Notices by Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@octodon.social), page 11

Well this thread got a lot more attention than I anticipated, which is nice and a little bit spooky but mostly nice.

Thanks everyone, it does feel nice to have some recognition. We're not done, and I'm not done. I might be mopey about things, but I'm also excited about the future, at the same time. I particularly think the things we're building in Spritely are really going to change the internet as we know it, whether we get the credit for it or not. Reasons to be excited, to keep going, to get myself up, to hack all the hacks, every day.

The funny thing with this thread getting so much attention is I *didn't* write a bunch about the history (and pre- and post- history!) of standardizing ActivityPub. Which, by the way, was a wild ride itself. That could have a thread of its own at some point I guess.

I will just say that I'm glad ActivityPub succeeded because the standards process definitely took a few years off my life. And it wasn't just me who did it, it was a bunch of us. But also a bunch of drama. The Social Web Working Group was my first ever standards group and nobody told me ahead of time that it was notoriously the most toxic standards group in all the W3C.

... maybe it's best NOT to revisit all that history. Oh my god. I'm glad we're past it. I'm glad we made it. Let sleeping drama lie. Onwards and upwards.

So if you DON'T KNOW @evan let me give you some context.

The fediverse really went through three eras, as I see it. The OStatus era, the great fragmentation era, and the ActivityPub era.

If you used "GNU Social", that was StatusNet originally, and it ran OStatus, both of which Evan was largely responsible for. Evan also built the precursor to ActivityPub, the Pump API, and ran the Social Web Working Group, where ActivityPub was standardized!

He's been absent for a while. I'm so happy to see him back!

FINALLY we've got @evan back on the fediverse!

WELCOME BACK EVAN!!!!

Often times people ask me, "But how do I learn about how ActivityPub works? Where do I get started?"

Friends! The ActivityPub spec itself is here to help you! There's a really lovely story-driven tutorial about ActivityPub right at the top of the spec in the "Overview" section! https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#Overview

Give it a read! I tried really hard to make it easy to follow, and it has beautiful illustrations from @mray!

A lot of people contributed to ActivityPub, but I'm going to give a breakdown of the authors and what they did:

- Evan Prodromou designed the core prototol, derived from the federation API of Pump.IO (itself a "lessons learned" from his experiences co-authoring OStatus, ActivityPub's predecessor)
- @erincandescent converted Evan's set of notes into the spec format and language style
- @tsyesika was the first major editor of the spec once it was being standardized at the W3C
- @rhiaro separated out client-to-server support from server-to-server support and made many, many edits
- And I carried the spec through probably the majority of the bureaucratic process and tried really hard to get inter-project buy-in on its ideas. And most importantly, I wrote that "Overview" tutorial at the top of the document, which is the part I'm most proud of!

I almost never use #hashtags

but maybe I should #thinkingabouthashtags #tumblrstyletagsmightbebettertho

For years I had such a hard time explaining to *anyone* why this ActivityPub spec we were working so hard on mattered

When you think about it Elon paid 44 billion just to advertise the importance of the fediverse, gotta give that guy some credit, real generous of him

welcome to the fediverse where it's okay to be horny on main just use a cw and keep it consensual