When #Bluesky says "Protocols, not platforms", they intent two things:
Grabbing people's attention by telling them what they want to hear.
Presenting the AT Protocol as an alternative to #ActivityPub to capitalize on the current hype around #Mastodon, the #Fediverse and decentralized social media in general.
The two protocols are not equal solutions for the same problem and, in fact, AT is not even a (communication) protocol to begin with.
YSK: When making posts on Lemmy/Kbin always put at the end some hashtags related to your post topic.
So users from Mastodon and Pixelfed can interact with your post without even need to use their Lemmy/Kbin account or learn about "how to use the ActivityPub".
This also helps to have more content avaliable across the Fediverse due to better discoverability.
You can't just distribute them across instances the way normal actors do. Whichever server hosts @technology or @technology is going to get HOSED on the regular.
At the State of the Word address this week, Matt Mullenweg was asked about support for the plugin, and he commented that less than 5,000 sites had installed it. So he wasn't sure how interested people are in it.
So... if you have a WP site, let's start installing that plugin and making more sites available via ActivityPub! 😀
Former CEO of Twitter wanted to build a social protocol no-one can control, like SMTP or HTTP for social media. Bluesky’s ATProto was supposed to be an open source protocol that Twitter could eventually utilize, but then Musk happened and Bluesky started taking it to the wrong direction and everything fell apart in Dorsey’s mind.
A very revealing interview. I now see even more future in W3C’s ActivityPub.
If the source code version control history is to be trusted, I started developing snac (a simple, minimalistic #ActivityPub instance server written in C) exactly one year ago (Sept 19th).
It was not my first experience with ActivityPub: I had built a prototype version in Python some months before (hence the "2" in the snac2 repository name), and back in 2019 I made some partial implementation for an unrelated (and now forgotten) blog project, so the protocol was not totally new to me.
These are my thoughts about one year of development.
Why did I start it? Because I read somewhere about the (still baffling to me) humoungous requirements of a basic #Mastodon installation. I read a lot of people affirming that was the bare minimum: "it CAN'T be done with less resources". But I've always seen it as a glorified short message application and challenged myself to write a feature-complete #Fediverse instance with the following goals: keeping it small, simple, easily deployed, and lacking the bloat software tendencies of modern times.
Did it come out as expected? not totally sure, but probably yes. I even implemented more things that I originally planned (I initially said a big NO to myself regarding adding Mastodon API support, but finally did it and it works mostly well). The program is still somewhat small (a stripped binary of less that 300k probably counts). The no-database, no-cookies, no-javascript absolute rules still apply. I'm fine with the (opinionated) web UI that shows conversations as threaded trees instead of the plain, dull stream of posts that Mastodon or Twitter show. It cooperates pretty well with the always growing ecosystem of ActivityPub applications.
Was the time and effort worth it? On this, I'm not sure. I'm old and depressed and unemployed, so developing snac has kept my brain busy and entertained for a little while. But it has been more work that I expected: the ActivityPub specification is a bit diffuse in some areas, so every implementation does some things a bit different and many corner cases had to be implemented; some parts (specifically, the Mastodon API) have been very tedious to implement and test; and also, helping users debugging remote systems is difficult and very stressing for me. Fortunately, some fellow developers have helped me and I'm immensely thankful to them.
Has it been a success? I'm pretty sure about this: no. I thought that the small footprint, the lack of moving parts and the feature set would be attractive to a large base of users, but this has not been the case. Perhaps I've been unable to reach the neccessary potential users for it to reach some critical mass (a failure of the PR department 😆). Perhaps what I consider interesting features (minimalism, footprint, the web UI concept, Mastodon API compatibility, etc.) are not that valuable for most. Perhaps people disregard it just because it's not Mastodon. Perhaps there are errors and crashes that I'm not aware of. Perhaps snac is rubbish and I'm unable to see it. The reality is that snac is a niche and unknown part of the Fediverse ecosystem and there is no sign that the user base will grow from the current small fistful of deployments out there.
What about the future? I'm also not sure. Apart from some pending bugfixes and wishlist items mentioned in the TODO file, I've implemented all the features I initially expected and then many more, so I consider snac a finished program. New bugs will happen, that's for sure. New ActivityPub applications will show out there and, if experience tells me anything, they will all have slightly different protocol interpretations that will need some code tuning on my part. Development will continue; snac is a maintained program. But big changes will probably not happen anymore.
Loops is a new platform for sharing short videos, and it's open source + federated using #ActivityPub
We're really excited to share this sneak peek that showcases the new onboarding flow and discovery features (Connect Mastodon) and look forward to the upcoming beta release!
Another example of how the flexibility in #ActivityPub is so high it makes it hard to work with: parser edition. Again, this is me thinking out loud while I figure out how to solve problems in my own project.
For this, we'll look at Collection and OrderedCollection.
Collection is an object to wrap, as one might expect, collections of objects.
It's designed to allow paging through collections, which is a hard problem in and of itself, using a forward and backwards cursor.
reading the #activitypub "standard" has changed my mind on whether for example #threads implementing it would be a good thing. i think it might break the #fediverse.
the standard is so open and undefined that it relies on de-facto implementation details springing from the larger implementations. a big actor with endless resources could easily dominate it.
One of the challenges that I'm working on is empowering people with consumer-class internet access (i.e., dynamic addresses) to run their own Fediverse servers. The Publish/Publisher and websocket components I've added to #SofaPub move in that direction.
This allows someone with broad connectivity to re-publish connections from users who are more limited.
da das #Fediverse immer noch am wachsen ist und es jetzt wohl gerade größere Wanderungsbewegungen weg von #Reddit zu #Lemmy und dem Fork #kbin gibt, hier mal ein aktualisiertes Übersichtsdiagramm um zu zeigen, dass das Fediverse nicht nur aus #Mastodon besteht.
Erst mal vielen Dank an @kuketzblog und @imke für das erstellen des Diagramms.
Dann gibt es natürlich auch noch ein paar Links zu Seiten auf denen man sich einen Überblick über das Fediverse verschaffen kann:
Today we're taking another important step in our journey to fully federate Flipboard.
This morning we federated 1,000 Flipboard Magazines curated by the publishers we have been testing federation with in addition to 20 new publishers we are federating today. These include magazines like Adventure Travel by Outside, Eater DC by Eater, Explore NYC by Thrillist, Throwbacks by SPIN, and Climate Tech by Bloomberg.
Flipboard Magazines are a simple way to curate articles, images, videos and podcasts into a thematic feed. This powerful curation tool has been at the heart of Flipboard since 2012 with millions of magazines curated since about recipes, road trips, architecture, books, tech trends and so much more.
Federated magazines become native #ActivityPub feeds and can be followed by anyone on Mastodon. For example, check out my Following the Fediverse magazine @following
I believe that thoughtfully curated feeds have the power to make social media a lot more effective and inspiring so I'm excited to bring millions of these magazines to the #Fediverse as we federate all public curators in the next few weeks.
Check out my Medium post for more details along with a list of some of the great magazines we federated today.
OK, I've got a question for #ActivityPub developers. I'm working on an extended example for the O'Reilly Media book I'm writing, focusing on the federation protocol. I'm going to cover using HTTP Signature, handling and sending the important set of Activity types defined in the AP spec (Follow, Create, Add, ...).
Any computer program can be designed to run from a single file if you architect it wrong enough! I wanted to create the simplest possible Fediverse server which can be used as an educational tool to show how ActivityPub / Mastodon works. The design goals were: Upload a single PHP file to the server. No […]
In December, we started to federate the accounts of some Flipboard publishers and in February, we introduced Magazines to the fediverse. Now, we’re taking two important steps: federating the accounts of 400 creators and expert curators; and enabling two-way communication so that new followers and fediverse activity are visible and actionable in the Flipboard app.
To learn more about this, take a look at our blogpost:
Thanks so much to everyone who has given feedback on what we’ve done so far. We welcome your thoughts and comments as we continue on our journey to fully federate Flipboard.