5 ms·

I have a problem with this fundamental thinking of what "site" should replace it. This is exactly why I'm an ActivityPub geek, because it's not one site, it's

I have a problem with this fundamental thinking of what "site" should replace it. This is exactly why I'm an ActivityPub geek, because it's not one site, it's sites. It's many softwares and many sites. Now I'm not claiming it will replace twitter, or that it's easy to use for most people. I can say for a fact that it is not, I see twitter users come over confused all the time. But regardless I think the concept of federation being available to any software like Wordpress or Nextcloud is truly something we should treasure. It might not replace twitter, but it might actually turn the entire internet into one big social media federation. My mind keeps putting ActivityPub into the context of the late 90s and 2000s when I was registered on countless message boards. Imagine if all those message boards could inter-communicate using a common protocol. That's where ActivityPub could lead us. The usability aspect can be worked on, it can be worked around. The gain in internet freedom is worth the effort. Right now it's clearly aimed at slightly more adept users. But imagine if Joe Sixpack could login to the modern equivalent of AOL, post a message, and that message is federated across hundreds of softwares and hundreds and thousands of sites and eventually Joe gets a reply from someone halfway around the world using a completely different software. That is what I find magical.

panosfilianos 4y ago
Hey, do you have any good intro to ActivityPub? Any aggregator or feed like RSS has? Looks very interesting.
- INTPenis 4y ago
  No I'm afraid I've looked very little at the actual protocol, mostly been busy running a node. I have seen a few people write their own AP implementations, in their personal blogs for example. It doesn't seem hard. My suggestion to learn AP would be to integrate your own blog into AP first. That way you learn by doing.
  - panosfilianos 4y ago
    Will look into it. Thanks!
- riffic 4y ago
  the actual published spec is a good place to start. w3.org
wruza 4y ago
What do you mean by “boards inter-communicate”, how for example?
- arlort 4y ago
  Not the person you're replying to but, using existing websites as an example, if I am not mistaken activity pub would allow you to see "twitter" posts from "facebook" and viceversa, or even using your "twitter" account to like and comment "youtube" videos https://fediverse.party/ https://fediverse.party/ https://activitypub.rocks/ https://activitypub.rocks/
- INTPenis 4y ago
  Well for starters there are already over a dozen different softwares in the fediverse. I can't even say exactly how many there are because some people have made their own blogs connected to the fediverse. So that's the true power of ActivityPub, that it can be integrated into any software. Wordpress has a plugin, Nextcloud is working on one, Gitea is working on some type of federation. Since I only ever used Mastodon (and GnuSocial before that) I can only speculate how exactly they work but let's assume you post a blog post on Wordpress, that blog post is then posted using ActivityPub to other nodes where your followers are. It might be posted to an AP relay that just relays the posts it gets to all other nodes connected to it. Increasing the discoverability of your blog to people who don't follow you. So that means all AP nodes connected to that one relay just received your wordpress blog post in their inbox and will show that to their local users. (you have to differ between local and remote users in the fediverse). And then the remote users of other nodes can comment on your wordpress post, and those comments are in a thread so you as the owner of the wordpress post will get those replies back to your instance, which is your wordpress blog. So what I just described is you posting a blog post from your wordpress, but receiving comments on your blog post from other softwares, other nodes, readable in the comfort of your own wordpress blog.
  - wruza 4y ago
    Thanks! I think it will take time for my head to wrap around this concept though.
mcv 4y ago
This is also the direction I'm thinking in. I'd like to see email integration, but with sender authentication and builtin encryption whenever possible, yet backwards compatible with email systems that don't support that yet. I want blog comments integrated so you can interact with the blog comments on your social media platform and vice versa. Maybe this can be done through a combination of RSS and a common comments/messaging standard. I also want it to replace WhatsApp and Signal with a simple messaging service that can still run standalone, but can also be accessed from other platforms. So interoperability with everything, but somehow also ensure security, block spam and abusive people, etc. Probably not an easy thing to solve.
- INTPenis 4y ago
  >So interoperability with everything, but somehow also ensure security, block spam and abusive people, etc. Probably not an easy thing to solve. This is the giant elephant in the room. If we compare AP to e-mail, then all of us who have worked in e-mail ops know the trouble brewing. And it has already started. So yes having a federated social media brings new problems but it also brings new freedoms.
  - mcv 4y ago
    I think having sender authentication would help a lot. Email infamously doesn't have that, which makes it easy to spam. If every spammer had to identify themselves, they'd probably be a lot easier to block.
    - pjc50 4y ago
      How do you ensure non-recycling of identities? Even trying to bind to a real-world government ID isn't entirely effective and quite onerous.
      - riffic 4y ago
        don't worry about it? on good instances identity will be tied to membership in an LDAP or AD sort of thing, with membership handed out as a perk of employment for example. bad instances get treated like spam email sites.
donmcronald 4y ago
> I think the concept of federation being available to any software like Wordpress or Nextcloud is truly something we should treasure I think federation will struggle because everyone will be allowed to participate regardless of the quality of their software. Nextcloud is a good example. They keep adding features and making releases, but can’t fix nasty sync bugs that have been around for a year [1,2]. What’s the use of a federated platform that’s unreliable and unusable? 1. https://syncloud.discourse.group/t/disaster-with-nexcloud-3-4-0-client/141 https://syncloud.discourse.group/t/disaster-with-nexcloud-3-... 2. https://github.com/nextcloud/desktop/issues/4378 https://github.com/nextcloud/desktop/issues/4378
- jtode 4y ago
  The good thing about a protocol (which ActivityPub is) is that it's not so much a matter of one person's bad software crashing my good software somehow, as it is a question of either forming your packets correctly, and getting good discourse in your federated software, or forming your packets badly, and having your software be algorithmically treated as "deprecated" or spit back an error response or whatever. Protocols act as a bit of a filter that way, it seems to me - each operator can surge forward in terms of bleeding-edge features, or stubbornly refuse to upgrade their versions, but there will eventually be a Wordpress-like herd instinct that will result in a settled "current" version (or version range) that works well enough. Whatever version of the protocol becomes widely used among the small existing userbase of whatever protocol wins the popularity lottery will gain support from that community, which will create the usual feedback loop of improvements and greater stability as more resources are brought to bear on making it work, and by the time the punters show up it'll be pretty well-baked, and some early adopters might get burned. I insisted on Betamax back in '83, and I had to live with Betamax till about 87. First world adolescent problems. It's never been more evident that the social platforms as they exist today are an overall social sickness, in ways that every previous Threat To The Children that I've lived with (drugs, video games, heavy metal music, etc) turned out not to be. So, we have to move to something different or else just plummet into barbarism, which even with the current situation I am betting against. People want hot water when they turn the tap and they'll settle the hell down and beg to help bring it back if they get a real taste of missing meals en masse. Dog help any elites hoarding resources on that day. On a practical and constructive note, someone else mentioned smaller, more locally-based platforms, and that is the only thing that seems workable to me as a way forward. I used to run BBSes in the 80s and early 90s, and was guilty of Digital Utopianism in extremis through to the naughts. The source of that utopianism was how good the old BBSes were at giving a loser like me a social community and real friends, and also how that experience was largely replicated, in a morphed kind of way, on Usenet and later in some, but not all, web-based forums. MySpace was my first real inkling that things were going very wrong. I live in the Manitoba Interlake, and I've been pondering what a local, BBS-like web site, perhaps using ActivityPub in some way and focused on my area would look like, in terms of operation, preventing abuse, etc. The BBSes were kind of an underground society of sorts, but a largely benign one focused strictly on fun, and the fact that we were all in the same city and would likely have to face each other at some gathering enforced some basic politeness rules that vanished with the perceived anonymity of this place. Back when I was a Sysop, I used to require an actual phone call before giving users leech access (ie. to the file section with the all the goodies). Not because I thought of it, it was just how we did things, kinda like that guy who did the Ted Talk where he was holding the printout with the names and addresses of "everyone on the internet" sometime in the mid-80s. We all had fake handles, absolutely all of us, but we all knew each other's real names, back then. I think anything less than that anti-anonymity will degenerate into some degree of whatever we end up calling this social jock itch we're all living through, so I'm probably gonna try putting something like that up for my local community. There's a new ISP deploying fibre right this moment, and I might talk to them about handling the hosting, and limiting traffic only to their network or traffic verified to be originating from this geographical area. The solution to all this is gonna be small and widespread, not big and centralized, whatever the case.

panosfilianos 4y ago

Hey, do you have any good intro to ActivityPub? Any aggregator or feed like RSS has? Looks very interesting.

INTPenis 4y ago
No I'm afraid I've looked very little at the actual protocol, mostly been busy running a node. I have seen a few people write their own AP implementations, in their personal blogs for example. It doesn't seem hard. My suggestion to learn AP would be to integrate your own blog into AP first. That way you learn by doing.
- panosfilianos 4y ago
  Will look into it. Thanks!
riffic 4y ago
the actual published spec is a good place to start. w3.org

wruza 4y ago

What do you mean by “boards inter-communicate”, how for example?

arlort 4y ago
Not the person you're replying to but, using existing websites as an example, if I am not mistaken activity pub would allow you to see "twitter" posts from "facebook" and viceversa, or even using your "twitter" account to like and comment "youtube" videos https://fediverse.party/ https://fediverse.party/ https://activitypub.rocks/ https://activitypub.rocks/
INTPenis 4y ago
Well for starters there are already over a dozen different softwares in the fediverse. I can't even say exactly how many there are because some people have made their own blogs connected to the fediverse. So that's the true power of ActivityPub, that it can be integrated into any software. Wordpress has a plugin, Nextcloud is working on one, Gitea is working on some type of federation. Since I only ever used Mastodon (and GnuSocial before that) I can only speculate how exactly they work but let's assume you post a blog post on Wordpress, that blog post is then posted using ActivityPub to other nodes where your followers are. It might be posted to an AP relay that just relays the posts it gets to all other nodes connected to it. Increasing the discoverability of your blog to people who don't follow you. So that means all AP nodes connected to that one relay just received your wordpress blog post in their inbox and will show that to their local users. (you have to differ between local and remote users in the fediverse). And then the remote users of other nodes can comment on your wordpress post, and those comments are in a thread so you as the owner of the wordpress post will get those replies back to your instance, which is your wordpress blog. So what I just described is you posting a blog post from your wordpress, but receiving comments on your blog post from other softwares, other nodes, readable in the comfort of your own wordpress blog.
- wruza 4y ago
  Thanks! I think it will take time for my head to wrap around this concept though.

mcv 4y ago

This is also the direction I'm thinking in. I'd like to see email integration, but with sender authentication and builtin encryption whenever possible, yet backwards compatible with email systems that don't support that yet. I want blog comments integrated so you can interact with the blog comments on your social media platform and vice versa. Maybe this can be done through a combination of RSS and a common comments/messaging standard. I also want it to replace WhatsApp and Signal with a simple messaging service that can still run standalone, but can also be accessed from other platforms. So interoperability with everything, but somehow also ensure security, block spam and abusive people, etc. Probably not an easy thing to solve.

INTPenis 4y ago
>So interoperability with everything, but somehow also ensure security, block spam and abusive people, etc. Probably not an easy thing to solve. This is the giant elephant in the room. If we compare AP to e-mail, then all of us who have worked in e-mail ops know the trouble brewing. And it has already started. So yes having a federated social media brings new problems but it also brings new freedoms.
- mcv 4y ago
  I think having sender authentication would help a lot. Email infamously doesn't have that, which makes it easy to spam. If every spammer had to identify themselves, they'd probably be a lot easier to block.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    How do you ensure non-recycling of identities? Even trying to bind to a real-world government ID isn't entirely effective and quite onerous.
    - riffic 4y ago
      don't worry about it? on good instances identity will be tied to membership in an LDAP or AD sort of thing, with membership handed out as a perk of employment for example. bad instances get treated like spam email sites.

donmcronald 4y ago

> I think the concept of federation being available to any software like Wordpress or Nextcloud is truly something we should treasure I think federation will struggle because everyone will be allowed to participate regardless of the quality of their software. Nextcloud is a good example. They keep adding features and making releases, but can’t fix nasty sync bugs that have been around for a year [1,2]. What’s the use of a federated platform that’s unreliable and unusable? 1. https://syncloud.discourse.group/t/disaster-with-nexcloud-3-4-0-client/141 https://syncloud.discourse.group/t/disaster-with-nexcloud-3-... 2. https://github.com/nextcloud/desktop/issues/4378 https://github.com/nextcloud/desktop/issues/4378

jtode 4y ago
The good thing about a protocol (which ActivityPub is) is that it's not so much a matter of one person's bad software crashing my good software somehow, as it is a question of either forming your packets correctly, and getting good discourse in your federated software, or forming your packets badly, and having your software be algorithmically treated as "deprecated" or spit back an error response or whatever. Protocols act as a bit of a filter that way, it seems to me - each operator can surge forward in terms of bleeding-edge features, or stubbornly refuse to upgrade their versions, but there will eventually be a Wordpress-like herd instinct that will result in a settled "current" version (or version range) that works well enough. Whatever version of the protocol becomes widely used among the small existing userbase of whatever protocol wins the popularity lottery will gain support from that community, which will create the usual feedback loop of improvements and greater stability as more resources are brought to bear on making it work, and by the time the punters show up it'll be pretty well-baked, and some early adopters might get burned. I insisted on Betamax back in '83, and I had to live with Betamax till about 87. First world adolescent problems. It's never been more evident that the social platforms as they exist today are an overall social sickness, in ways that every previous Threat To The Children that I've lived with (drugs, video games, heavy metal music, etc) turned out not to be. So, we have to move to something different or else just plummet into barbarism, which even with the current situation I am betting against. People want hot water when they turn the tap and they'll settle the hell down and beg to help bring it back if they get a real taste of missing meals en masse. Dog help any elites hoarding resources on that day. On a practical and constructive note, someone else mentioned smaller, more locally-based platforms, and that is the only thing that seems workable to me as a way forward. I used to run BBSes in the 80s and early 90s, and was guilty of Digital Utopianism in extremis through to the naughts. The source of that utopianism was how good the old BBSes were at giving a loser like me a social community and real friends, and also how that experience was largely replicated, in a morphed kind of way, on Usenet and later in some, but not all, web-based forums. MySpace was my first real inkling that things were going very wrong. I live in the Manitoba Interlake, and I've been pondering what a local, BBS-like web site, perhaps using ActivityPub in some way and focused on my area would look like, in terms of operation, preventing abuse, etc. The BBSes were kind of an underground society of sorts, but a largely benign one focused strictly on fun, and the fact that we were all in the same city and would likely have to face each other at some gathering enforced some basic politeness rules that vanished with the perceived anonymity of this place. Back when I was a Sysop, I used to require an actual phone call before giving users leech access (ie. to the file section with the all the goodies). Not because I thought of it, it was just how we did things, kinda like that guy who did the Ted Talk where he was holding the printout with the names and addresses of "everyone on the internet" sometime in the mid-80s. We all had fake handles, absolutely all of us, but we all knew each other's real names, back then. I think anything less than that anti-anonymity will degenerate into some degree of whatever we end up calling this social jock itch we're all living through, so I'm probably gonna try putting something like that up for my local community. There's a new ISP deploying fibre right this moment, and I might talk to them about handling the hosting, and limiting traffic only to their network or traffic verified to be originating from this geographical area. The solution to all this is gonna be small and widespread, not big and centralized, whatever the case.