What drew you to ActivityPub?
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This question was asked by [email protected] on Dot Social's latest episode about the blogosphere on Fedi.
[email protected]: "we wanted to connect Ghost blogs to each other, but then we discovered ActivityPub"
[email protected]: "we wanted to connect WordPress blogs to each other, and ActivityPub has been the most successful attempt"
[paraphrased for brevity]
Did you catch the subtext? Both those answers, and my own answer with NodeBB contain the same seed idea... that we originally wanted to connect our software with itself only. We went through years of building a company and vying for profitability that it never occurred to us to work towards cross compatibility with anyone besides out own software.
Then ActivityPub came along and quite literally expanded the potential for the entire endeavour a hundred-fold, because not only are you connecting your own software to each other, but every other ActivityPub enabled software in existence. Blogs, microblogs, forums, image boards, etc. all with a built-in user base ready from the get-go.
It's no wonder that after discovering AP, it becomes the protocol to utilise.
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The problem with starting a new social media app is the chicken and egg thing where people need content (and other people) and content only exists if there are people. Network effects. ActivityPub avoids that hurdle.
So that makes it possible to enter the game with much less capital. That's nice but personally I'm here for the billionaire-resistant nature of it and the better moderation.
- No one can 'do a Musk' to Mastodon and if they did everyone would just fork it and defederate from his instance.
- Without an advertising-based business model we don't need to encourage controversy and nurture dickheads, we can just ban them. Same goes for fake news sources.
We have the potential to create something far more human and revolutionary than any of the ad-based mainstream platforms.
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My story is a bit different. I've made a conscious choice over the years to maintain a user PoV, by being a tester, tech ethicist and evangelist, rather than a software dev or server admin. So AP kind of came to me, because I was already using the fediverse when it came into being. As it happens, I shifted from an EU-based GNU social service that shut down, to a locally run Mastodon service, around the same time it was adding AP support on top of its existing OStatus federation.
But to answer the deeper question about what drew me to the fediverse, what @rimu1 said; network effects.
I've started and supported a lot of anti-corporate online projects over the years. Getting a critical mass of people to create yet another account was always a major obstacle. I could see the benefits of an open federation of disparate services in email, and to a lesser extent Jabber (XMPP). So as soon as I saw projects like Identi.ca and Diaspora applying that concept to social media, I could see the potential.
After more than a decade of pushing this concept uphill with a pointed stick, it's very exciting to see it start to take off in the wider open source dev world, and beyond
-
The problem with starting a new social media app is the chicken and egg thing where people need content (and other people) and content only exists if there are people. Network effects. ActivityPub avoids that hurdle.
So that makes it possible to enter the game with much less capital. That's nice but personally I'm here for the billionaire-resistant nature of it and the better moderation.
- No one can 'do a Musk' to Mastodon and if they did everyone would just fork it and defederate from his instance.
- Without an advertising-based business model we don't need to encourage controversy and nurture dickheads, we can just ban them. Same goes for fake news sources.
We have the potential to create something far more human and revolutionary than any of the ad-based mainstream platforms.
> We have the potential to create something far more human and revolutionary than any of the ad-based mainstream platforms.
Right on! That's the refrain I hear a lot from people who discover ActivityPub and then build software for it.
Building something out of principle is a wonderful approach. I hope someday were in a position so that you don't have to sacrifice principles to make money.
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My story is a bit different. I've made a conscious choice over the years to maintain a user PoV, by being a tester, tech ethicist and evangelist, rather than a software dev or server admin. So AP kind of came to me, because I was already using the fediverse when it came into being. As it happens, I shifted from an EU-based GNU social service that shut down, to a locally run Mastodon service, around the same time it was adding AP support on top of its existing OStatus federation.
But to answer the deeper question about what drew me to the fediverse, what @rimu1 said; network effects.
I've started and supported a lot of anti-corporate online projects over the years. Getting a critical mass of people to create yet another account was always a major obstacle. I could see the benefits of an open federation of disparate services in email, and to a lesser extent Jabber (XMPP). So as soon as I saw projects like Identi.ca and Diaspora applying that concept to social media, I could see the potential.
After more than a decade of pushing this concept uphill with a pointed stick, it's very exciting to see it start to take off in the wider open source dev world, and beyond
> Getting a critical mass of people to create yet another account was always a major obstacle.
I see and have experienced this effect time and time again, and we're getting closer and closer to the point where the protocol implementations can abstract away the messy bits.
Gaining critical mass among devs is the first step!
