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Why ActivityPub is the future

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Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#131

Post by fenwick67 »

detaro wrote: post #111
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…

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.

The real benefit of federation is that anywhere on the moderation spectrum is possible on a per-instance basis.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#133

Post by prepend »

froasty wrote: post #41
bhhaskin wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You’re assuming that urban is always superior to suburban. There are many who prefer the problems you call out vs the problems with urban centers.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#134

Post by ohtwenty »

jancsika wrote: post #125

I get it from a developer standpoint, but I don't get it at all from a user standpoint. For example: joinmastodon.org gives me two dropdown boxes at the bottom of their frontpage. One asks what my interest is, the other asks what language I speak. Then it ajaxes in some links to different instances which (I suppose) are geared toward the interest I chose. Does this mean that for each interest I must sign up on a diff…

I've been using mastodon for a few months and it depends on your instance, really. A lot are more "this is the type of people you'd expect here" (tech people, lgbt people, art peopl, etc) but everything that isn't specifically related to that topic is OK. I'm on a semi-political one, because that's what I'd use a platform like that for. But it's not limited to that at all. Some are stricter, some aren't pegged down to a topic, but might be related to a "type" of person. I know some people who have a few accounts, to only share stuff related to that instance. Some people end up running their own instance (although that's easier with pleroma, you could probably run it off a toaster if you wanted to) or just with one or two friends.

there's added value to the local timeline, especially in smaller instances when you've just joined, because it allows you to find like-minded people. If you could do without that the easiest option might be to join a large instance or start your own, but both come with discoverability issues.

In short, no, you don't need to, but you could (just like you can make multiple emails) if it helps you separate stuff

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#135

Post by ajconway »

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…

Banning federated networks is actually much easier than dealing with an important centralized entity like Facebook or Google. Just ban every node that provides access to illegal content.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#136

Post by 18pfsmt »

froasty wrote: post #119
mgummelt wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

For the sake of argument, let’s say federated social platforms will not solve "digital privacy, digital harassment, and digital overpopulation,” what is your proposal to solve these “problems?” Are you suggesting everybody stay on FB/TWTR/IG/SNAP? Are you saying nobody should use the internet to socialize? I seriously do not comprehend the point(s) you are trying to make.

Just because not all problems can be solved with Mastodon, and the like, does not mean they are not worth pursuing.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#137

Post by 18pfsmt »

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 thought Mastodon was default whitelist whereas email was default blacklist, no?

In other words, if you don't explicitly take action (i.e. follow) nobody can send you a message on Mastodon? I thought that was how it was implemented, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#138

Post by dane-pgp »

amelius wrote: post #71
dane-pgp wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To be honest, the only data I would want to export out of Facebook would be "events" (event name, time, location, description, rsvps, image/video data, comments). Would that also be possible using the GDPR directive?

The relevant term of Article 20 of the directive seems to be "personal data", which means information relating to a person (thus being broader than the idea of "personally identifiable information").

If you ran the Facebook page for a club or society, then much of the metadata about the events you created for it would likely not be covered by the GDPR; but for a personal Facebook page, if you were publishing information about an event that you were organising and were planning to attend, it is more likely that a useful amount of metadata would be covered.

I don't know whether ActivityPub has a standardised way of handling event invitations and RSVPs, but the existence of things like the iCalendar format and its various implementations might go some way towards making the "technically feasible" argument.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#139

Post by skybrian »

Kinrany wrote: post #78
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?

This statement can be generalized to all of science and technology.

Yes, of course.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#140

Post by hsienmaneja »

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

It might be more accurate to say that a social standard would need to support productized client evolutions that outlook and others provided along the way of email’s evolutionary path.
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