there are a lot of factors stopping me from migrating my email because they own my identity.

badrabbit 7y ago

Been hearing this for a while. The future sure comes slow? It's a great protocol and system but not a great product/brand.