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Why ActivityPub is the future

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Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#151
post #79
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be a better name?

Nearly anything that's ideally one or two syllables, phonetically easy to say, and can have a reasonable brand built around it. Not that these are awesome but just examples off the top of my head so I'm not just saying "they suck" without providing alternatives... Ivy - Naturally grows and spreads and often is seen climbing walls. Maybe in this case it climbs and covers a FB wall :-P Also a play on FB being started a…

Australians will just shorten it to "Masto". It's no big deal.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#152
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…

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

Like most standards, its success hinges on the success of products/projects/whatever that employ it.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#153
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.

Desktop Linux's failure is a matter of perspective,

It's really not.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Instead of asking why these problems are endemic to every platform, people just say "let's try silver bullet #24 so that we can keep doing the same pernicious stuff with a veneer of progress" and now you have several more problems on top of the ones that already existed.

Are humans in large numbers capable of interfacing with individual human beings without engaging in pernicious behavior? The answer, as anyone online in the last twenty-five years is a resounding no. Are humans in large numbers capable of behaving immaculately when it comes to preserving their own or their customer's privacy? Once again the answer, as anyone online in the last twenty-five years (and several decades longer if you include proto-business networks) is a resounding no. If you add progressively more humans to anything, does the output improve? If the metric is human satisfaction, the answer is no. If the metric is the rate of return in a Ponzi scheme, then yes, okay, you've got me there. The cause of almost all problems is solutions.

As far as social media goes, it's literally designed to use people to promulgate human-motivated pseudo-information for as long as humanly possible. It's not for "socializing" or "meeting people" in the same way that TV shows and movies aren't there for entertainment. It's to sell the viewer's attention to people that have anything but their interest in mind. Moving to federated enclaves is just further deregulating an already throughly pernicious industry.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're missing the point. Like you said, Mosaic was ALREADY a great product, compared to the nerdy terminal browsers without embedded media, etc.

OP's point is not whether netscape or mosaic is better, but that the graphical web browser was what brought the web mainstream. Doesn't matter if it's mosaic or netscape (or several other graphical ui browser competitors that existed during that time)

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#157
My buzzword antibodies have been circling "federation" for quite a while, but the email analogy in this article has made me reconsider.

Ever since quitting social networks I've been looking for a way to push content to close friends and I really had to fall all the way down to email before anything worked. So I'm hopeful for some slightly more tailored technologies to step in.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And nobody used it, relatively speaking vs the extraordinary scale that those email products made possible later.

Hotmail had more users after 18 months than the total history of all email services on earth combined for the first two decades of email. If email was still as annoying to use as it was pre AOL & Hotmail, the general public still wouldn't be using it today.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to Github.

As far as I'm aware, git isn't a standard. It's a single implementation.

There are definitions for the git protocol and packfile format. There are multiple implementations of Git: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git#Implementations

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And email was around long before AOL or Hotmail.

And nobody used it, relatively speaking vs the extraordinary scale that those email products made possible later. Hotmail had more users after 18 months than the total history of all email services on earth combined for the first two decades of email. If email was still as annoying to use as it was pre AOL & Hotmail, the general public still wouldn't be using it today.

How many people used any internet technology before there was even in Internet? But some people did use email.
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