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Why ActivityPub is the future

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Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#41

Post by froasty »

bhhaskin wrote: post #35
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.

Yes, and nominally so did homeownership in suburbia vs rental in overcrowded cities. What it actually meant is that instead of being beholden to "The Man's" cultural standards, they were now beholden to the Homeowner's Association's. Instead of overt racism and segregation, they got redlining, blockbusting, and racial steering. Instead of razor thin walls leading to informal surveillance, they had to Keep Up with the Joneses.

Of course, the forces are now politically/socially based rather than fundamentally racially based, but the principle remains the same. It's another digital White Flight by any other name.^1

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1 https://www.technologyreview.com/s/419843/did-whites-flee-th...

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#42

Post by amelius »

mankash666 wrote: post #36

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

What if there was a well-maintained library that continuously scrapes a given user's Facebook account, and publishes it to AP?

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#43

Post by skywhopper »

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…

What will we do when keybase goes away?

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#45

Post by needz »

marknadal wrote: post #40

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…

That's a very interesting project! I hope it catches on.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#46

Post by oelmekki »

xj9 wrote: post #22
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…

the AP spec is actually, a bit more abstract that you would expect. JSON and JSON-LD are required, but transport and actor resolution are not well specified. current-gen AP servers do have an implicit dependency on HTTP and DNS. i've spoken with several people about creating a proof-of-concept AP server that supports gossip-based replication and a few other ssb-inspired features.

This sounds interesting. Does it mean an AP server could exist that would not be based on the federation model?

Or to make my question more precise : would the gossip model be used only for data distribution and we would still have to register on a node, or would it allow to keep and reuse our data and identity should our usual node disappear?

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#47

Post by stcredzero »

jordigh wrote: post #6
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?

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…

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.

How about backing up accounts in other servers? These could be encrypted with a key which only the user controls. Or perhaps the backup could be done encrypted in cloud storage like S3 (this would involve a paid account, obviously) so the user's presence could be resurrected in a different server?

It might also be dandy to have "failover" agreements, where one server can agree ahead of time to failover users for another server, in case of failure.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#48

Post by stcredzero »

amelius wrote: post #42
mankash666 wrote: post #36

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

What if there was a well-maintained library that continuously scrapes a given user's Facebook account, and publishes it to AP?

How about browser extensions?

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#49

Post by donpdonp »

rainbowmverse wrote: post #21
jesse_m wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you subscribe from mastodon? I see the video.blender.org is their instance right?

Put @blender@video.blender.org in the search box.

The search box can be easy to miss - its the text field above the new-toot-box and below the menu bar in the left-most column.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#50

Post by stcredzero »

marknadal wrote: post #40

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…

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.

What are the systemic issues? Why did everybody move to gmail? I liked the ability to just let my email collect and search it. I liked the spam filtering. That's why everybody moved to gmail.

The systemic problems I saw with email had to do with server security and spam. How is it that those problems aren't solvable federated, but solvable P2P?

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