The ActivityPub #fediverse we've built couldn't have happened with an invite-only federation protocol. The only way to build up enough fedizens (beyond true believers like me) to make the network useful and attractive, was to make joining it as frictionless as possible. The network only exchanges messages online, so the potential for harm is limited, and mute/block tools are adequate to mitigate abuse.
But other types of social web networks, such as time-exchange, ride-sharing or couch surfing networks, require more trust to work and would work better with invite-only federation.
Two sites offering the same service both increase their network effect if they federate. So unless they meter and charge for making connections as a revenue model (in which case they're doomed because, as per the Shirky principle, people hate microPayments), there's only one thing that might stop them.
That thing is Bad Actors on sites they federate with. Which could discourage people from using their own site, reducing their network effect as much or more than the federated relationships increase it. Because the potential for harm is so much higher in time-exchange or couch-surfing than in exchanging online messages, admins will want to vet their counterparts on another site before federating with it, not after. So invite-only federation makes sense here.
But is ActivityPub the best protocol for this? Considering it's more of a publishing protocol (hence the name) and would need to be significantly extended to cover invite-only federation, maybe not.
OTOH maybe now is the time to specify this, along with various other things currently missing from the AP spec (eg encryption of Direct Posts), and publish an updated version of AP? Before mass adoption makes protocol evolution even more complicated.
You can do the invitation out-of-band. Then, refuse activities that come from outside the network.
Also, "pub" refers to the publish-subscribe model, not to publishing data. Create, read, update and delete are four activities in the base vocabulary. But there's much more possible!
I did a talk at MozFest about using AP for dating apps. I think it's a great use case!
> Then, refuse activities that come from outside the network
Can you expand on this?
> I did a talk at MozFest about using AP for dating apps
Interesting you should mention that, I was thinking about how a federated dating apps could work while I was writing this string of posts. Is there a video of your talk online? I did a quick search on PeerTube and YewTu.be and couldn't find one.
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