Why ActivityPub is the future • Hacker News Board

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#141

Post by rablo » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 1:31 AM UTC

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…

It won’t fix censorship. Most users will pile up in certain servers (or even just one) and the owners of that server will censor whatever they don’t like (be it users or entire servers). In the end, it’ll be like Twitter.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#142

Post by rayalez » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 1:42 AM UTC

Unfortunately, at the moment it's impossible to rename/move your account to a different domain, and if your mastodon instance is shut down(which, let's face it, is likelier to happen than twitter shutdown), you still lose your followers.

You can host your own instance, of course, but that requires time/money for maintenance, and not everyone will do this.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#143

Post by rayalez » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 1:42 AM UTC

Does anyone know if there are some good ActivityPub implementations in Node?

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#144

Post by ripdog » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 1:46 AM UTC

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…

No, thanks to federation it doesn't matter which instance you sign up on, you can follow people on any instance. You're choosing your home instance there, so basically the group of people you're closest to.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#145

Post by _emacsomancer_ » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 1:49 AM UTC

lilbobbytables wrote: post #129

johnchristopher wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

And it was productized before then. AOL being a huge one ("You've got mail"), and Hotmail also coming to mind.

And email was around long before AOL or Hotmail.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#146

Post by incompatible » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 1:53 AM UTC

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

The web was already doing fine with Mosaic, although that was also proprietary. Netscape was just the better-funded and flashier version.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#147

Post by nl » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 1:57 AM UTC

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…

Exactly this.

I did some work on PubSubHubbub based federated social networks back in the FriendFeed days. Technically it worked really well, and we had a few nodes sending posts between sites with only seconds of delay.

But no one wanted to use it.

After I while I worked out it failed for exactly the same reason FriendFeed (and Google Buzz) did: federation is actually a weakness when there is a major player.

FriendFeed gave up and took the FB money (smart). Google Buzz gave up and was replaced with the completely different (and non-federated) Google Plus (which failed for different reasons).

The only argument for it working this time is timing. I've come to appreciate timing based arguments a lot more over the last few years, so maybe there is an opportunity, but I'm sure not putting any effort into it.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#148

Post by incompatible » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 1:58 AM UTC

ajconway wrote: post #135

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…

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.

China is happy to ban both, difficulty doesn't seem to be an issue.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#149

Post by incompatible » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 2:01 AM UTC

briandear wrote: post #98

egypturnash wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Facebook came from actual face books at universities. It a brilliant name because the entire point was to see people you might want to sleep with. It wasn’t about sharing photos with mom.

Strange that it didn't evolve into Tinder.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#150

Post by cbsmith » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 2:01 AM UTC

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…

Mozilla was founded out of Netscape's product failure, and survived largely on the coattails of the search revolution.

Desktop Linux's failure is a matter of perspective, but there were more than a few products built around it... they just failed. It turns out, that was the wrong vision.