The #ActivityPub community both overestimates and underestimates it's actual power currently.
E.g Sitting in a corner and threatening not to federate with new apps/instances is not very powerful.
E.g. Recognizing that #ActivityPub is uniquely well positioned to evolve into the single, trusted, comprehensive protocol apps use to send human activity-related messages is very, very powerful.
I'm interested in exploring development of AT Protocol client apps, but have no access to BlueSky yet (running my own isolated server not really helpful here either).
If anyone does have a spare invite that be greatly appreciated! #bluesky
I do not run an instance, so I think the pool is not for me. However, I'll say that I definitely would quit an instance which didn't block Meta for harvesting my data
I do think it's a victory because in the end, the fediverse will always have the means to not federate with #meta but the fact such big player adopt the protocol is going to bring a furry of other actors to potentially adopt the protocol, it's like "email" being adopted, yes some emails providers are bad but the internet won by having a common protocol for one to one interaction. The same can happen for #activitypub!
I bring impressions and takes from 12 hours occasionally glancing at #bluesky social and reading about the tech
The #federation concept and approach to personal data / profile portability and security is neat. I’ll be interested to see how that progresses in practice over the next months and year, and how much cross pollination there ends up being between #fedi / #activitypub and #bsky / #atproto
And then, unfortunately, at the moment there’s an.. oddly designed feature that enables some people to be total sleezeballs and rack up thousands / 10s of thousands of follows (yes! I saw an account with >40k follows!), in what I can only guess is a vain attempt at creating an influence-y social fiefdom early in the vacuum with few heavy hitters. I find it really distasteful and don’t plan on touching bsky until there’s a mitigation.
Call me a romantic, but I like to feel like I’m in a small community and sorta get to “know” the people following me? And have others discover me organically?
If #bluesky and the #atprotocol fail to fulfill their promises, I predict there will be another. And another after that one. All funded and pushed by rich bastards with lots of connections. And we little people who have pushed the #fediverse for years will all be expected to give them our attention and not be critical. All while this confusion slows adoption of #ActivityPub by journalists and governments and developers and the decentralization moment passes yet again.
YouTube integration with ActivityPub would really enhance my experience. Mostly because the UX currently sucks.
I'd like to follow an address at youtube.com that posted for each video a subscribed channel published.
I think a dedicated address that published the community posts from my subscriptions would be very useful. Heck, just having a few RSS feeds could help.
I don't think people are realising the danger the Fediverse is in.
The only thing stopping corporations and VCs taking over this place is that the Fediverse is spread out on many different servers, which makes it very difficult to purchase.
If most of the Fediverse ends up on mastodon.social, which is now a strong possibility, there will be nothing to stop most of it being sold to Musk or Zuckerberg or whoever.
The bigger mastodon.social becomes, the more likely a buyout is to happen.
On top of that, #Mastodon deliberately breaks #ActivityPub specs, and refuses to fix that. It can already be observed that, instead of forcing Mastodon to be interoperable, other projects start breaking their implementations to please Mastodon instead due to its market power.
When something is lacking in Mastodon, people assume it is the Fediverse / ActivityPub that is lacking. That is like saying chicken is the worst food because you've tasted McDonald's chicken, when there #Jollibee's #ChickenJoy is tastier and juicier.
There are now even people who praise a non-fediverse network based on those false assumptions above. They have time to research a non-fediverse network, but doesn't have the time to do their due diligence about the Fediverse; all because they falsely assumed they've seen everything.
It's like moving to a new country, settling in a new home, exploring their new neighbourhood, and then assumed that village they're in is a representation of the entire country.
If we can make people see, and make people explore their own “city” and “country”, then maybe, just maybe, the distribution of people in the fediverse will start to balance between the different forks, projects, and instances. It won't happen overnight, but maybe we can plant the seeds.
I'm thinking that Task Management is a typical candidate for a standard #ActivityPub vocabulary extension to be created for it. One would even expect a well-known ontology to be available for the purpose.
In any case then it could become a #FEP and until that time you might add an issue to the new fediverse-ideas repo to track this.
I don’t fully agree with your prognosis, but the excessive hosting costs are undeniable and must be resolved sooner rather than later.
One thing about your post is unclear to me: Are you still hopeful about the future of #ActivityPub and the #fediverse at large?
Faster implementations like #Akkoma and #gotosocial are coming along. I’m especially excited about Kitsune by @0x0 because of its performance and ease of setup.
Bit of a long shot, but could my good mastodon follower folk give me some boosts?
I'm starting work on a documentary podcast series about the future of space; renewable/sustainable technologies, commercialism in the sector and the public's perception of it all.
I'm hoping to connect with people who know space to complement my client's contacts, so any signal boosting would be appreciated!
@drewtoynbee while you're at it, you might want to consider using #castopod the #activitypub enabled podcasting application so people on the #fediverse can follow you from right here, while still publishing to all the usual places but without being tied into a specific service.