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ActivityPub: a federated social web standard

w3.org

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Re: ActivityPub: a federated social web standard

#41

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

tomphoolery wrote: post #40
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…

> Did you try reaching out to each of those major social networking websites to offer collaboration on this standard? What possible benefit would it give companies whose entire business value revolves around their data...to just give that data away to anyone? Here's what I learned from working on the DIASPORA* project: The only people that federated/distributed social networking benefits are the 1% of nerds who know…

> but in reality they just want Facebook without Facebook actually owning their data

Truer words-. Thank you both for working on diaspora* and also for your subsequent realization that completely-unnecessary-decentralization-just-for-its-own-sake is not actually what 99.9% of people want. They just want to be in control of their data.

Re: ActivityPub: a federated social web standard

#43

Post by HerraBRE »

devrandomguy wrote: post #34
nercht12 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

Actually, this is a real issue. For one, there is the Wayback Machine, which could very well see increased usage and mindshare as legally mandated content takedowns increase. For another, if, say, Facebook wanted to harvest data from this network to create shadow profiles and flesh out missing patterns in their analytics, then they could easily follow everything, keep the raw data/content internal, and never develop…

This is a legitimate concern.

I would not put it past Facebook (or other businesses which are addicted to harvesting user data) to behave badly against networks like this. However, for the sake of their reputations they'd still probably do it quietly, which means many of the person-to-person attacks that deletion protects against would still be thwarted.

This is a problem the same way Facebook's privacy controls are a problem. Facebook themselves are not bound by them, but they're still useful if you want to protect your data from other users of the platform.

And FWIW, I think most of the big crawlers respect robots.txt - this is the same sort of thing.

Re: ActivityPub: a federated social web standard

#44

Post by dmd »

paroneayea wrote: post #19
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.

It's tricky, though people are using them. Mastodon probably is seeing the most success at the moment. Over half a million users by current estimates. Not everyone who signs up stays around, but there's still quite a bit of retention. We could do better. We need to make these things easier to host and deploy though. Having worked on MediaGoblin for many years now, I've found the most depressing part of it is that not…

> Over half a million users by current estimates

For context, that's 3 days' worth of Twitter signups.

Re: ActivityPub: a federated social web standard

#45

Post by eevilspock »

I don't see any mention of encryption in this standard. Are all messages public? I'd like to see this using public and private keys so that it is guaranteed only intended recipients (e.g. people on my friends list) can read my messages. This is especially important given the federated nature of this.

Re: ActivityPub: a federated social web standard

#46

Post by smarx007 »

tomphoolery wrote: post #40
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…

> Did you try reaching out to each of those major social networking websites to offer collaboration on this standard? What possible benefit would it give companies whose entire business value revolves around their data...to just give that data away to anyone? Here's what I learned from working on the DIASPORA* project: The only people that federated/distributed social networking benefits are the 1% of nerds who know…

> What possible benefit would it give companies whose entire business value revolves around their data.

You are right, but inviting them is still worth doing. BTW, diaspora* should have also been invited, but as I understand, they were.

> federated/distributed social networking benefits are the 1% of nerds

I actually tried to understand how can I benefit from a distributed social network and did not (I almost stopped using FB as well, not for the privacy reasons, but because of little utility given the time it consumes).

> Yes, XMPP...once the golden boy of federated discussion platforms...has been totally deprecated by the top two implementors. Why?

For Google it was primarily because Microsoft used their XMPP integration in Outlook but refused to allow Google to have a similar Skype integration. Somewhere on HN Googlers were writing about this. Don't remember, but I think FB also integrated Google Talk as well without allowing reciprocal integration for Google.

> The fact that anyone actually sat down and took the time to build specs for federated social networking is a miracle to me...considering there's practically zero business value in it.

Again, I agree, but there is zero value in a good spec that is followed by a single product. At least diaspora* and GNU Social should agree on this standard so that we can in future use different federated social network distros.

Re: ActivityPub: a federated social web standard

#47

Post by JeremyBanks »

graphememes wrote: post #31
ForHackernews wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I believe they did give a suggestion, to build it before making the assumption that it works.

It has already been built.

Re: ActivityPub: a federated social web standard

#48

Post by devoply »

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.

I think you have your priorities a bit mixed up. I would like an alternative to FB twitter. I can tolerate rest of the stuff until that minimum goal is achieved. Nor do I care that much about spam.

Re: ActivityPub: a federated social web standard

#49

Post by beagle3 »

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."…

> Only bad actors will disobey and they will have to modify their software in order to do so.

I have an hourly bup backup for each of my servers, that goes to a backup host. I am not a bad actor, have not modified any software, and yet if I run an activityhub server I will have a complete timeline at 1hr granularity, so basically anything not deleted within minutes of posting.

(Considering a switch to borg backup when I have the time to really evaluate it)

Re: ActivityPub: a federated social web standard

#50

Post by dnel »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #41
tomphoolery wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did you try reaching out to each of those major social networking websites to offer collaboration on this standard? What possible benefit would it give companies whose entire business value revolves around their data...to just give that data away to anyone? Here's what I learned from working on the DIASPORA* project: The only people that federated/distributed social networking benefits are the 1% of nerds who know…

> but in reality they just want Facebook without Facebook actually owning their data Truer words-. Thank you both for working on diaspora* and also for your subsequent realization that completely-unnecessary-decentralization-just-for-its-own-sake is not actually what 99.9% of people want. They just want to be in control of their data.

Decentralisation provides no benefits to users, only burdens. Federation is there to provide scalability and resilience to admins and designers of the network. The ultimate federated social network is the one that does not need to mention it at all to users because it has zero impact on how they use it.
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