I realize it's not a popular topic around here, but I fear there's a storm coming if this catches. No matter how much we true believers see ActivityPub as the best approach to global social media, it does have a number of issues, as we know. Most of the public doesn't care about the big picture. They never really have.
Dorsey-backed Twitter alternative Bluesky hits Android .
@shoq DARPA definitely funded development but I think enterprises settled on ethernet-TCP/IP because of their flexible designs, we have that with #ActivityPub we just need to flesh some stuff (e.g. identity 😜, scaled moderation) out.
🤯 First thing that blows my mind is how wicked #Calkey looks compared to vanilla #Mastodon
🤯 Second thing is that I can even follow someone on a such a different looking app with different features, directly from my existing Mastodon.
🤔 Third thing: I wonder whether its possible to have the same Mastodon #activitypub handle but access it through a different app like Calkey on the same server??
#ElonMusk thought he could save #Twitter, but it turns out he may have saved the idea of an open social internet instead. When Musk spent $44 billion to acquire Twitter and then systematically destroyed everything people loved about the platform, users went looking for something better.
Is #BlueSky built on top of #activitypub ? Hoping it’s going to be interoperable with #mastodon because it seems that the last wave of people fleeing #twitter are going there🤞
I've just released version 2.28 of #snac, the simple, minimalistic #ActivityPub instance server written in ANSI C, including the following:
Added a new notification area to the web interface, accessible from a link at the top, that also shows the number of unseen events. This area lists all notifications in reverse chronological order and provides a button to clear all.
More work in the Mastodon API. The new supported features are: notifications, post of new and reply messages (including attached images). Some API v2 entry points had to be implemented, so you'll need to update your HTTPS proxy configuration again, see snac(8). #Tusky no longer crashes, or so I think. The official app and close relatives like #Megalodon still don't work, though.
If you are not interested in this Mastodon API crap, you can compile it out of your #snac by defining the NO_MASTODON_API preprocessor directive and forget about it.
Fixed an HTML cache bug (it was not refreshed after editing a post).
One of my regrets was advising an IT director at a previous employer that #ActivityPub wasn't worth pursuing at the time. Granted, this was a few years ago when it was far more "niche", but I was clearly wrong to downplay it.
Excellent deep dive on the current state of the #fediverse and #mastodon, with a detailed history of the movement to #decentralize#social, and predictions about where we go from here.
Think upgraded #UI experience vs. what you typically see on #Mastodon - with some extra features thrown in. Of course being #ActivityPub, it interacts nicely with others.
I’ve spun up another #MagicalTrash test account to natively explore - @DreamfulDreck - if you happen to also be poking around there and want to say “hi!”
as i predicted, Mastodon and other Fedi servers are woefully underequipped to deal with even the most basic spammers. hopefully this 1978-ass "thegx" guy and the vietnamese casino spammers provoke some defensive development. we literally have decades of email spam tools to reuse, and maybe infrastructure and organizations, but right now we don't even have keyword filters.
What are the odds that a load of fediverse implementations only support hacky security-vocab validation methods and would completely break if I used publicKeyPem instead of publicKey on the actor object.
I'm a bit embarrassed to say that It's been a long time since I caught up with how the @Flipboard is evolving. It's just so well done, and chock full of features and ideas I once criticized it for not having. And now that it's partly integrated with Fediverse, I am seeing all kinds of new possibilities for it. I'm allocating a lot of time next week to studying it more closely, and seeing if it can become the foundation of a really cool curation idea I've been noodling for years.
@shoq@Flipboard Love hearing that, Shoq. Please let me know what you think. We're actively designing the next gen #Flipboard built on #ActivityPub so suggestions are particularly helpful right now.
@fediverse What type of social media do you feel is lacking most in the fediverse?
To elaborate, there are a lot of different types of social media already on the fediverse such as microblogs, regular blogs, image sharing, link sharing and video sharing.
Personally, I'd love to see a gaming-focused social media platform on the fediverse.
A federated #forum software. But most likely there are a couple in the works. There's The Pavilion cooperative working on a plugin for #Discourse and some time ago a #Flarum maintainer told me they are working on adding #ActivityPub support too. And there's #LemmyBB which has forum-like aspects.
A big thing that's lacking at the moment is not so much new platforms, but dedicated instances using the existing Fediverse platforms.
A great example of what I mean is something like Urbanists.video. It's a PeerTube instance dedicated to videos about urban planning, cycling, and transport.
We need more dedicated instances like that for more special interest communities.
Just imagine a PeerTube and LemmyBB instance dedicated to baking. Or Buddhism. Or the global Armenian diaspora. Or folk music. Or quilt makers. Or charity fundraisers. Or particular social issues. Or high school principals. Or a particular university. Or independent short films. Or netball. Or watercolour artists.
The more dedicated communities like that exist, the stronger the Fediverse ecosystem is as a whole.
The tech industry is abuzz about a new standard for social networking that is more open, more user-centric, and potentially more powerful than Twitter and Facebook. But we’ve been here before.
For most of the last 15 years, the social web has felt like a settled market — and then Elon Musk bought Twitter
@aronow They both utilize #ActivityPub. So you can follow and be followed by people in both apps.
Calckey is actually a fork of Misskey. There's also Akkoma and a bunch of others. They provide additive features on top of the core ActivityPub ones most of which I think Mastodon captures.
I love this about the #Fediverse. Unlike BlueSky and Nostr and of corse all those other centralized social media, the ActivityPub fediverse has a very rich and active interconnected ecosystem.