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Why ActivityPub is the future

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Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#31

Post by PKop »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #28
jordigh wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would and it has. In Mastodon-speak, this is called an "extinction event", and I have seen a few of those. Mastodon, however, has already implemented take-out feature where you can download all of your data at any time, including your friend list. It's not perfect, because although you can keep your followee list, your followers don't have an automatic way of knowing where your new presence may have moved to. Also…

Unfortunately, it's out there, but you can't associate those previous messages with your new account.

Keybase.io could be a part of solving this I think:

https://keybase.io/docs/sigchain

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#32

Post by pjc50 »

amelius wrote: post #20
daveid wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the thread: >I don't expect any major changes are needed for compliance, which is why it's been pretty low priority. it's just a matter of getting a document together that better informs admins. Mastodon has all the features needed for compliance, and does not collect or store any data that's not for its primary purpose.

Does that mean that in ActivityPub, I can't share messages with a restricted group of people?

Why do you think that? Please explain with reference to the text of the directive.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#33

Post by dnomad »

edhelas wrote: post #15

ActivityPub is built by the W3C and therefore relies on Web related technologies (lost of HTTP and JSON exchanged) :) Does this scale properly and how does it compare to existing solutions like XMPP Pubsub ( https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html ) that is basically built to deliver content, in real-time (trough TCP sockets) and can handle thousands (millions?) of delivered packets per seconds? I'm building a fede…

I suspect XMPP is superior to ActivityPub and the way to go. Bandwidth is only increasing with 5G and with binary XML [1] I think you'll (one day, in theory) be able to get large scale, efficient real-time message flows. XML is just more extensible than JSON soup. These architectures are also probably flawed for pushing for complete N-to-N connectivity. It makes far more sense to push for mobile data that can be liberated from any one server than to assume any given data will always be available and will always provide a given chunk of data. This allows aggregation and caching and copy-resilience which is what makes the web actually work.

[1] https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0322.html

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#34

Post by froasty »

Mastodon and other federated platforms are to social media what suburbia historically has been to cities.

People think it'll resolve or at least mitigate the issues of digital privacy, digital harassment, and digital overpopulation, but in reality will just create ever more wasteful and unaccountable digital sprawl while inevitably recreating the exact same problems (e.g. HOA discrimination, nosey neighbors, hiding all non-conforming traits lest your cohabitants judge you, etc).

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#35

Post by bhhaskin »

froasty wrote: post #34

Mastodon and other federated platforms are to social media what suburbia historically has been to cities. People think it'll resolve or at least mitigate the issues of digital privacy, digital harassment, and digital overpopulation, but in reality will just create ever more wasteful and unaccountable digital sprawl while inevitably recreating the exact same problems (e.g. HOA discrimination, nosey neighbors, hiding a…

You are comparing apples to oranges.

Self hosting a service will of course mitigate all of the issues you listed. The control shifts from a company like Facebook into the hands of the server owner.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#36

Post by mankash666 »

The tech and applications have existed for a while now, but adoption hasn't been comparable to large, centralized rivals.

I'd argue activityPub isn't the future, until it root causes the reason for anemic adoption.

Also, the best use case might not be in transferring an existing centralized app onto activity pub

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#38

Post by wmf »

xez wrote: post #5

>If Twitter shuts down, you’ll lose your followers. If Facebook shuts down, you’ll lose your friends. For some platforms, it’s not a question of “if”, but “when”. Wouldn't this happen as well if the instance my account was created in shuts down?

IMO the solution to this is one instance, one domain, and one IP per person with some kind of financial sustainability (i.e. you pay for it) but it's very difficult for people to swallow.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#39

Post by wmf »

PKop wrote: post #30
jordigh wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would and it has. In Mastodon-speak, this is called an "extinction event", and I have seen a few of those. Mastodon, however, has already implemented take-out feature where you can download all of your data at any time, including your friend list. It's not perfect, because although you can keep your followee list, your followers don't have an automatic way of knowing where your new presence may have moved to. Also…

I was thinking that federation still leaves unsolved the issue of knowing the single source of truth for identities, and when instances go down, you can't reference anything to know who/where people are. Couldn't Keybase.io solve this? It could track your identities on these servers, and it would exist outside of any instances or federation, but be the source of identity that would go along with any federated instanc…

Or DNS.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#40

Post by marknadal »

Mastodon is a great Federated protocol, but the problem with /any/ federated protocol is that it is federated.

I've commented about this before, email is federated, and we saw what happened there: Everybody moved to gmail. Federation will lead to all the same systemic issues.

A better approach is to use P2P/decentralization, rather than a hosted instance owning your account/identity, you own your account/identity and you can reuse it across any/all services. Even if those services die or go away, you will always exist.

This isn't just "talk" though, we've spent the last 4 years of our lives working on giving away truly Free and Open (MIT/Zlib/Apache2) software to help people build stuff like this:

https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-wi...

Now there are dApps in production that have pushed terabytes of daily traffic. We're still working through some scaling up kinks, but we're making fast progress.

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