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1. Embed this notice
   silverpill (silverpill@mitra.social)'s status on Monday, 03-Aug-2026 17:59:08 JST silverpill

   The biggest problem for peer to peer ActivityPub is the fact that ActivityPub is primarily a "pull" protocol. You need to fetch a remote actor before interacting with it. This is not feasible in the environment where nodes are intermittently online.

   What if we used a special activity to request objects? I've described this idea in more detail in Asynchronous object retrieval:

   https://codeberg.org/silverpill/feps/src/branch/main/aef6/fep-aef6.md

   I think this mechanism, if combined with self-authenticating objects, should make ActivityPub compatible with store and forward protocols.

   #p2p #dtn #fep_ef61

   • Embed this notice
     silverpill (silverpill@mitra.social)'s status on Monday, 03-Aug-2026 18:49:42 JST silverpill

     in reply to

     • Erwin Ernst eest9 Steinhammer
     • 🫧 Social coding commons

     @smallcircles @eest9 Yes, not everyone wants to be on a global public square. Small private zero-cost friend-to-friend networks should also exist, and for those p2p is a good architecture.

   • Embed this notice
     🫧 Social coding commons (smallcircles@social.coop)'s status on Monday, 03-Aug-2026 18:49:44 JST 🫧 Social coding commons

     in reply to

     • Erwin Ernst eest9 Steinhammer

     @eest9 @silverpill

     I think in practice things will go towards hybrid decentralization. A healthy mix of p2p and federated apps and services. Whatever is most appropriate for a certain use case, group of people, or region in the world.

     Update: cross-post with silverpill, same gist :)

   • Embed this notice
     Erwin Ernst eest9 Steinhammer (eest9@chaos.social)'s status on Monday, 03-Aug-2026 18:49:47 JST Erwin Ernst eest9 Steinhammer

     in reply to

     @silverpill I don't even want it to be p2p, I think p2p has considerable downsides to a federated structure. Yes I like p2p networks as a fallback in authoritarian regimes where you can't reliably host common resources pools, but when this is possible a federated structure has significant advantages both technical and social (shared ressources like server/data space, outsorced administration, shared moderation, community coherence, etc. etc.).

   • Embed this notice
     silverpill (silverpill@mitra.social)'s status on Monday, 03-Aug-2026 18:52:55 JST silverpill

     in reply to

     • Erwin Ernst eest9 Steinhammer

     @eest9 I think we can have a network that supports both kinds of structures at the same time. Big federation where resources are meant to be pooled and small federation where people use their own offline-first nodes.