The network effect for #ActivityPub is gaining some serious momentum right now. As more services adopt the protocol, more people, more communities and more content are added to the network making it increasingly more valuable for everyone. This will only accelerate in the coming months as Threads, Wordpress, Tumblr, Flipboard and others federate.
We're still in early innings but there's no way to put this genie back in the bottle. The open social Web / the #Fediverse is going to be huge.
@nunesdennis@evan Our plan is to fully federate in the coming months so that anyone in the Fediverse can follow and engage with anyone curating on Flipboard and anyone on Flipboard can follow and engage with any public account in the Fediverse.
This is excellent news Mike. Following your original announcement many months ago, I actually thought this was the case and created a clipboard about for myself, lolz.
It took a bit, but eventually I figured out that such integration would need to wait for a later day.
Sounds good, but what's the plan for handling the fallout of Meta slurping in the whole social graph of Mastodon and using it for their own nefarious purposes?
@NatureMC@albertcardona On one hand, that's the beauty of the #fediverse. People are free to federate or de-federate based on what they value and the kind of communities they want to participate in.
I would just caution that automatically walling entire groups of people off from each other out of fear could be self defeating for the Fediverse. There are many tools that can be used to prevent bad actors and bad behavior when it's seen. And more can be built to effectively federate moderation.
@mike@NatureMC@albertcardona The irony here is that rando Mastodon instances (or really anything that supports AP) actually pose a much bigger problem for Meta via Threads than the reverse.
@albertcardona@mike@NatureMC Federation is a two-way street. Now content from any Mastodon instance, for example, is visible to Threads’ users. The amount of trust and safety work those instances’ mods do is…let’s say it varies widely. Meta has to figure out how to deal with CSAM, scams, and disinformation coming from sources it doesn’t control, or have a ton of information about.
Thanks. But isn't it easy to let other instances see your server's posts but hide any outside replies by outside users? This way Threads would act as broadcaster and encourage outsiders to join it in order to participate of the conversation–all the while collecting the social graph from the outside servers.
Meta can see any public posts anyway, because they are public: all they need is a web crawler, which they have.
One of the dangers in my view is the extra costs of federating with Threads, which can make running small instances unaffordable, and promote consolidation of the user base into large instances.
Thankfully, entire instances can be blocked, and I anticipate that many will block threads.net as the means to block not only the shenanigans from Meta but also to survive as a small community and on a limited budget for running the server.
Even individual users can block entire instances in their Preferences, under "Import and Export", "Import" tab, choosing "Domain block list" as the type of CSV file to upload – and all the file needs to contain is "threads.net" without quotes.
Given that such goals as stated are at best orthogonal, and many plainly opposed to Meta's business model, I don't share the reasons for optimism. Time will tell, and hopefully if the outcome is negative, communities will be able to recover. @scribandotcom@mike
@mike Question: If corporations implement Activity Pub, does that mean they are providing “Algorithms" to filter the home feed according to user signals (and their advertisers “legitimate" interests)?
@kajkandler ActivityPub implementations are independent from whether algorithms are used or not. And anyone can implement ActivityPub however they choose.
@kajkandler This is a really good question because ActivityPub is similar to RSS with two really important differences. 1) ActivityPub is two way. While RSS broadcasts content it does not have a way to know if someone liked, boosted or commented on that content. 2) RSS forms a connection between a blog and an RSS app. ActivityPub forms a follow connection between an account and another account. This means if you move from one reader app to another the connection is maintained.
The Fediverse has lived under three protocols: OpenMicroBlogging (XMPP-based, 2008), OStatus (2009-2017), ActivityPub (2018–).
OStatus was indeed built on something very similar to RSS, it was Atom plus a few more protocols to handle push, comments and other things.
The reason OStatus was abandoned was that the stack of protocols was difficult to implement and difficult to extend. ActivityPub was intended to improve on it, and judging from the number of implementations, it seems it did.
@clacke@mike@kajkandler was OpenMicroBlogging really the start? That came out of the OpenSocial project that was sorta associated with MySpace and Orkut/Google if I remember right?
@liaizon OpenMicroBlogging was created for laconi.ca and only ever implemented by laconi.ca and a shortlived project OpenMicroBlogger that wanted to federate. Google and friends were not involved.
> When I first designed StatusNet in the Spring of 2008, there were no distributed social networking protocols. So, I made one up. OpenMicroBlogging (OMB) 0.1 [ . . . ]
"We wanted more sites to implement these protocols so the network becomes even more valuable. Some parts have been implemented already by sites like Google Buzz, LiveJournal, WordPress.com, and Tumblr." - @evan
I guess Tumblr and Wordpress have been working on joining the fediverse for 13 years!
@liaizon@clacke@mike@kajkandler yes, if I remember correctly, Tumblr and WordPress both supported PubSubHubbub. We could follow accounts there but not reply.
@liaizon@clacke@mike@kajkandler Here's my best guess: not enough client software used it (just StatusNet and Buzz and Cliqset), so it wasn't valuable for publishers. Without support for feedback through Salmon, it was one-way syndication. And it was hard to find and subscribe to feeds. Our clients made you find the right Tumblr URL, instead of saying "fred179 on Tumblr". My company went out of business around 2013, so that didn't help, either.
"Now the Cliqset FeedProxy tool will normalize feeds from more than 70 other services into new feeds in the ActivityStreams format. It may just be an initial inroad to interoperability between these networks, provided by a 3rd party and not yet extensively used – but it’s an important step none the less." https://readwrite.com/cliqset_activity_streams_api/
@liaizon@clacke@mike@kajkandler I think we also had a real underground of open social web hackers spread throughout the tech world for about a decade between 2005 and 2015. They'd advocate for standards like OpenID and OAuth internally. Today, I think that network has been frayed.
"Facebook, MySpace, Netflix and other services are already making user data available in ActivityStreams format, but there are far more social networks that don’t." -2009 oh how far away that seems
@clacke@mike@kajkandler I should point out that @benwerd designed the first social network standard for the Elgg project. It was more around data portability, but it could represent your social graph and content. I think the intent was to eventually connect live sites, but it never happened afaik
@kajkandler@mike you can get a lot of this out of RSS, using RSSCloud for push, Pingback or something similar for responses. The only way I know to do private distribution with RSS is with secret feed URLs. For extensible content, just need to define the RSS extension elements. I think there was some work with Activity Streams and RSS in the first versions. @davew probably could sketch out a good architecture for it.
Particularly thrilled by the prospect of being able to “take my followers” with me in case I ever decide to migrate instances… I’m still traumatized over the demise of the bird site and the fact it’s “holding hostage” my followers and posts now that I no longer use it (14+ years of activity gone up in smoke) 💨
@mike I wish you were right, but experience shows me that capitalism will surely find a way to fuck all of this up. Fediverse will peak and then onto the Next Big Thing
@mike
My concern is -- can Meta use this linkage to scrape all of my Mastodon activity? (We didn't think they could scrape us before the Cambridge Analytica scandal either.)
@mitchmarq42xyz Based on what I can see, I think it's pretty clear that both Threads and Tumblr are serious about federating. It may happen in stages because it's a lot of work to federate an existing service in a useful way that makes sense for both the service's existing users as well as for users in the Fediverse.
@mike Now all we need are some plugin standards and a slightly more evolved mastodon API (or successor) to make true interoperability a thing. Oh, yes, and a bulletproof Nazi filter, too.
@shoq@mike mmm.. None of those large corporate services will have that. I think there's a fair chance that large portions of the mastodon network will block the meta-owned services..
@mike I think the "missing link" is actually getting those embedded posts made, like in a blog or news report or even on other social media, where you literally can drag a twitter widget into your wordpress page and you're done. There needs to be a way you can
Drag and drop a mastodon post
Somehow make a way to automatically link their instance user to the instance where the post was made. So you can just "reply" without any back and forth.
Once that's in place, I think you'll find more and more people will use it instead of Twitter, simply because a post on Mastodon from a news agency or a person is more likely to be legit and well thought out. Users here have some expectations that simply don't exist on Twitter.
to set up an instance instead of using twitter and facebook, but they didn't seem to understand. I tried to explain that their specialty is Accessibility and mastodon is like designed for that. And how they could own the instance entirely and use it for their chats and commentary, etc... but... deaf ears.
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