Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

ActivityPub: a federated social web standard

w3.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 57 posts

Re: ActivityPub: a federated social web standard

#21

Post by shopkins »

smarx007 wrote: post #20

The standard is awesome and looks well-designed. The biggest issue is that it was lead solely by the people around Mastodon/Pump.io/Mediagoblin. While not a bad thing per se (on the contrary, it shows a commitment to a free internet), it means that there is little chance for it to penetrate the general (social) networking scene (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, VK etc.). Did you try reaching out to each of those major so…

I would argue it's also, uh, not in their business model whatsoever to support efforts like this (thinking Facebook especially). Better to develop the spec and forge on now, or we'd be waiting around for a long time.

Re: ActivityPub: a federated social web standard

#22

Post by max_ »

I think It looks more like a mashup of Facebook & Twitter.

It would really be good is some of the actions e.g liking, following, were more generalized.

For instance, instead of "like" you could have an entity called "Response" that could refer to a comment/like/upvote/downvote etc

Re: ActivityPub: a federated social web standard

#24

Post by windlep »

Small section about how Spam should be handled somehow by a server. Sigh. How about we build a federated spam/harassment prevention system first?

I have little hope that a spec not designed to reduce/stop harassment up front can have it bolted on later successfully.

Re: ActivityPub: a federated social web standard

#25

Post by nercht12 »

HerraBRE wrote: post #12
devrandomguy wrote: post #3

So, about that federated DELETE operation. In a decentralized network, we can't unilaterally delete a shared piece of content; that is one of the main features of decentralization. Even providing that verb seems kind of deceptive to me; it implies that content that enters the network, could conceivably be purged, which will affect how people use the network. Perhaps DISOWN would be a more accurate verb, especially if…

If the social contract says "delete things when you see a delete message", then that's useful in a federated environment. Only bad actors will disobey and they will have to modify their software in order to do so. This doesn't provide absolute protection against bad actors, but since most bad actors don't own a time machine, it reduces the scope of the harm they can enact. Consider the adversary "angry ex-boyfriend."…

>> most bad actors don't own a time machine

You mean besides me, of course. XD

EDIT: It's a joke people, for Pete's sake.

Re: ActivityPub: a federated social web standard

#26

Post by ForHackernews »

windlep wrote: post #24

Small section about how Spam should be handled somehow by a server. Sigh. How about we build a federated spam/harassment prevention system first? I have little hope that a spec not designed to reduce/stop harassment up front can have it bolted on later successfully.

It's only a "candidate" so far, maybe you can add some suggestions?

Re: ActivityPub: a federated social web standard

#27

Post by bluetwo »

bct wrote: post #17

We know how to build protocols for federated systems - there must be at least a dozen serious efforts at federated social media by now. What we don't know (or what we've forgotten) is how to get people to use federated systems.

Yes. This seems to be a classic two-sided market problem. Developers won't flock to it unless there is a critical mass of users. Users won't flock to it until there are widely used and understood tools that are better than they have now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-sided_market

Re: ActivityPub: a federated social web standard

#28

Post by paroneayea »

windlep wrote: post #24

Small section about how Spam should be handled somehow by a server. Sigh. How about we build a federated spam/harassment prevention system first? I have little hope that a spec not designed to reduce/stop harassment up front can have it bolted on later successfully.

Well we certainly consider it an important aspect! But also, as said, we were standardizing the existing set of federation functionality currently implemented in the federated social web.

But the Social Web Incubator Community Group has made anti-spam/anti-abuse stuff part of our mission, but that's hard stuff. ActivityPub does include federated blocklist support, but I think it's not enough. I've written about possible directions though: https://dustycloud.org/blog/possible-distributed-anti-abuse/

Re: ActivityPub: a federated social web standard

#29

Post by paroneayea »

smarx007 wrote: post #20

The standard is awesome and looks well-designed. The biggest issue is that it was lead solely by the people around Mastodon/Pump.io/Mediagoblin. While not a bad thing per se (on the contrary, it shows a commitment to a free internet), it means that there is little chance for it to penetrate the general (social) networking scene (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, VK etc.). Did you try reaching out to each of those major so…

We did reach out to both all the major centralized social networks and also all the distributed social networks. The major social centralized networks didn't seem interested in participating in this round, but they were welcomed and encouraged to become part of the group iirc.

Re: ActivityPub: a federated social web standard

#30

Post by avivo »

Social networks function in the context of society. Which is messy. Developing a system that doesn't have very harmful failure modes is not easy. And if it's a federated standard, there is no easy way to fix it after the fact. I'd recommend that anyone working on something like that (or really any social network) read this: https://www.twitterandteargas.org/

Evan Williams, a Twitter founder recently said: “I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place. I was wrong about that.”

Post reply on HN