Why ActivityPub is the future • Hacker News Board

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#111

Post by detaro » Wed, Jun 27, 2018, 9:18 PM UTC

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 non-empty set of Mastodon users probably picked precisely for it's "censorship" abilities, unhappy with how Twitter handles it and wanting a space where their instance can enforce its own policies.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#112

Post by mgummelt » Wed, Jun 27, 2018, 9:33 PM UTC

froasty wrote: post #91

CM30 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. It's just a return to the olden days of internet communities, when users controlled the sites they posted on and people found groups to talk to about things that interested them (rather than being stuck on a giant platform owned by a large corporation). And it's probably better for society in general that communities work that way. You don't want millionaires and oorporations controlling discourse, and in…

There's a pretty stark difference between organic internet communities as they were and what is emerging from federated platforms on an already connected planet. I was on an emulation forum for several years in the early 2000s that had people from every walk of life, every stripe of politics, on essentially every continent of the planet, yet the number of regular users was still within Dunbar's number, for years. Tha…

> Secondly, the notion that by federating or centralizing, you can avoid or generate discursal control is pretty unfounded. The 2016 US Presidential election and Brexit are more than enough evidence of that.

Control isn't binary. Facebook can exert much control over discourse while still being vulnerable to powerful actors.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#113

Post by k__ » Wed, Jun 27, 2018, 9:38 PM UTC

In Germany we have rather socialism like structures like the "eingetranger Verein/eV" (membership association) or the "eingetragene Genossenschaft/eG" (incorporated cooperative)

These are made for things like that.

The idea with a eG is, the owners are also the customers. For example, if there is need of appartments, people found a eG to pool the money to build multi-appartment houses where they self live in later.

Since the customers are also the "stock owners" they elect the board.

I think this fits perfectly for these federated social networks.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#114

Post by icedchai » Wed, Jun 27, 2018, 9:43 PM UTC

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.

What do you do instead? Ship it to them on CD?

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#115

Post by s73v3r_ » Wed, Jun 27, 2018, 9:46 PM UTC

daveid wrote: post #14

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?

Then your account is gone, but your friends on other servers are still where they were. With backup/import tools you can reconnect with them from a new account easily.

Can you? You have to be able to message them to tell them where your new account is. And they have to actually go and re-follow.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#116

Post by s73v3r_ » Wed, Jun 27, 2018, 9:49 PM UTC

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.

No it won't. You might not have to see harassment directed at you, but that doesn't mitigate it. Especially if part of that harassment is doxxing.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#117

Post by s73v3r_ » Wed, Jun 27, 2018, 9:50 PM UTC

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?

That's not going to be very worthwhile unless that person is also interacting via AP. If the person is not interacting, then the followers would lose interest, and it becomes just a read-only account rather than the interactivity that most of us have been wanting.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#118

Post by s73v3r_ » Wed, Jun 27, 2018, 9:56 PM UTC

mankash666 wrote: post #101

amelius wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, to start, why would users want to move over away from the platforms they already are on? What benefits for them are there on these other platforms? And, what kind of marketing/outreach has been done to let them know about them?

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#119

Post by froasty » Wed, Jun 27, 2018, 9:56 PM UTC

mgummelt wrote: post #112

froasty wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a pretty stark difference between organic internet communities as they were and what is emerging from federated platforms on an already connected planet. I was on an emulation forum for several years in the early 2000s that had people from every walk of life, every stripe of politics, on essentially every continent of the planet, yet the number of regular users was still within Dunbar's number, for years. Tha…

> Secondly, the notion that by federating or centralizing, you can avoid or generate discursal control is pretty unfounded. The 2016 US Presidential election and Brexit are more than enough evidence of that. Control isn't binary. Facebook can exert much control over discourse while still being vulnerable to powerful actors.

If your narrative can be derailed by pseudo-anonymous actors, you don't control the narrative.

The idea that I'm primarily disagreeing with is that Facebook, Twitter, et al. can be hegemonic in a user-populated space. I don't think they can. They can certainly exert large amounts of influence and constrain it, but it's not monolithic and they don't control it. Federation only makes that influence more invisible. It certainly doesn't remove it.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#120

Post by type0 » Wed, Jun 27, 2018, 10:01 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

But it's the same with gmail and everything else like that, I don't see it being a problem of ActivityPub or Mastodon. There's keybase or having your own domain with some index.html where you can direct your followers to a new account is not that big of a deal nowdays. If having to host it somewhere is too much for you - use dot tel tld (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tel). People that really want to read your ramblings will find you anyway.