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Why ActivityPub is the future

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Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#81

Post by alex_duf »

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…

Yes I think the next step to avoid that is to own your own domain name.

If you own your domain name you can have a provider die, and you'll still be able to re import your data on a new provider, assuming you're able to set up a DNS

And that's where you lose most non technical users I guess?

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#82

Post by dreen »

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?

Yes although Account Migration is a very active discussion topic https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#83

Post by kyberias »

Kiro wrote: post #65
detaro wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why can't you do that? GDPR does not require end-to-end email encryption.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#84

Post by alex_duf »

skybrian wrote: post #53

Okay, it sounds plausible that it could be a good thing. But it seems that everything good on the Internet eventually gets weaponized by the bad guys, and these days it seems to happen faster than ever. So maybe we should talk about the downsides of ActivityPub?

I think spam is going to be a problem to control, it's also a matter of time before fake accounts are a thing.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#85

Post by CNJ7654 »

snissn wrote: post #27
mtgx wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti-censorship has always been the #1 benefit of federation and peer-to-peer connectivity. I don't think any other benefits come even close, and they are usually overshadowed by how much more difficult it is to build a well-working federated or P2P network. But when you start having global monopolies in various industries that don't care about automatically banning the "little guy" from which they make little money…

Your comment resonates with Maslow's hierarchy of needs on a digital level. Society's primary benefit is safety and decentralization creates the internet's base offering of security

>Society's primary benefit is safety

This is subjective, my favorite benefit from society is guaranteed freedoms. Luckily decentralization also offers a great deal of freedom on the internet :)

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#86

Post by apotheon »

mtgx wrote: post #4
rainbowmverse wrote: post #3

The real value of federation, and the value of a standard like ActivityPub, didn't fully click for me until I realized I could follow Blender's PeerTube experiment from my Mastodon account. If enough sites start supporting it, you could get many of the benefits of RSS with the few benefits of massive silos like Twitter and Facebook.

Anti-censorship has always been the #1 benefit of federation and peer-to-peer connectivity. I don't think any other benefits come even close, and they are usually overshadowed by how much more difficult it is to build a well-working federated or P2P network. But when you start having global monopolies in various industries that don't care about automatically banning the "little guy" from which they make little money…

"a decent competitor"

How did it do that? It threw away all the technical and usability benefits it had over Chrome, so I guess it's "a decent competitor" instead of "a clear winner" for some purposes, like it once was. Is that what you mean?

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#87

Post by remir »

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter: they grew to what they are today because each of them had people behind the wheel with a product mentality. This mentality attracted the capital and talent necessary to create products that resonated with people.

Now, some would say that, these services had the goal to make money and that's why they attracted capital and could hire top talent, but it doesn't change the fact that they had to have a strong product mentality to get to where they are today.

Most decentralized software I see have a project mentality based on idealism, but idealism is not enough. That's why desktop Linux failed to capture significant market share even if it costs zero to Joe Average to install it: it stayed at the level of idealism, of a project, while proprietary platforms like Windows an OSX had serious money and talent behind them because they weren't just projects.

On the other hand, Firefox and the Linux kernel are good example of successful open source softwares with a strong product mentality. Mozilla had a vision and they realized they need a strong product to fulfill that vision, so they needed to be able to pay their developers well, meaning they had to generates money. Same thing with the Linux kernel, which is backed by a lot of big companies.

So I guess what I'm saying is; if ActivityPub is to be the future, then there should be more than idealism behind it.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#88

Post by ixxie »

remir wrote: post #87

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter: they grew to what they are today because each of them had people behind the wheel with a product mentality . This mentality attracted the capital and talent necessary to create products that resonated with people . Now, some would say that, these services had the goal to make money and that's why they attracted capital and could hire top talent, but it doesn't change the fact t…

While I see your point about product mentality, and agree to a large extent, I am not sure it applies to ActivityPub. Its like saying email needed to be productized; it didn't, we just needed productized implementations of email servers and clients to get the network going.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#89

Post by Brakenshire »

remir wrote: post #87

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter: they grew to what they are today because each of them had people behind the wheel with a product mentality . This mentality attracted the capital and talent necessary to create products that resonated with people . Now, some would say that, these services had the goal to make money and that's why they attracted capital and could hire top talent, but it doesn't change the fact t…

On the other hand, ActivityPub is a just a standard, it wouldn’t be meaningful to complain about the product mentality of HTTP or JSON. The people building the websites or applications that use ActivityPub are the ones who need the product mentality, and they could use any business model they like.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#90

Post by TekMol » 

    You can be certain that regardless what happens
    with Mastodon, the network will live on and
    flourish. Newer and better software will be born
    within this ecosystem, but you will never have to
    drag all your friends and followers someplace
    else again–they’ll already be where they need to
    be.
What is a 'friend' here? A follower?

If mastodon.social is shut down tomorrow, a user - say joe@mastodon.social - would lose all his followers, no?

First of all the followers that were on mastodon.social too - their data is gone just like Joes data.

And the ones not on mastodon.social - yes, they would still exist. But Joe would have to make a new account somewhere else and ask each and every one to follow him again. And he would have no proof that he is the same joe that they knew under the account joe@mastodon.social.

Or am I missing something? Is there some public key that is Joes real identity and only he knows the private key?

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