ActivityPub: a federated social web standard

https://indieweb.org/Vouch (for Webmention, which is a much simpler spec, already a W3C Recommendation, and deserves more hype)

Vouch is a pretty clever scheme — as the sender, you include a link to someone who linked to you, who the receiver also linked to. So your server can detect, essentially, "randos" — unknown sites that might be spam, harassment, or good replies from someone who found your site accidentally.

I haven't yet implemented Vouch in my server software https://github.com/myfreeweb/sweetroll but my idea is to eventually have a settings switch that determines what to do with mentions from randos — reject, require pre-moderation or accept. Depending on your situation you'll be able to change it — e.g. set it to pre-moderation when some spam appears, or set to reject when a harassment campaign attacks you.

While, I'm W3C staff contact for the working group now, I wasn't involved as staff when the group started, so I'm not sure exactly what happened. By W3C practice, ever member organization is consulted on every new thing we do, though, so Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc were informed and asked for input and invited to participate. The public is also informed, although I don't know how much people pay attention to W3C news, and the framing might not have caught the right people's attention: https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/3958. I still have a hard time understanding what that announcement is talking about.

In any case, as other people have said, perhaps these companies didn't see the business case to participate. This baffles me a little. I can see why as the market leader Facebook wouldn't necessarily benefit financially from helping the effort, but if I were them, I'd want to at least have someone in the room, paying attention. And if I were anyone else, I'd probably see the value in teaming up and helping. But that's not what happened, so I'm clearly wrong about something. It's possible they just thought the problem was too hard and the group would never succeed, so it wasn't worth paying it any attention. My sense is it's done well enough that with more help it might have done great. But it was touch and go at many points, and I personally thought it would go nowhere until our Paris meeting, about 8 months in. It's also possible they just didn't have anyone senior enough to handle the job who had any desire to do it.

And yes, OpenSocial were one of the big motivators for this work starting at W3C (as the news announcement says). But, aside from IBM, they never actually showed up in the group. Someday, I'd like to understand that, too.

WebSub literally does the same thing, except ActivityPub cuts away the middle layers, removing some redundancy on the way. It makes ActivityPub less of a protocol hodge-podge than OStatus, which has the same drawbacks and benefits as any introduction of a dependency into a protocol or software.

In general, it would be interesting to see to what degree people manage to build bridges between the IndieWeb and the ActivityPub web.

MicroPub and ActivityPub grew out of the same working group, because the two camps couldn't find shared ground.

I don't know if they managed to get a decent mapping between ActivityStreams2 and Microformats2 at least.