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.
How do you subscribe from mastodon? I see the video.blender.org is their instance right?
Why ActivityPub is the future
21–30 of 187 posts
Re: Why ActivityPub is the future
#22ActivityPub is built by the W3C and therefore relies on Web related technologies (lost of HTTP and JSON exchanged) :) Does this scale properly and how does it compare to existing solutions like XMPP Pubsub ( https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html ) that is basically built to deliver content, in real-time (trough TCP sockets) and can handle thousands (millions?) of delivered packets per seconds? I'm building a fede…
current-gen AP servers do have an implicit dependency on HTTP and DNS. i've spoken with several people about creating a proof-of-concept AP server that supports gossip-based replication and a few other ssb-inspired features.
Re: Why ActivityPub is the future
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the thread: >I don't expect any major changes are needed for compliance, which is why it's been pretty low priority. it's just a matter of getting a document together that better informs admins. Mastodon has all the features needed for compliance, and does not collect or store any data that's not for its primary purpose.
Does that mean that in ActivityPub, I can't share messages with a restricted group of people?
edit: I didn't see that this was in the context of GDPR.
Re: Why ActivityPub is the future
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does that mean that in ActivityPub, I can't share messages with a restricted group of people?
You can do DMs, but it's possible for admins with sufficient access on each recipient's instance to read them. edit: I didn't see that this was in the context of GDPR.
Also, doesn't ActivityPub allow closed groups?
Re: Why ActivityPub is the future
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the thread: >I don't expect any major changes are needed for compliance, which is why it's been pretty low priority. it's just a matter of getting a document together that better informs admins. Mastodon has all the features needed for compliance, and does not collect or store any data that's not for its primary purpose.
Does that mean that in ActivityPub, I can't share messages with a restricted group of people?
Re: Why ActivityPub is the future
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can do DMs, but it's possible for admins with sufficient access on each recipient's instance to read them. edit: I didn't see that this was in the context of GDPR.
Ok, that sounds like they don't comply with the GDPR then. Also, doesn't ActivityPub allow closed groups?
Re: Why ActivityPub is the future
#27The 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…
Re: Why ActivityPub is the future
#28>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?
It would and it has. In Mastodon-speak, this is called an "extinction event", and I have seen a few of those. Mastodon, however, has already implemented take-out feature where you can download all of your data at any time, including your friend list. It's not perfect, because although you can keep your followee list, your followers don't have an automatic way of knowing where your new presence may have moved to. Also…
Re: Why ActivityPub is the future
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does that mean that in ActivityPub, I can't share messages with a restricted group of people?
You can do DMs, but it's possible for admins with sufficient access on each recipient's instance to read them. edit: I didn't see that this was in the context of GDPR.
Re: Why ActivityPub is the future
#30>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?
It would and it has. In Mastodon-speak, this is called an "extinction event", and I have seen a few of those. Mastodon, however, has already implemented take-out feature where you can download all of your data at any time, including your friend list. It's not perfect, because although you can keep your followee list, your followers don't have an automatic way of knowing where your new presence may have moved to. Also…
Couldn't Keybase.io solve this? It could track your identities on these servers, and it would exist outside of any instances or federation, but be the source of identity that would go along with any federated instances you are a part of