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Not everything has to be ActivityPub. If you want to recreate Reddit, the protocol already exists: It’s called NNTP, and it’s already federated and there’s a va
by eschaton 3y ago
Not everything has to be ActivityPub. If you want to recreate Reddit, the protocol already exists: It’s called NNTP, and it’s already federated and there’s a variety of software out there for running sites from individual to Internet-scale.
- CaptainFever 3y agoI wonder how non-federated options (e.g. web forums) compare to federated options (e.g. ActivityPub (somewhat, since it’s not globally federated like NNTP), NNTP). Federation seems to come with disadvantages such as inefficiency and additional bad places for moderation to occur (e.g. if you’re on A, talking to someone from B, through the sublemmy on C, all 3 servers’ moderators can interfere. For web forums, that’s not the case, as only C (the web forum’s moderators) can interfere, whom you probably already trust). It does have an advantage: not needing to sign up to multiple web forums, but that can be solved with other methods such as IndieAuth or by allowing anonymous posting.
- eschaton 3y agoThe biggest advantage of ActivityPub, NNTP, etc. over any web forum is that you do not have to go to a bunch of different places in a browser and use a bunch of different UIs under a bunch of different identities for something that is fundamentally not all that different from email. Other than modern encryption, NNTP is perfectly usable on hardware that’s multiple decades old: Basically any 32-bit system with memory in the single-digit megabytes can run a newsreader, even a graphical one. I suspect the same is true for ActivityPub. And while that can be true for web forums, it almost never is, and mostly for aesthetic reasons.