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What is ActivityPub, and how will it change the internet?

jeremydormitzer.com

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Re: What is ActivityPub, and how will it change the internet?

#11

Post by jdormit »

gizzlon wrote: post #9

So.. I like this direction, but haven't the "decentralized social network" been tried a few times already? What different this time?

To be honest, the main difference is that the public is getting slightly more disillusioned with centralized social media. Mastodon (an ActivityPub-compliant Twitter clone) has gotten a huge influx of new users in recent months due to a bunch of PR missteps by Twitter.

I will admit that the post was intentionally hyperbolic, though. AP doesn't have nearly the adoption threshold it would need to be a serious contender in the social media space. I'm hoping that through articles like these we can spread the word and drive adoption.

But yeah, this has been tried before and didn't really take off. I think the fundamental problem is that it's just way more lucrative to have a centralized social network than a decentralized/federated one. But as I alluded in the post, I think there is a way to build a profitable business on ActivityPub, and that's what it's going to take to make AP mainstream.

Re: What is ActivityPub, and how will it change the internet?

#12

Post by jdormit »

joshstrange wrote: post #10
jdormit wrote: post #4

Haha, didn't expect my blog to ever get to the front page of HN and my $5/month DO droplet couldn't keep up. I resized it and now I'm putting Cloudflare in front of it, so hopefully it will stay up now.

You might want to look into caching (either at the wordpress or nginx level). I have a $5 DO and it can handle a good bit of traffic before being hugged to death. Now I do use Ghost as my blogging platform but I haven't enabled anything special in ghost for caching, I did it all in nginx.

Thanks! Yeah, I haven't looked into any sort of performance optimizations. Better late than never, I suppose.

Re: What is ActivityPub, and how will it change the internet?

#14

Post by ChristianBundy »

amelius wrote: post #13

They list a whole bunch of services built on top of AP, except for events. Please give me decentralized events (including the rsvp option), and I might be able to leave Facebook.

Not ActivityPub, but this has been implemented in with Scuttlebutt[0] with availability polls to decide when to schedule an event, RSVP options, and it's all done completely P2P with no "instances" required to act as central servers.

[0]: http://scuttlebutt.nz/

Re: What is ActivityPub, and how will it change the internet?

#15

Post by Vendan »

ChristianBundy wrote: post #14
amelius wrote: post #13

They list a whole bunch of services built on top of AP, except for events. Please give me decentralized events (including the rsvp option), and I might be able to leave Facebook.

Not ActivityPub, but this has been implemented in with Scuttlebutt[0] with availability polls to decide when to schedule an event, RSVP options, and it's all done completely P2P with no "instances" required to act as central servers. [0]: http://scuttlebutt.nz/

Scuttlebutt has a lot of work to do before I'll consider it as even approaching usable, mostly to do with the protocol layer. It works great for very small (<1000 member) communities, but it scales extremely poorly, and the protocols are poorly designed and cumbersome to work with.

Re: What is ActivityPub, and how will it change the internet?

#16

Post by riffic »

gizzlon wrote: post #9

So.. I like this direction, but haven't the "decentralized social network" been tried a few times already? What different this time?

ActivityPub is a W3C recommendation[1], which is further along in maturity than previous open protocols.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web_Consortium#Spec...

Re: What is ActivityPub, and how will it change the internet?

#17

Post by mikedilger »

What could help Mastodon grow significantly is if the moderation on a large number of instances was toned down a bit. What happened to Wil Wheaton was a bit nuts. And conservative opinions are often banned due to being agressively labelled as hate or racist when they are usually not technically so. Most people don't want to be part of a social justice warrior authoritarian "fall in line or we will ban you" community.

Sure, people could set up their own instance. Federation is awesome. But if almost all other instances don't talk to them, they have to build a community from scratch, and it's usually not worth it.

Re: What is ActivityPub, and how will it change the internet?

#18

Post by jklinger410 »

mikedilger wrote: post #17

What could help Mastodon grow significantly is if the moderation on a large number of instances was toned down a bit. What happened to Wil Wheaton was a bit nuts. And conservative opinions are often banned due to being agressively labelled as hate or racist when they are usually not technically so. Most people don't want to be part of a social justice warrior authoritarian "fall in line or we will ban you" community.…

For those who were unaware what happened to Wil (http://wilwheaton.net/2018/08/the-world-is-a-terrible-place-...)

Re: What is ActivityPub, and how will it change the internet?

#19

Post by toofy »

mikedilger wrote: post #17

What could help Mastodon grow significantly is if the moderation on a large number of instances was toned down a bit. What happened to Wil Wheaton was a bit nuts. And conservative opinions are often banned due to being agressively labelled as hate or racist when they are usually not technically so. Most people don't want to be part of a social justice warrior authoritarian "fall in line or we will ban you" community.…

I’m not sure this is really an issue when we consider that there are gobs and gobs of completely unmoderated instances.

You might be correct, but considering there are so many totally unmoderated instances and that anyone can easily attach their own instance to the network and have the exact level of moderation they deem appropriate for their community, im guessing it’s really just a matter of getting people away from Twitter, and the concern I hear about by far the most often is the fact that you can’t bring your followers with you if you choose to change instances.

Re: What is ActivityPub, and how will it change the internet?

#20

Post by canhascodez »

stephengillie wrote: post #5

The site is currently inaccessible, possibly due to being "hugged to death". Would ActivityPub be able to solve this issue?

That's probably a better term, but I kinda miss when that was known as "slashdotting" or the "Slashdot Effect".
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