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A lot of negativity in this thread. Not earned, imho. I see Mastodon being mentioned a lot (and sometimes Pleroma) as if that is the only application to access

by rapnie 6y ago

A lot of negativity in this thread. Not earned, imho. I see Mastodon being mentioned a lot (and sometimes Pleroma) as if that is the only application to access the fediverse. ActivityPub is still in early stages of adoption. It is great that these apps have proven themselves in production (with a couple million users) based on a v1.0 of the spec where intentially a lot of things were left out, like authz, account discovery, search, etc. Right now, based on experience and with a good base of knowledgeable AP devs, the spec is evolving. With its flexibility and JSON-LD at its base federated applications can be created for any number of domains. And this is happening. Almost every week there are new project announcements that adopt AP in some way. They will not all federate with Mastodon from the start, and there are many challenges to be tackled to make a seamless fediverse integration smooth sailing. Here is a good AP project watchlist: https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-for-activitypub-apps https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-fo... There is an online AP conf in October for those interested: https://conf.activitypub.rocks/#home https://conf.activitypub.rocks/#home For questions you can go to these forums: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/ https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/ https://talk.feneas.org/ https://talk.feneas.org/

thejohnconway 6y ago
As someone who has tried to implement ActivityPub (for my personal site), I think the negativity is largely justified. In my opinion, ActivityPub is way too complicated, and federating is just too hard to do for smaller projects. You mention that there are many new projects – this has been the case for a while. Last time I looked, nearly all of them had failed/stopped/paused before actually getting federation working. The test suite is down, and has been for at least a year: https://test.activitypub.rocks https://test.activitypub.rocks I think that ActivityPub should have started out far simpler, and it should have been in reach of hobbyist developers. Something probably closer to RSS, with verify-from-source rather than cryptographically signed posts. Just my experience, obviously. I would love to be able to write and run my own little Twitter-like instance that people can subscribe to, but I can't because ActivityPub was too difficult for me to get working.
- gargron 6y ago
  Do you want something that works well for millions of real users or do you want something that's simple to implement for hobbyist developers? I personally don't even think that ActivityPub is that difficult to implement, I've written a tutorial [1] on it, but it seems like a misguided goal to me to prefer simplicity over other factors like fitness for a particular purpose. [1]: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/06/how-to-implement-a-basic-activitypub-server/ https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/06/how-to-implement-a-bas... https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/07/how-to-make-friends-and-verify-requests/ https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/07/how-to-make-friends-an...
  - thejohnconway 6y ago
    Hi Gargron, ideally I want both, obviously! I like Mastodon, as open source software that can federate with other instances, it's very neat. I'm just disappointed that the federation specification is too hard for me to get working, and that appears to be the case for other people as well, given how many fail to implement it. I did follow your tutorials, by the way, but I got stuck on certain things (cryptographic signing being the main one I remember), couldn't test them easily with the test suite being down, and gave up eventually. Am I too stupid? Probably. But I can imagine a spec that gives me practically everything I want in a decentralised Twitter replacement being almost as simple as RSS or JSONfeed for example, which took me a few hours to implement.
  - detaro 6y ago
    I don't think that's necessarily a real dichotomy. Lots of the issues around being able to implement AP are not "it has to be complicated", but "there is no consistent specification that matches what practical implementations do". It's fairly frustrating to implement something that looks ok and then have to go around and figure out what implicit assumptions Mastodon et al make that you didn't know about.
- rapnie 6y ago
  Those are fair points. Yes, the road to implementing AP federation is still hard. Reason is that implementations (Mastodon, Pleroma) went way ahead of community / documentation / spec development (after v1.0) and they filled in the blanks in the specs making their own implementation choices. Incompatibilities arose between impls, etc. and a new implementer still has to delve into other codebases, old issue threads to find the proper way forwards. This is bad, of course, but there was organic, though chaotic growth. The AP community has recognized the problem and is slowly catching up. Slow, because its an all-volunteer FOSS movement, atm. The testsuite being down is a known issue and on the todo-list for a long while [0]. Just yesterday an alternative testsuite was announced [1]. Also the creator of PixelFed has a great test tool called FediDB [2] in private beta. Finally note that federation with the Fediverse is often not the first goal of new projects, but something that comes later on the roadmap, if at all. Some projects like ForgeFed [3] - federated code forges - need no Mastodon connectivity per se, just interconnect github, gitlab, gitea, etc. and is developing their own spec on top of AP for that. PS. There is also a guide for new implementers in the making, but currently exists as a wiki post [4] on SocialHub (that you can improve based on own experience). [0] https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/the-activitypub-test-suite/290 https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/the-activitypub-test-s... [1] https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/unofficial-test-suite-go-fed-testsuite/805 https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/unofficial-test-suite-... [2] https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/introducing-fedidb-devtools-for-activitypub/660 https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/introducing-fedidb-dev... [3] https://forgefed.peers.community https://forgefed.peers.community [4] https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/guide-for-new-activitypub-implementers/479 https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/guide-for-new-activity...

by rapnie 6y ago

thejohnconway 6y ago

As someone who has tried to implement ActivityPub (for my personal site), I think the negativity is largely justified. In my opinion, ActivityPub is way too complicated, and federating is just too hard to do for smaller projects. You mention that there are many new projects – this has been the case for a while. Last time I looked, nearly all of them had failed/stopped/paused before actually getting federation working. The test suite is down, and has been for at least a year: https://test.activitypub.rocks https://test.activitypub.rocks I think that ActivityPub should have started out far simpler, and it should have been in reach of hobbyist developers. Something probably closer to RSS, with verify-from-source rather than cryptographically signed posts. Just my experience, obviously. I would love to be able to write and run my own little Twitter-like instance that people can subscribe to, but I can't because ActivityPub was too difficult for me to get working.

gargron 6y ago
Do you want something that works well for millions of real users or do you want something that's simple to implement for hobbyist developers? I personally don't even think that ActivityPub is that difficult to implement, I've written a tutorial [1] on it, but it seems like a misguided goal to me to prefer simplicity over other factors like fitness for a particular purpose. [1]: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/06/how-to-implement-a-basic-activitypub-server/ https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/06/how-to-implement-a-bas... https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/07/how-to-make-friends-and-verify-requests/ https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/07/how-to-make-friends-an...
- thejohnconway 6y ago
  Hi Gargron, ideally I want both, obviously! I like Mastodon, as open source software that can federate with other instances, it's very neat. I'm just disappointed that the federation specification is too hard for me to get working, and that appears to be the case for other people as well, given how many fail to implement it. I did follow your tutorials, by the way, but I got stuck on certain things (cryptographic signing being the main one I remember), couldn't test them easily with the test suite being down, and gave up eventually. Am I too stupid? Probably. But I can imagine a spec that gives me practically everything I want in a decentralised Twitter replacement being almost as simple as RSS or JSONfeed for example, which took me a few hours to implement.
- detaro 6y ago
  I don't think that's necessarily a real dichotomy. Lots of the issues around being able to implement AP are not "it has to be complicated", but "there is no consistent specification that matches what practical implementations do". It's fairly frustrating to implement something that looks ok and then have to go around and figure out what implicit assumptions Mastodon et al make that you didn't know about.
rapnie 6y ago
Those are fair points. Yes, the road to implementing AP federation is still hard. Reason is that implementations (Mastodon, Pleroma) went way ahead of community / documentation / spec development (after v1.0) and they filled in the blanks in the specs making their own implementation choices. Incompatibilities arose between impls, etc. and a new implementer still has to delve into other codebases, old issue threads to find the proper way forwards. This is bad, of course, but there was organic, though chaotic growth. The AP community has recognized the problem and is slowly catching up. Slow, because its an all-volunteer FOSS movement, atm. The testsuite being down is a known issue and on the todo-list for a long while [0]. Just yesterday an alternative testsuite was announced [1]. Also the creator of PixelFed has a great test tool called FediDB [2] in private beta. Finally note that federation with the Fediverse is often not the first goal of new projects, but something that comes later on the roadmap, if at all. Some projects like ForgeFed [3] - federated code forges - need no Mastodon connectivity per se, just interconnect github, gitlab, gitea, etc. and is developing their own spec on top of AP for that. PS. There is also a guide for new implementers in the making, but currently exists as a wiki post [4] on SocialHub (that you can improve based on own experience). [0] https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/the-activitypub-test-suite/290 https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/the-activitypub-test-s... [1] https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/unofficial-test-suite-go-fed-testsuite/805 https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/unofficial-test-suite-... [2] https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/introducing-fedidb-devtools-for-activitypub/660 https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/introducing-fedidb-dev... [3] https://forgefed.peers.community https://forgefed.peers.community [4] https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/guide-for-new-activitypub-implementers/479 https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/guide-for-new-activity...