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

Why ActivityPub is the future

blog.joinmastodon.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 187 posts

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#61

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

fiatjaf wrote: post #37

Who's going to host thousands of petabytes of videos on behalf of others if not YouTube or a similar service?

As anyone involved on the major torrent communities knows, at least some people are willing to share the great artistic achievements of mankind, worthwhile documentary material, etc. You will usually find seeders for the great canon of films, ebooks, all manner of musical genres, etc. So, I assume that for videos that really matter to some loyal audience, at least some people will set aside storage space for that.

However, most of Google’s petabytes of video are inane "cat videos", people’s personal uploads that only ever attract one or two of their friends to look, or shills, and would it really be such a shame if their content couldn’t be hosted somewhere?

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#62

Post by Kiro »

detaro wrote: post #26
amelius wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, that sounds like they don't comply with the GDPR then. Also, doesn't ActivityPub allow closed groups?

Just as GDPR-incompliant as e-mail then, or any social media platform that's not e2e encrypted?

Yes, which is why you can't use email to send sensitive personal data anymore.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#63

Post by detaro »

Kiro wrote: post #62
detaro wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just as GDPR-incompliant as e-mail then, or any social media platform that's not e2e encrypted?

Yes, which is why you can't use email to send sensitive personal data anymore.

That doesn't mean your mail provider isn't GDPR compliant. And with the proper agreements and technical steps in place, a business sending personal data via e-mail could be totally fine to. (a big one would be requiring transport encryption, which is a sensible choice for ActivityPub too, and made by implementations, e.g. Mastodon)

It's specific to the use case and what guarantees you have, and not a strict property of a protocol.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#64

Post by xj9 »

oelmekki wrote: post #46
xj9 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

the goal is to decouple users from servers.

the idea is to move the key that AP uses to sign JSON-LD objects to the client and do all of the crypto operations there.

a server in this model is an always-on relay for replicating data. you can submit a message to any relay and expect to have it show up on all interested servers.

unfortunately, this will also break compat with HTTP/DNS-based AP servers, but hopefully this is something that the maintainers will be open to supporting.

relevant threads:

https://b.9chan.lol/notice/279590

https://b.9chan.lol/notice/226866

https://b.9chan.lol/notice/212397

https://shitposter.club/notice/9830850

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#65

Post by Kiro »

detaro wrote: post #63
Kiro wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, which is why you can't use email to send sensitive personal data anymore.

That doesn't mean your mail provider isn't GDPR compliant. And with the proper agreements and technical steps in place, a business sending personal data via e-mail could be totally fine to. (a big one would be requiring transport encryption, which is a sensible choice for ActivityPub too, and made by implementations, e.g. Mastodon) It's specific to the use case and what guarantees you have, and not a strict property…

What technical steps? My business used to send personal data to normal people via email (their own data). Now we can't do that anymore.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#66

Post by ktosobcy »

donpdonp wrote: post #49
rainbowmverse wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This definitely should be better highlighted... I knew I should be able to follow ActivityPub but: nothing was on blender/peertube website nor I saw any field to search for blender...

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#67

Post by rakoo »

fiatjaf wrote: post #37

Who's going to host thousands of petabytes of videos on behalf of others if not YouTube or a similar service?

Much like email, if ActivityPub becomes prevalent one day, there will be 2-3 main players hosting 80% of the traffic, and then the small independent players on the side. So Youtube will be a ActivityPub-compliant platform.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#68

Post by egypturnash »

_8j50 wrote: post #52

Let me just say this - both mastodon and activitypub are terrible names. I say that as a consumer not as an expert on anything. It's not a dealbreaker for me but platform popularity by the masses depends on color schemes and catchy names. I feel the same way about duckduckgo. Great products though.

Twitter’s a pretty stupid name too. So’s Facebook. You get used to them after a while.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#69

Post by marknadal »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #60
stcredzero wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Everyone moved to gmail because it was free with a really high storage limit, which was unheard of at the time, and your email address would stay the same when your ISP changed. Hotmail was the hotness before that for pretty much the same reasons, minus the high storage limit.

@rainbowmverse @stcredzero @AnIdiotOnTheNet

It is true that people switched to gmail because of what you say. I don't disagree.

The point is that even with federated services, consumers will choose the most convenient one (and they should!).

But that still means users are dependent upon that service. Imagine if Facebook became ActivityPub protocol compliant.

They (like Google with Gmail) would have more resources to make the most convenient/amazing Mastodon experience. Is this itself bad? No. Is it that companies have more resources, that is bad? No.

It is simply that the following is better:

If you have a P2P/decentralized protocol, even if Google/Facebook were to create a killer app/experience for it that everybody "switched" to, there...

- data

- account

- identity

- friends

- etc.

Would and could still exist regardless of the backend (federated, centralized, or not). This is not true with ActivityPub / Mastodon.

Imagine if you could have switched to gmail and automatically "kept" all your emails? And then you could just as easily switch to a different competing email interface, and it "kept" all the emails/data you had in gmail?

That is the kicker here, by "kept" I do not mean "migrates from one to the other", by "kept" I mean the application interface just reused the same existing underlying data.

Extra point:

Very few people are going to switch for encryption/privacy alone. But if gmail/activitypub/facebook/mastodon was P2P/decentralized (like is possible with our system), then you can have competing apps (analog: gmail vs hotmail) that are still end-to-end encrypted (analog: neither gmail's or hotmail's servers would be able to read/decrypt your data) because that is happening in the app (the "client") not on the federated server (like with activitypub/mastodon) or the centralized server (gmail/facebook).

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#70

Post by dane-pgp »

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?

Or we could go one better and use the GDPR's "data portability" requirement to force Facebook to effectively offer such an API:

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/

A regulator / court would have to look at what is "technically feasible" for Facebook to implement, but given that there are multiple interoperating projects supporting ActivityPub (with much smaller resources than Facebook) I think it would be hard to argue that Facebook couldn't add ActivityPub support.

At a stretch, Facebook might argue that data portability only requires them (as data controllers) to publish your Facebook posts to specific accounts on other services, and doesn't require Facebook to accept inbound posts from competing platforms, but I don't know whether Facebook would want to be in a situation where their competitors have access to data on Facebook but Facebook doesn't have similar access to data from their users.

Post reply on HN