Mike McCue
The network effect for #ActivityPub is gaining some serious momentum right now. As more services adopt the protocol, more people, more communities and more content are added to the network making it increasingly more valuable for everyone. This will only accelerate in the coming months as Threads, Wordpress, Tumblr, Flipboard and others federate.
We're still in early innings but there's no way to put this genie back in the bottle. The open social Web / the #Fediverse is going to be huge.
Dan Morris
@mike I think the "missing link" is actually getting those embedded posts made, like in a blog or news report or even on other social media, where you literally can drag a twitter widget into your wordpress page and you're done. There needs to be a way you can
1. Drag and drop a mastodon post
2. Somehow make a way to automatically link their instance user to the instance where the post was made. So you can just "reply" without any back and forth.
Once that's in place, I think you'll find more and more people will use it instead of Twitter, simply because a post on Mastodon from a news agency or a person is more likely to be legit and well thought out. Users here have some expectations that simply don't exist on Twitter.
Mike McCue
@coldfish Great point! I don't think there's anything preventing this from happening. Just a matter of an engineer building it now.
Mike McCue
@mitchmarq42xyz Based on what I can see, I think it's pretty clear that both Threads and Tumblr are serious about federating. It may happen in stages because it's a lot of work to federate an existing service in a useful way that makes sense for both the service's existing users as well as for users in the Fediverse.
mirqmarq428
implying that threads and tumblr will actually bother federating when they already got the publicity from it
Mark Saltveit
@mike
My concern is -- can Meta use this linkage to scrape all of my Mastodon activity? (We didn't think they could scrape us before the Cambridge Analytica scandal either.)
Mike McCue
@taoish A well placed concern. They can do that without federating. Google has already indexed the entirety of the fediverse.
Mike McCue
@IanAtCambio maybe. there are more defense mechanisms this time around.
Ian Campbell
@mike I wish you were right, but experience shows me that capitalism will surely find a way to fuck all of this up. Fediverse will peak and then onto the Next Big Thing
Kaj Kandler
@mike Question: What is the difference/innovation of Activity Pub over RSS for a blog/CMS like Wordpress?
Mike McCue
@kajkandler This is a really good question because ActivityPub is similar to RSS with two really important differences. 1) ActivityPub is two way. While RSS broadcasts content it does not have a way to know if someone liked, boosted or commented on that content. 2) RSS forms a connection between a blog and an RSS app. ActivityPub forms a follow connection between an account and another account. This means if you move from one reader app to another the connection is maintained.
Mike McCue
@kajkandler ActivityPub implementations are independent from whether algorithms are used or not. And anyone can implement ActivityPub however they choose.
Kaj Kandler
@mike Question: If corporations implement Activity Pub, does that mean they are providing “Algorithms" to filter the home feed according to user signals (and their advertisers “legitimate" interests)?
Mike McCue
@_elena Yes. All the work that people put into making connections with people should belong to them, not a company.
Mike McCue
@albertcardona if that happens most people will de-federate with their instance.
Albert Cardona
Sounds good, but what's the plan for handling the fallout of Meta slurping in the whole social graph of Mastodon and using it for their own nefarious purposes?
Petra van Cronenburg
@mike @albertcardona Some instances already started defederation: https://fedipact.online/ (and everybody can block Threads personally, too).
But I'm not sure if Mastodon is secured against "Embrace, extend, and extinguish": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Mike McCue
@NatureMC @albertcardona On one hand, that's the beauty of the #fediverse. People are free to federate or de-federate based on what they value and the kind of communities they want to participate in.
I would just caution that automatically walling entire groups of people off from each other out of fear could be self defeating for the Fediverse. There are many tools that can be used to prevent bad actors and bad behavior when it's seen. And more can be built to effectively federate moderation.
Mike McCue
@scribandotcom @NatureMC @albertcardona Exactly.
scribandotcom
@mike @NatureMC @albertcardona The irony here is that rando Mastodon instances (or really anything that supports AP) actually pose a much bigger problem for Meta via Threads than the reverse.
Mike McCue
@IanAtCambio hah! If only John Connor knew he could just fire the CEO of OpenAI.
Ian Campbell
@mike That's what John Connor said Skynet... Enshittification is inevitable. Man, I sound so jaded.
clacke
The Fediverse has lived under three protocols: OpenMicroBlogging (XMPP-based, 2008), OStatus (2009-2017), ActivityPub (2018–).
OStatus was indeed built on something very similar to RSS, it was Atom plus a few more protocols to handle push, comments and other things.
The reason OStatus was abandoned was that the stack of protocols was difficult to implement and difficult to extend. ActivityPub was intended to improve on it, and judging from the number of implementations, it seems it did.
clacke
@liaizon OpenMicroBlogging was created for laconi.ca and only ever implemented by laconi.ca and a shortlived project OpenMicroBlogger that wanted to federate. Google and friends were not involved.
> When I first designed StatusNet in the Spring of 2008, there were no distributed social networking protocols. So, I made one up. OpenMicroBlogging (OMB) 0.1 [ . . . ]
wakest ⁂
@clacke @mike @kajkandler was OpenMicroBlogging really the start? That came out of the OpenSocial project that was sorta associated with MySpace and Orkut/Google if I remember right?
clacke
@kajkandler @mike RSS + WebSub + WebMention together offer similar functionality as ActivityPub, as does OStatus.
The major thing missing is message scopes that allow follower-only posts and direct messages. In addition, AP has acquired extensions over the years, like reaction emojis.
Bob Jonkman
Good article! Interesting to see a naked[*] @evan in the avatar.
Also, #TIL that the 'Salmon' protocol is named for messages that swim upstream. Nyuk!
https://web.archive.org/web/20110720190236/http://status.net/2010/03/07/understanding-ostatus
[*] Sans Moustache
Evan Prodromou
@bobjonkman @clacke blame/praise @jpanzer for the Salmon name.
Evan Prodromou
@clacke @mike @kajkandler I should point out that @benwerd designed the first social network standard for the Elgg project. It was more around data portability, but it could represent your social graph and content. I think the intent was to eventually connect live sites, but it never happened afaik
Evan Prodromou
@kajkandler @mike some top differences:
1. Two-way
2. Private posts
3. Extensible rich content (likes, replies, media)
4. Push, not poll
5. JSON instead of XML
Evan Prodromou
@kajkandler @mike you can get a lot of this out of RSS, using RSSCloud for push, Pingback or something similar for responses. The only way I know to do private distribution with RSS is with secret feed URLs. For extensible content, just need to define the RSS extension elements. I think there was some work with Activity Streams and RSS in the first versions. @davew probably could sketch out a good architecture for it.
Dennis Nunes
@mike @evan What is the plan for flipboard+activityPub?
I notice that there is an espn account on flipboard.com
Mike McCue
@nunesdennis @evan Our plan is to fully federate in the coming months so that anyone in the Fediverse can follow and engage with anyone curating on Flipboard and anyone on Flipboard can follow and engage with any public account in the Fediverse.
Stay tuned for more details soon.
Evan Prodromou
@davew @kajkandler @mike thank you!
Dave Winer ☕️
I replied here where I had unlimited length and markdown support.
Tim Chambers
👀
John Panzer
@evan @bobjonkman @clacke Fun fact; It came to me while swimming laps at the Palo Alto YMCA.
clacke
@evan Oh! I've heard of #elgg , read about it and almost checked it out once upon a time, but didn't know @benwerd was behind it.
I remember reading their forums and some people were looking into OStatus, but it never came to full fruition.
Evan Prodromou
@liaizon @clacke @mike @kajkandler yes, if I remember correctly, Tumblr and WordPress both supported PubSubHubbub. We could follow accounts there but not reply.
wakest ⁂
"We wanted more sites to implement these protocols so the network becomes even more valuable. Some parts have been implemented already by sites like Google Buzz, LiveJournal, WordPress.com, and Tumblr." - @evan
I guess Tumblr and Wordpress have been working on joining the fediverse for 13 years!
Evan Prodromou
@liaizon @clacke @mike @kajkandler Here's my best guess: not enough client software used it (just StatusNet and Buzz and Cliqset), so it wasn't valuable for publishers. Without support for feedback through Salmon, it was one-way syndication. And it was hard to find and subscribe to feeds. Our clients made you find the right Tumblr URL, instead of saying "fred179 on Tumblr". My company went out of business around 2013, so that didn't help, either.
wakest ⁂
@evan @clacke @mike @kajkandler wow I had no idea https://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-publishing/tumblr-goes-real-time-with-pubsubhubbub-006273.php
crazy how close we came way back when to everything federating. I wonder if anyone has written any longform pieces about how that all fell apart
Evan Prodromou
@liaizon @clacke @mike @kajkandler I think we also had a real underground of open social web hackers spread throughout the tech world for about a decade between 2005 and 2015. They'd advocate for standards like OpenID and OAuth internally. Today, I think that network has been frayed.
wakest ⁂
@clacke fell in a rabbit hole about how many things used to support the open web. Instagram used to support remote subscribing through PubSubHubBub which I didn't realize https://web.archive.org/web/20151118091736/https://instagram.com/developer/subscriptions/
wakest ⁂
I had to look up Cliqset, didn't remember it.
"Now the Cliqset FeedProxy tool will normalize feeds from more than 70 other services into new feeds in the ActivityStreams format. It may just be an initial inroad to interoperability between these networks, provided by a 3rd party and not yet extensively used – but it’s an important step none the less." https://readwrite.com/cliqset_activity_streams_api/
wakest ⁂
@evan @clacke @mike @kajkandler
"Facebook, MySpace, Netflix and other services are already making user data available in ActivityStreams format, but there are far more social networks that don’t." -2009 oh how far away that seems
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