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Why ActivityPub is the future

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Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#101

Post by mankash666 »

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?

The first question to answer is WHY user adoption remains anemic. Once there's an understanding of the cause, solution proposals make sense.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#102

Post by fwilliams »

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?

You could build a peer-tube compatible YouTube-like website. With control over the server, you could collect user data and probably stream ads over peer-tube. So there is possibly a profit incentive to hosting content.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#103

Post by phyzome »

alex_duf wrote: post #81
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…

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?

Mastodon (and I suppose ActivityPub in general) conflates hosting location with username. If I have a username like @bob@mastodon.social, then my stuff has to be accessible at mastodon.social's IP address (the A record).

Compare to email, where the MX record provides a layer of indirection. ActivityPub technically has a feature like this using a .well-known file, but it leaks into the user interface n unpleasant ways.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#104

Post by johnchristopher »

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #93
ixxie wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly- email would be nothing without outlook and gmail, http might have fallen without netscape. We need products on ActivityPub that beat real products

Email was there before outlook and Gmail and will still be long after Gmail sunsets it and Microsoft rebrands outlook to something like "Microsoft xbox delayed chat system".

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#105

Post by deft »

QualityReboot wrote: post #100
TekMol wrote: post #90

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 h…

Could I have me@mydomain be accepted by mastodon.social somehow? Similar to how I point my MX records to Gmail?

Not right now and maybe not ever. People have been asking for an account migration tool for quite awhile.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#106

Post by detaro »

QualityReboot wrote: post #100
TekMol wrote: post #90

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 h…

Could I have me@mydomain be accepted by mastodon.social somehow? Similar to how I point my MX records to Gmail?

If you install an ActivityPub compatible software, or if someone starts to offer one with custom domain support as a service. Account discovery most commonly is done with a HTTP request in /.well-known/, but the application that points to doesn't have to be at the same domain.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#107

Post by deltron3030 »

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…

The main selling point of these apps is a portable social graph for everybody, the Linux equivalent of that would be the ability of being able to understand the entire stack, and job security this brings with it. Open social networks could be similarly successful with normal people as Linux was with computer specialists. That's how I see it.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#108

Post by rotexo »

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…

Bingo. I've told this story a few times on here, and I feel the need to tell it again whenever the notion "uncensorable internet==unqualified good" comes up:

Once I got doxxed by bloggers from one end of the political spectrum who thought I was a blogger from the opposite end. (We have similar names, but the doxxers put out all of my info. I generally try to avoid making extreme political statements publicly on the internet.) Even after I got my info taken down, someone archived it and the archives got passed around on Twitter, prolonging the mess. Even now all that stuff shows up if you google my name (which I could see being an issue in employment and housing searches, for instance).

I'm not asking anyone to care about what happened to me, I just want people to think about the consequences of a system that can't be moderated. If some bad actors can continuously re-inject false information about normal people into the internet, it can have negative effects on the lives of those individuals. Advocate for an uncensorable internet all you want, but you should also be honest about the potential ramifications.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#109

Post by [deleted] »

deltron3030 wrote: post #107
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…

The main selling point of these apps is a portable social graph for everybody, the Linux equivalent of that would be the ability of being able to understand the entire stack, and job security this brings with it. Open social networks could be similarly successful with normal people as Linux was with computer specialists. That's how I see it.

[deleted]

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#110

Post by mgummelt »

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.

I think you've hit on the actual end user benefit - aggregation.

The article is either pitching abstractions like "compatibility" or solutions to non-problems like the risk that Facebook might vanish.

Though I'm not convinced aggregation is a big problem.

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