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Why ActivityPub is the future

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Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#71

Post by amelius »

dane-pgp wrote: post #70
amelius wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if there was a well-maintained library that continuously scrapes a given user's Facebook account, and publishes it to AP?

Or we could go one better and use the GDPR's "data portability" requirement to force Facebook to effectively offer such an API: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/ A regulator / court would have to look at what is "technically feasible" for Facebook to implement, but given that there are multiple interoperating projects supporting ActivityPub (with much smaller resources than Facebook) I think it would be hard to argue…

To be honest, the only data I would want to export out of Facebook would be "events" (event name, time, location, description, rsvps, image/video data, comments). Would that also be possible using the GDPR directive?

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#72

Post by resu_nimda »

egypturnash wrote: post #68
_8j50 wrote: post #52

Let me just say this - both mastodon and activitypub are terrible names. I say that as a consumer not as an expert on anything. It's not a dealbreaker for me but platform popularity by the masses depends on color schemes and catchy names. I feel the same way about duckduckgo. Great products though.

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

"Twitter" and "tweet" sound very light and airy, almost musical; the theme of birds chirping lines up well with the format of seeing many short messages. "Twitter" is also largely an abstract word without much prior association.

A mastodon is a massive, hairy, smelly beast. It's also an extremely well known heavy metal band. For a Twitter clone it makes absolutely no sense. "Toot" as well has some existing connotations I wouldn't think they would want to associate with...just seems like a total non-starter.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#73

Post by defanor »

xj9 wrote: post #22
edhelas wrote: post #15

ActivityPub 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…

the AP spec is actually, a bit more abstract that you would expect. JSON and JSON-LD are required, but transport and actor resolution are not well specified. 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.

> JSON and JSON-LD are required

I find it rather disappointing (in ActivityStreams in general), by the way: on the first sight it's a part of the Semantic Web, but the approaches seem to differ from common ones, and the specification itself mentions that there's merely compatibility with one of the serialization formats (JSON-LD).

> but transport and actor resolution are not well specified

There's this for ActivityPub though: "Publicly facing content SHOULD use HTTPS URIs", and bits such as "The outbox accepts HTTP POST requests, with behaviour described in Client to Server Interactions", "clients MUST discover the URL of the actor's outbox from their profile and then MUST make an HTTP POST request". Authentication is not specified, but apparently de facto it will be some hacks on top of HTTP, too.

Putting those two together, it seems to mostly aim the popular nowadays combination of HTTP and JSON (just RDF/semweb-friendly).

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#74

Post by youseecomrade »

marknadal wrote: post #69
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone moved to gmail because it was free with a really high storage limit, which was unheard of at the time, and your email address would stay the same when your ISP changed. Hotmail was the hotness before that for pretty much the same reasons, minus the high storage limit.

@rainbowmverse @stcredzero @AnIdiotOnTheNet It is true that people switched to gmail because of what you say. I don't disagree. The point is that even with federated services, consumers will choose the most convenient one (and they should!). But that still means users are dependent upon that service. Imagine if Facebook became ActivityPub protocol compliant. They (like Google with Gmail) would have more resources to…

It's just EEE, they'll slowly introduce better features (with a colossal marketing budget) and after they gain the userbase back they'll close it down. Until I see a solution for this problem I'm not going to advocate/adopt any of these services.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#75

Post by CM30 »

fiatjaf wrote: post #37

Who's going to host thousands of petabytes of videos on behalf of others if not YouTube or a similar service?

Communities would host the stuff that's valuable to them. That's a lot more manageable than trying to host everything on YouTube, and would just lead to instances dedicated to various topics (games, TV, music, sports, etc). With federation, it won't matter that these videos are all hosted across dozens or hundreds/thousands of instances.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#76

Post by CM30 »

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…

Not really. It's just a return to the olden days of internet communities, when users controlled the sites they posted on and people found groups to talk to about things that interested them (rather than being stuck on a giant platform owned by a large corporation).

And it's probably better for society in general that communities work that way. You don't want millionaires and oorporations controlling discourse, and in many cases, there are groups and communities who simply physically cannot use the same platform (those on complete opposite sides of the political spectrum for example).

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#77

Post by ziftface »

skybrian wrote: post #53

Okay, it sounds plausible that it could be a good thing. But it seems that everything good on the Internet eventually gets weaponized by the bad guys, and these days it seems to happen faster than ever. So maybe we should talk about the downsides of ActivityPub?

Well the bad guys have shown that they can make as many fake accounts as they want on facebook/twitter. If anything, they're encouraged to do so. I don't see how a decentralized network would be any worse in that regard at least.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#78

Post by Kinrany »

skybrian wrote: post #53

Okay, it sounds plausible that it could be a good thing. But it seems that everything good on the Internet eventually gets weaponized by the bad guys, and these days it seems to happen faster than ever. So maybe we should talk about the downsides of ActivityPub?

This statement can be generalized to all of science and technology.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#79

Post by kovacs »

daveid wrote: post #55
_8j50 wrote: post #52

Let me just say this - both mastodon and activitypub are terrible names. I say that as a consumer not as an expert on anything. It's not a dealbreaker for me but platform popularity by the masses depends on color schemes and catchy names. I feel the same way about duckduckgo. Great products though.

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 at an ivy league school.

Greenfield - Maybe a reasonable name for the protocol that those apps can be built upon? "Ivy's built on the greenfield protocol"

Anyway, that's what I came up with in 10-15 minutes of brainstorming and I would pose that those are much easier, approachable, and just better names than these others that simply don't elicit any sort of emotion (or negative ones).

Names matter, a lot. You need to be able to tell a story that moves people to action. That's what marketing folks do that adds a ton of value. Most open source projects don't have marketing folks so... :-)

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#80

Post by aqsalose »

xez wrote: post #5

>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?

>If Twitter shuts down, you’ll lose your followers.

Maybe my way of using Twitter is particularly weird, but I'd be more disappointed if I'd lose the thematic lists of interesting Twitter accounts that I have collected over several years at this point than if I'd lose my followers.

The above is also the main reason my pasts attempts to switch from Twitter to Mastodon have failed. There's quite much people and content in the Fediverse now, but still not enough that matches my particular combination of interests.

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