Why ActivityPub is the future(blog.joinmastodon.org)
blog.joinmastodon.org
Why ActivityPub is the future
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/06/why-activitypub-is-the-future/
186 comments
While I see your point about product mentality, and agree to a large extent, I am not sure it applies to ActivityPub. Its like saying email needed to be productized; it didn't, we just needed productized implementations of email servers and clients to get the network going.
Exactly- email would be nothing without outlook and gmail, http might have fallen without netscape.
We need products on ActivityPub that beat real products
We need products on ActivityPub that beat real products
Email was there before outlook and Gmail and will still be long after Gmail sunsets it and Microsoft rebrands outlook to something like "Microsoft xbox delayed chat system".
And it was productized before then. AOL being a huge one ("You've got mail"), and Hotmail also coming to mind.
And email was around long before AOL or Hotmail.
And nobody used it, relatively speaking vs the extraordinary scale that those email products made possible later.
Hotmail had more users after 18 months than the total history of all email services on earth combined for the first two decades of email. If email was still as annoying to use as it was pre AOL & Hotmail, the general public still wouldn't be using it today.
Hotmail had more users after 18 months than the total history of all email services on earth combined for the first two decades of email. If email was still as annoying to use as it was pre AOL & Hotmail, the general public still wouldn't be using it today.
Great point. Webmail is a product that was massively adopted compared to regular clients.
Perhaps, but no particular web implementation of email really stands out. (You might say Gmail, Gmail is really comparatively recent.) So a web interface on email push adoption further.
How many people used any internet technology before there was even in Internet? But some people did use email.
It might be more accurate to say that a social standard would need to support productized client evolutions that outlook and others provided along the way of email’s evolutionary path.
The web was already doing fine with Mosaic, although that was also proprietary. Netscape was just the better-funded and flashier version.
You're missing the point. Like you said, Mosaic was ALREADY a great product, compared to the nerdy terminal browsers without embedded media, etc.
OP's point is not whether netscape or mosaic is better, but that the graphical web browser was what brought the web mainstream. Doesn't matter if it's mosaic or netscape (or several other graphical ui browser competitors that existed during that time)
OP's point is not whether netscape or mosaic is better, but that the graphical web browser was what brought the web mainstream. Doesn't matter if it's mosaic or netscape (or several other graphical ui browser competitors that existed during that time)
On the other hand, ActivityPub is a just a standard, it wouldn’t be meaningful to complain about the product mentality of HTTP or JSON. The people building the websites or applications that use ActivityPub are the ones who need the product mentality, and they could use any business model they like.
The rub is that standards are difficult to productize because they're difficult to iterate on. They're rigid by definition.
Tell that to Github.
As far as I'm aware, git isn't a standard. It's a single implementation.
There are definitions for the git protocol and packfile format. There are multiple implementations of Git: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git#Implementations
Exactly this.
I did some work on PubSubHubbub based federated social networks back in the FriendFeed days. Technically it worked really well, and we had a few nodes sending posts between sites with only seconds of delay.
But no one wanted to use it.
After I while I worked out it failed for exactly the same reason FriendFeed (and Google Buzz) did: federation is actually a weakness when there is a major player.
FriendFeed gave up and took the FB money (smart). Google Buzz gave up and was replaced with the completely different (and non-federated) Google Plus (which failed for different reasons).
The only argument for it working this time is timing. I've come to appreciate timing based arguments a lot more over the last few years, so maybe there is an opportunity, but I'm sure not putting any effort into it.
I did some work on PubSubHubbub based federated social networks back in the FriendFeed days. Technically it worked really well, and we had a few nodes sending posts between sites with only seconds of delay.
But no one wanted to use it.
After I while I worked out it failed for exactly the same reason FriendFeed (and Google Buzz) did: federation is actually a weakness when there is a major player.
FriendFeed gave up and took the FB money (smart). Google Buzz gave up and was replaced with the completely different (and non-federated) Google Plus (which failed for different reasons).
The only argument for it working this time is timing. I've come to appreciate timing based arguments a lot more over the last few years, so maybe there is an opportunity, but I'm sure not putting any effort into it.
This is a good point, though it's more something the products/services using ActivityPub need to consider rather than the procol makers themselves. Focus less on how neat the tech is and more on what people can use it for, with a clear purpose that your software fulfills in an easy to use way.
Too many 'hacker/techie focused' projects focus on grandiose visions and philosophical points at the expense of a real purpose.
Too many 'hacker/techie focused' projects focus on grandiose visions and philosophical points at the expense of a real purpose.
Don't agree. Mentality is important but it will not automatically lead to success. Look at how well Windows Phone did. Microsoft put everything they had to make that product but ultimately failed.
Both Mac and Windows is successful because retail. People do not want to troubleshoot issues themselves.. They also want something they know. Apple is good at marketing and Windows is something we all know. Linux has just a bunch of small shops and does not have the same brand recognition. It takes much longer for Linux desktop to reach that level of trust. Especially when Microsoft uses their considerable capital to lobby against Linux adoption. Linux adoption is continually rising though.. It is at about 3% right now.
ActivityPub is like the Linux kernel. It is the foundation that other software can use. It took a long time but eventually the idealism behind Linux made it work. It became an important infrastructure that saved money and thus an edge. ActivityPub have the same possibility. It could become the infrastructure of social media.
Both Mac and Windows is successful because retail. People do not want to troubleshoot issues themselves.. They also want something they know. Apple is good at marketing and Windows is something we all know. Linux has just a bunch of small shops and does not have the same brand recognition. It takes much longer for Linux desktop to reach that level of trust. Especially when Microsoft uses their considerable capital to lobby against Linux adoption. Linux adoption is continually rising though.. It is at about 3% right now.
ActivityPub is like the Linux kernel. It is the foundation that other software can use. It took a long time but eventually the idealism behind Linux made it work. It became an important infrastructure that saved money and thus an edge. ActivityPub have the same possibility. It could become the infrastructure of social media.
Yeah, after watching this dynamic repeatedly over various projects, I've come to the conclusion that federation is a feature, not the feature. Mastodon is not the first federated network by a long shot: StatusNet kicked this all off and is more or less dead, same with RStatus and a few others. Moreover, there's multiple ways you may want to federate a service: ActivityPub, Matrix, pump/tent (dead?), IRC, even, and you're probably better off tweaking your own protocol to fit your app versus trying to adapt your app to fit the protocol which can be hairy.
You've gotta build a really compelling service first and foremost (otherwise, why bother), and then add federation later. The danger of that is it's really tempting to just skip the federation part if you get big, but it's a critical part that shouldn't be forgotten, but only after you've got a great app people are using.
I'm watching Mastodon to see if this belief is wrong and it ends up taking off, but I think there's a real danger is designing for nerds and getting small time success and validation with nerds and geeks (this is not derogatory fellow nerds), because what we want is not what matters to most people and you risk biasing your community (the Google+ effect, though it happened there for different reasons).
The idealism has to be matched with hard pragmatism. Maybe one of these projects will do that.
You've gotta build a really compelling service first and foremost (otherwise, why bother), and then add federation later. The danger of that is it's really tempting to just skip the federation part if you get big, but it's a critical part that shouldn't be forgotten, but only after you've got a great app people are using.
I'm watching Mastodon to see if this belief is wrong and it ends up taking off, but I think there's a real danger is designing for nerds and getting small time success and validation with nerds and geeks (this is not derogatory fellow nerds), because what we want is not what matters to most people and you risk biasing your community (the Google+ effect, though it happened there for different reasons).
The idealism has to be matched with hard pragmatism. Maybe one of these projects will do that.
The main selling point of these apps is a portable social graph for everybody, the Linux equivalent of that would be the ability of being able to understand the entire stack, and job security this brings with it. Open social networks could be similarly successful with normal people as Linux was with computer specialists. That's how I see it.
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Mozilla was founded out of Netscape's product failure, and survived largely on the coattails of the search revolution.
Desktop Linux's failure is a matter of perspective, but there were more than a few products built around it... they just failed. It turns out, that was the wrong vision.
Desktop Linux's failure is a matter of perspective, but there were more than a few products built around it... they just failed. It turns out, that was the wrong vision.
Desktop Linux's failure is a matter of perspective,
It's really not.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...
It's really not.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...
That's because the place to make inroads was elsewhere... in mobile, embedded, etc., which we don't count as "desktop" (though at one point, desktop was basically anything with a GUI). You throw in Android phones, Chromebooks, browsers in embedded devices, etc., the picture looks quite different.
Desktop Linux never became significantly better than Mac OS or Windows, that's why it failed to grow. It's worse in a lot of aspects except ideology.
Firefox is arguably better than Chrome and has a much nicer ideology as well, but it's not so much better than Chrome that the majority of users is switching by default.
Non technical people need a reason other than ideology to switch. The product needs to provide a new value that doesn't exist or be so much better that it's obvious to everybody who tries it.
Firefox is arguably better than Chrome and has a much nicer ideology as well, but it's not so much better than Chrome that the majority of users is switching by default.
Non technical people need a reason other than ideology to switch. The product needs to provide a new value that doesn't exist or be so much better that it's obvious to everybody who tries it.
> Non technical people need a reason other than ideology to switch. The product needs to provide a new value that doesn't exist or be so much better that it's obvious to everybody who tries it.
It's not even that.. often it's just distribution. Often consumers don't really want to make a conscious choice, so taking it away from them in the distribution channel is the way to go. I remember doing studies on search engine switching rates. No matter how awful we made the default search engine, the vast majority of users would not even try using Google. It was AMAZING.
I would argue that the browser wars have, to a much larger degree than we're prepared to acknowledge, been driven by distribution. Users don't want to make a choice.
So that means you just need a strategy for winning the distribution channel game. Product design be damned.
It's not even that.. often it's just distribution. Often consumers don't really want to make a conscious choice, so taking it away from them in the distribution channel is the way to go. I remember doing studies on search engine switching rates. No matter how awful we made the default search engine, the vast majority of users would not even try using Google. It was AMAZING.
I would argue that the browser wars have, to a much larger degree than we're prepared to acknowledge, been driven by distribution. Users don't want to make a choice.
So that means you just need a strategy for winning the distribution channel game. Product design be damned.
It failed to grow because it was never preinstalled on a sufficiently large number of machines at BestBuy, there's nothing else to it. If people were buying PCs with Linux on them, they'll use Linux and nobody would find anything weird about it.
Firefox was also not pre-installed but still beat out IE.
Firefox was pre-installed (just not by OS makers) and it didn't so much beat IE as Chrome beat IE and didn't harm Firefox nearly as much (likely because Google prioritized converting systems where neither Firefox nor Chrome were the default browser).
Installing an alternative browser alongside your existing one requires minimal investment. Backing up all your data, converting to alternative formats, adopting a whole suite of new programs, different conventions etc. is an entirely different investment if you're already on Windows - if you had purchased the PC with Linux, it would be the same amount of hassle switching back to Windows.
> So I guess what I'm saying is; if ActivityPub is to be the future, then there should be more than idealism behind it.
Like most standards, its success hinges on the success of products/projects/whatever that employ it.
Like most standards, its success hinges on the success of products/projects/whatever that employ it.
You are comparing apples to oranges. Google, Facebook, WhatsApp are companies. Firefox and Linux Kernel are "software products". ActivityPub is an open proposition about a technical standard.
Google, Facebook, Whatsapp are companies with strong products. Mozilla have a strong products. Same thing with the Linux Foundation.
The article is talking about how ActivityPub is the future, but without strong products, how can that future be possible?
Idealism alone won't convince people to switch to Mastodon instead of using Twiiter or Peertube intead of Youtube.
The article is talking about how ActivityPub is the future, but without strong products, how can that future be possible?
Idealism alone won't convince people to switch to Mastodon instead of using Twiiter or Peertube intead of Youtube.
> Idealism alone won't convince people to switch to Mastodon instead of using Twiiter or Peertube intead of Youtube.
Just curious, according to you, is democracy an idealism that happened alone or with a product?
Just curious, according to you, is democracy an idealism that happened alone or with a product?
What I think about democracy is irrelevant. The question is: will idealism be enough to convince people to switch from Twitter to Mastodon and my answer is no.
Twitter, Mastodon can be tools for political system such as democracy. Twitter don't sell anything to the end user : it is free, it is not really a "product" for an end user. Why did people use it? Because it's a new way of expressing your ideas. If some governments force Twitter to censor itself for X reasons, and users disagree with it, people will start to look for alternative to express themselves. Also I think the Mastodon/federation system is harder to block nation-wide than just Twitter. Democracy is totally revelant to the topic imho.
Edit : so, maybe Mastodon will never be as big as Twitter, but the goal isn't to migrate everyone from Twitter to another platform. The goal is to propose alternatives. The title of the submission is a bit click-bait
Edit : so, maybe Mastodon will never be as big as Twitter, but the goal isn't to migrate everyone from Twitter to another platform. The goal is to propose alternatives. The title of the submission is a bit click-bait
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The real value of federation, and the value of a standard like ActivityPub, didn't fully click for me until I realized I could follow Blender's PeerTube experiment from my Mastodon account.
If enough sites start supporting it, you could get many of the benefits of RSS with the few benefits of massive silos like Twitter and Facebook.
If enough sites start supporting it, you could get many of the benefits of RSS with the few benefits of massive silos like Twitter and Facebook.
I think you've hit on the actual end user benefit - aggregation.
The article is either pitching abstractions like "compatibility" or solutions to non-problems like the risk that Facebook might vanish.
Though I'm not convinced aggregation is a big problem.
The article is either pitching abstractions like "compatibility" or solutions to non-problems like the risk that Facebook might vanish.
Though I'm not convinced aggregation is a big problem.
How do you subscribe from mastodon? I see the video.blender.org is their instance right?
Put @[email protected] in the search box.
The search box can be easy to miss - its the text field above the new-toot-box and below the menu bar in the left-most column.
Ahh thank you. I had the format wrong there
Anti-censorship has always been the #1 benefit of federation and peer-to-peer connectivity. I don't think any other benefits come even close, and they are usually overshadowed by how much more difficult it is to build a well-working federated or P2P network.
But when you start having global monopolies in various industries that don't care about automatically banning the "little guy" from which they make little money to begin with and when you have governments that are increasingly more interested in let's say "curating" the internet, then that anti-censorship benefit starts to become a lot more appealing to a lot more people.
It's why I'm glad Firefox is not only finally a decent competitor to Chrome but also starting to adopt all sort of anti-censorship protocols and technologies, too (and hopefully there are more to come).
But when you start having global monopolies in various industries that don't care about automatically banning the "little guy" from which they make little money to begin with and when you have governments that are increasingly more interested in let's say "curating" the internet, then that anti-censorship benefit starts to become a lot more appealing to a lot more people.
It's why I'm glad Firefox is not only finally a decent competitor to Chrome but also starting to adopt all sort of anti-censorship protocols and technologies, too (and hopefully there are more to come).
>> "Anti-censorship has always been the #1 benefit of federation and peer-to-peer connectivity. I don't think any other benefits come even close, and they are usually overshadowed by how much more difficult it is to build a well-working federated or P2P network."
The rank of benefits is, of course, highly subjective. I'm speaking for myself.
The rank of benefits is, of course, highly subjective. I'm speaking for myself.
A non-empty set of Mastodon users probably picked precisely for it's "censorship" abilities, unhappy with how Twitter handles it and wanting a space where their instance can enforce its own policies.
The real benefit of federation is that anywhere on the moderation spectrum is possible on a per-instance basis.
Banning federated networks is actually much easier than dealing with an important centralized entity like Facebook or Google. Just ban every node that provides access to illegal content.
China is happy to ban both, difficulty doesn't seem to be an issue.
"a decent competitor"
How did it do that? It threw away all the technical and usability benefits it had over Chrome, so I guess it's "a decent competitor" instead of "a clear winner" for some purposes, like it once was. Is that what you mean?
How did it do that? It threw away all the technical and usability benefits it had over Chrome, so I guess it's "a decent competitor" instead of "a clear winner" for some purposes, like it once was. Is that what you mean?
ActivityPub is built by the W3C and therefore relies on Web related technologies (lost of HTTP and JSON exchanged) :)
Does this scale properly and how does it compare to existing solutions like XMPP Pubsub (https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html) that is basically built to deliver content, in real-time (trough TCP sockets) and can handle thousands (millions?) of delivered packets per seconds?
I'm building a federated social platform that is fully relying on XMPP (Movim https://movim.eu) and I'm wondering about the limits and different usages of this fresh new protocol.
Does this scale properly and how does it compare to existing solutions like XMPP Pubsub (https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html) that is basically built to deliver content, in real-time (trough TCP sockets) and can handle thousands (millions?) of delivered packets per seconds?
I'm building a federated social platform that is fully relying on XMPP (Movim https://movim.eu) and I'm wondering about the limits and different usages of this fresh new protocol.
the AP spec is actually, a bit more abstract that you would expect. JSON and JSON-LD are required, but transport and actor resolution are not well specified.
current-gen AP servers do have an implicit dependency on HTTP and DNS. i've spoken with several people about creating a proof-of-concept AP server that supports gossip-based replication and a few other ssb-inspired features.
current-gen AP servers do have an implicit dependency on HTTP and DNS. i've spoken with several people about creating a proof-of-concept AP server that supports gossip-based replication and a few other ssb-inspired features.
> JSON and JSON-LD are required
I find it rather disappointing (in ActivityStreams in general), by the way: on the first sight it's a part of the Semantic Web, but the approaches seem to differ from common ones, and the specification itself mentions that there's merely compatibility with one of the serialization formats (JSON-LD).
> but transport and actor resolution are not well specified
There's this for ActivityPub though: "Publicly facing content SHOULD use HTTPS URIs", and bits such as "The outbox accepts HTTP POST requests, with behaviour described in Client to Server Interactions", "clients MUST discover the URL of the actor's outbox from their profile and then MUST make an HTTP POST request". Authentication is not specified, but apparently de facto it will be some hacks on top of HTTP, too.
Putting those two together, it seems to mostly aim the popular nowadays combination of HTTP and JSON (just RDF/semweb-friendly).
I find it rather disappointing (in ActivityStreams in general), by the way: on the first sight it's a part of the Semantic Web, but the approaches seem to differ from common ones, and the specification itself mentions that there's merely compatibility with one of the serialization formats (JSON-LD).
> but transport and actor resolution are not well specified
There's this for ActivityPub though: "Publicly facing content SHOULD use HTTPS URIs", and bits such as "The outbox accepts HTTP POST requests, with behaviour described in Client to Server Interactions", "clients MUST discover the URL of the actor's outbox from their profile and then MUST make an HTTP POST request". Authentication is not specified, but apparently de facto it will be some hacks on top of HTTP, too.
Putting those two together, it seems to mostly aim the popular nowadays combination of HTTP and JSON (just RDF/semweb-friendly).
This sounds interesting. Does it mean an AP server could exist that would not be based on the federation model?
Or to make my question more precise : would the gossip model be used only for data distribution and we would still have to register on a node, or would it allow to keep and reuse our data and identity should our usual node disappear?
Or to make my question more precise : would the gossip model be used only for data distribution and we would still have to register on a node, or would it allow to keep and reuse our data and identity should our usual node disappear?
the goal is to decouple users from servers.
the idea is to move the key that AP uses to sign JSON-LD objects to the client and do all of the crypto operations there.
a server in this model is an always-on relay for replicating data. you can submit a message to any relay and expect to have it show up on all interested servers.
unfortunately, this will also break compat with HTTP/DNS-based AP servers, but hopefully this is something that the maintainers will be open to supporting.
relevant threads:
https://b.9chan.lol/notice/279590
https://b.9chan.lol/notice/226866
https://b.9chan.lol/notice/212397
https://shitposter.club/notice/9830850
the idea is to move the key that AP uses to sign JSON-LD objects to the client and do all of the crypto operations there.
a server in this model is an always-on relay for replicating data. you can submit a message to any relay and expect to have it show up on all interested servers.
unfortunately, this will also break compat with HTTP/DNS-based AP servers, but hopefully this is something that the maintainers will be open to supporting.
relevant threads:
https://b.9chan.lol/notice/279590
https://b.9chan.lol/notice/226866
https://b.9chan.lol/notice/212397
https://shitposter.club/notice/9830850
I suspect XMPP is superior to ActivityPub and the way to go. Bandwidth is only increasing with 5G and with binary XML [1] I think you'll (one day, in theory) be able to get large scale, efficient real-time message flows. XML is just more extensible than JSON soup. These architectures are also probably flawed for pushing for complete N-to-N connectivity. It makes far more sense to push for mobile data that can be liberated from any one server than to assume any given data will always be available and will always provide a given chunk of data. This allows aggregation and caching and copy-resilience which is what makes the web actually work.
[1] https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0322.html
[1] https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0322.html
XMPP was what I first thought of while reading https://joinmastodon.org/ . My thought before that was "Why will this time be different than that time that ~everyone thought XMPP federation would be the future?"
You can be certain that regardless what happens
with Mastodon, the network will live on and
flourish. Newer and better software will be born
within this ecosystem, but you will never have to
drag all your friends and followers someplace
else again–they’ll already be where they need to
be.
If mastodon.social is shut down tomorrow, a user - say [email protected] - would lose all his followers, no?
First of all the followers that were on mastodon.social too - their data is gone just like Joes data.
And the ones not on mastodon.social - yes, they would still exist. But Joe would have to make a new account somewhere else and ask each and every one to follow him again. And he would have no proof that he is the same joe that they knew under the account [email protected].
Or am I missing something? Is there some public key that is Joes real identity and only he knows the private key?
> And the ones not on mastodon.social - yes, they would still exist. But Joe would have to make a new account somewhere else and ask each and every one to follow him again.
But it's the same with gmail and everything else like that, I don't see it being a problem of ActivityPub or Mastodon. There's keybase or having your own domain with some index.html where you can direct your followers to a new account is not that big of a deal nowdays. If having to host it somewhere is too much for you - use dot tel tld (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tel). People that really want to read your ramblings will find you anyway.
But it's the same with gmail and everything else like that, I don't see it being a problem of ActivityPub or Mastodon. There's keybase or having your own domain with some index.html where you can direct your followers to a new account is not that big of a deal nowdays. If having to host it somewhere is too much for you - use dot tel tld (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tel). People that really want to read your ramblings will find you anyway.
Could I have me@mydomain be accepted by mastodon.social somehow? Similar to how I point my MX records to Gmail?
If you install an ActivityPub compatible software, or if someone starts to offer one with custom domain support as a service. Account discovery most commonly is done with a HTTP request in /.well-known/, but the application that points to doesn't have to be at the same domain.
Not right now and maybe not ever. People have been asking for an account migration tool for quite awhile.
Let me just say this - both mastodon and activitypub are terrible names. I say that as a consumer not as an expert on anything. It's not a dealbreaker for me but platform popularity by the masses depends on color schemes and catchy names. I feel the same way about duckduckgo.
Great products though.
Great products though.
Twitter’s a pretty stupid name too. So’s Facebook. You get used to them after a while.
"Twitter" and "tweet" sound very light and airy, almost musical; the theme of birds chirping lines up well with the format of seeing many short messages. "Twitter" is also largely an abstract word without much prior association.
A mastodon is a massive, hairy, smelly beast. It's also an extremely well known heavy metal band. For a Twitter clone it makes absolutely no sense. "Toot" as well has some existing connotations I wouldn't think they would want to associate with...just seems like a total non-starter.
A mastodon is a massive, hairy, smelly beast. It's also an extremely well known heavy metal band. For a Twitter clone it makes absolutely no sense. "Toot" as well has some existing connotations I wouldn't think they would want to associate with...just seems like a total non-starter.
Facebook came from actual face books at universities. It a brilliant name because the entire point was to see people you might want to sleep with. It wasn’t about sharing photos with mom.
Strange that it didn't evolve into Tinder.
"World wide web", "email, "Internet", and "HTTP" are pretty bad names too.
They didn't have competition when they gained mass adoption. There was gopher for http but it but http but that was before consumers were sold either item. Needless to say those are systems and protocols not products.
What would be a better name?
Nearly anything that's ideally one or two syllables, phonetically easy to say, and can have a reasonable brand built around it. Not that these are awesome but just examples off the top of my head so I'm not just saying "they suck" without providing alternatives...
Ivy - Naturally grows and spreads and often is seen climbing walls. Maybe in this case it climbs and covers a FB wall :-P Also a play on FB being started at an ivy league school.
Greenfield - Maybe a reasonable name for the protocol that those apps can be built upon? "Ivy's built on the greenfield protocol"
Anyway, that's what I came up with in 10-15 minutes of brainstorming and I would pose that those are much easier, approachable, and just better names than these others that simply don't elicit any sort of emotion (or negative ones).
Names matter, a lot. You need to be able to tell a story that moves people to action. That's what marketing folks do that adds a ton of value. Most open source projects don't have marketing folks so... :-)
Ivy - Naturally grows and spreads and often is seen climbing walls. Maybe in this case it climbs and covers a FB wall :-P Also a play on FB being started at an ivy league school.
Greenfield - Maybe a reasonable name for the protocol that those apps can be built upon? "Ivy's built on the greenfield protocol"
Anyway, that's what I came up with in 10-15 minutes of brainstorming and I would pose that those are much easier, approachable, and just better names than these others that simply don't elicit any sort of emotion (or negative ones).
Names matter, a lot. You need to be able to tell a story that moves people to action. That's what marketing folks do that adds a ton of value. Most open source projects don't have marketing folks so... :-)
Pied Piper is the best name.
Australians will just shorten it to "Masto". It's no big deal.
>If Twitter shuts down, you’ll lose your followers. If Facebook shuts down, you’ll lose your friends. For some platforms, it’s not a question of “if”, but “when”.
Wouldn't this happen as well if the instance my account was created in shuts down?
Wouldn't this happen as well if the instance my account was created in shuts down?
It would and it has. In Mastodon-speak, this is called an "extinction event", and I have seen a few of those. Mastodon, however, has already implemented take-out feature where you can download all of your data at any time, including your friend list. It's not perfect, because although you can keep your followee list, your followers don't have an automatic way of knowing where your new presence may have moved to.
Also, the stuff that has already been tooted lives on in the fediverse in other servers, so it's not like the toots also disappear from other servers after an extinction event, just like an email server going down doesn't delete the email from everyone else's inbox.
Also, the stuff that has already been tooted lives on in the fediverse in other servers, so it's not like the toots also disappear from other servers after an extinction event, just like an email server going down doesn't delete the email from everyone else's inbox.
It would and it has. In Mastodon-speak, this is called an "extinction event", and I have seen a few of those. Mastodon, however, has already implemented take-out feature where you can download all of your data at any time, including your friend list.
How about backing up accounts in other servers? These could be encrypted with a key which only the user controls. Or perhaps the backup could be done encrypted in cloud storage like S3 (this would involve a paid account, obviously) so the user's presence could be resurrected in a different server?
It might also be dandy to have "failover" agreements, where one server can agree ahead of time to failover users for another server, in case of failure.
How about backing up accounts in other servers? These could be encrypted with a key which only the user controls. Or perhaps the backup could be done encrypted in cloud storage like S3 (this would involve a paid account, obviously) so the user's presence could be resurrected in a different server?
It might also be dandy to have "failover" agreements, where one server can agree ahead of time to failover users for another server, in case of failure.
Yes I think the next step to avoid that is to own your own domain name.
If you own your domain name you can have a provider die, and you'll still be able to re import your data on a new provider, assuming you're able to set up a DNS
And that's where you lose most non technical users I guess?
If you own your domain name you can have a provider die, and you'll still be able to re import your data on a new provider, assuming you're able to set up a DNS
And that's where you lose most non technical users I guess?
Mastodon (and I suppose ActivityPub in general) conflates hosting location with username. If I have a username like @[email protected], then my stuff has to be accessible at mastodon.social's IP address (the A record).
Compare to email, where the MX record provides a layer of indirection. ActivityPub technically has a feature like this using a .well-known file, but it leaks into the user interface n unpleasant ways.
Compare to email, where the MX record provides a layer of indirection. ActivityPub technically has a feature like this using a .well-known file, but it leaks into the user interface n unpleasant ways.
I was thinking that federation still leaves unsolved the issue of knowing the single source of truth for identities, and when instances go down, you can't reference anything to know who/where people are.
Couldn't Keybase.io solve this? It could track your identities on these servers, and it would exist outside of any instances or federation, but be the source of identity that would go along with any federated instances you are a part of
Couldn't Keybase.io solve this? It could track your identities on these servers, and it would exist outside of any instances or federation, but be the source of identity that would go along with any federated instances you are a part of
What will we do when keybase goes away?
Isn't keybase.io just a way of storing public keys? If they go down, and you still have the private key, you can just sign a message saying "No, really! It's me!"
The issue with distributed systems that rely on public keys is the lack of options to turn to if the keys are lost or compromised. And yes, people will lose keys. Systems that rely on keys for identity need to figure out what options people have at that point to re-establish their identity.
The issue with distributed systems that rely on public keys is the lack of options to turn to if the keys are lost or compromised. And yes, people will lose keys. Systems that rely on keys for identity need to figure out what options people have at that point to re-establish their identity.
Or DNS.
[deleted]
Unfortunately, it's out there, but you can't associate those previous messages with your new account.
Keybase.io could be a part of solving this I think:
https://keybase.io/docs/sigchain
https://keybase.io/docs/sigchain
right, there's that at least, and that's probably better than the alternatives. It just didn't sound like a good analogy. A bit deceiving even.
>If Twitter shuts down, you’ll lose your followers.
Maybe my way of using Twitter is particularly weird, but I'd be more disappointed if I'd lose the thematic lists of interesting Twitter accounts that I have collected over several years at this point than if I'd lose my followers.
The above is also the main reason my pasts attempts to switch from Twitter to Mastodon have failed. There's quite much people and content in the Fediverse now, but still not enough that matches my particular combination of interests.
Maybe my way of using Twitter is particularly weird, but I'd be more disappointed if I'd lose the thematic lists of interesting Twitter accounts that I have collected over several years at this point than if I'd lose my followers.
The above is also the main reason my pasts attempts to switch from Twitter to Mastodon have failed. There's quite much people and content in the Fediverse now, but still not enough that matches my particular combination of interests.
Then your account is gone, but your friends on other servers are still where they were. With backup/import tools you can reconnect with them from a new account easily.
What if a significant portion of your friends were on the same server? Wouldn't you not have an easy connection to them?
Can you? You have to be able to message them to tell them where your new account is. And they have to actually go and re-follow.
It's always a risk. However, I'll take my chances on something that's already paying for itself (the instances I use) over something that's going to collapse the moment easy capital dries up in the next market crash.
That said, it's wise to maintain a backup account on a different instance. Right now one of my instances is down for unknown reasons, but almost everyone who follows me there also follows my other account.
That said, it's wise to maintain a backup account on a different instance. Right now one of my instances is down for unknown reasons, but almost everyone who follows me there also follows my other account.
IMO the solution to this is one instance, one domain, and one IP per person with some kind of financial sustainability (i.e. you pay for it) but it's very difficult for people to swallow.
Yes, though:
1. You can readily extract your information.
2. And re-import it elsewhere.
3. You can run your own instance.
(I've had a couple instances die and / or fade on me, which is why I maintain a few presences.)
1. You can readily extract your information.
2. And re-import it elsewhere.
3. You can run your own instance.
(I've had a couple instances die and / or fade on me, which is why I maintain a few presences.)
Yes although Account Migration is a very active discussion topic https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177
Mastodon and other federated platforms are to social media what suburbia historically has been to cities.
People think it'll resolve or at least mitigate the issues of digital privacy, digital harassment, and digital overpopulation, but in reality will just create ever more wasteful and unaccountable digital sprawl while inevitably recreating the exact same problems (e.g. HOA discrimination, nosey neighbors, hiding all non-conforming traits lest your cohabitants judge you, etc).
People think it'll resolve or at least mitigate the issues of digital privacy, digital harassment, and digital overpopulation, but in reality will just create ever more wasteful and unaccountable digital sprawl while inevitably recreating the exact same problems (e.g. HOA discrimination, nosey neighbors, hiding all non-conforming traits lest your cohabitants judge you, etc).
Bingo. I've told this story a few times on here, and I feel the need to tell it again whenever the notion "uncensorable internet==unqualified good" comes up:
Once I got doxxed by bloggers from one end of the political spectrum who thought I was a blogger from the opposite end. (We have similar names, but the doxxers put out all of my info. I generally try to avoid making extreme political statements publicly on the internet.) Even after I got my info taken down, someone archived it and the archives got passed around on Twitter, prolonging the mess. Even now all that stuff shows up if you google my name (which I could see being an issue in employment and housing searches, for instance).
I'm not asking anyone to care about what happened to me, I just want people to think about the consequences of a system that can't be moderated. If some bad actors can continuously re-inject false information about normal people into the internet, it can have negative effects on the lives of those individuals. Advocate for an uncensorable internet all you want, but you should also be honest about the potential ramifications.
Once I got doxxed by bloggers from one end of the political spectrum who thought I was a blogger from the opposite end. (We have similar names, but the doxxers put out all of my info. I generally try to avoid making extreme political statements publicly on the internet.) Even after I got my info taken down, someone archived it and the archives got passed around on Twitter, prolonging the mess. Even now all that stuff shows up if you google my name (which I could see being an issue in employment and housing searches, for instance).
I'm not asking anyone to care about what happened to me, I just want people to think about the consequences of a system that can't be moderated. If some bad actors can continuously re-inject false information about normal people into the internet, it can have negative effects on the lives of those individuals. Advocate for an uncensorable internet all you want, but you should also be honest about the potential ramifications.
Not really. It's just a return to the olden days of internet communities, when users controlled the sites they posted on and people found groups to talk to about things that interested them (rather than being stuck on a giant platform owned by a large corporation).
And it's probably better for society in general that communities work that way. You don't want millionaires and oorporations controlling discourse, and in many cases, there are groups and communities who simply physically cannot use the same platform (those on complete opposite sides of the political spectrum for example).
And it's probably better for society in general that communities work that way. You don't want millionaires and oorporations controlling discourse, and in many cases, there are groups and communities who simply physically cannot use the same platform (those on complete opposite sides of the political spectrum for example).
There's a pretty stark difference between organic internet communities as they were and what is emerging from federated platforms on an already connected planet.
I was on an emulation forum for several years in the early 2000s that had people from every walk of life, every stripe of politics, on essentially every continent of the planet, yet the number of regular users was still within Dunbar's number, for years. That's not going to happen nowadays. If you can reasonably attract ten users, you can and probably will attract several hundred, or more, in much smaller timelines.
This is borne out by looking at Mastodon instances right now--there are ~200 out of ~3000 that fall within reasonable estimates of Dunbar's number and there's no guarantee that any of them will be stable even in the short term. It's a Great Filter for comprehensible human communities.
Secondly, the notion that by federating or centralizing, you can avoid or generate discursal control is pretty unfounded. The 2016 US Presidential election and Brexit are more than enough evidence of that. People can and will use any capacity within their reach to influence discourse, regardless of who owns or doesn't own the infrastructure.
I'd argue that federating generally allows for more pernicious discursal control by monied and corporate interests, solely through the lack of singular points of control. If you can automate contact and distribution, which is already trivial, you can spread whatever you want as far as you please as much as you like, knowing that if 90% of administrators remove it, you still have 90% possible impressions and 10% of instances that haven't removed it. If the content is even remotely infectious, it'll immediately spread back to the 90% by the 10% of users, anyway. Chain-letters are great examples of this in action (and in their more modern forms "upvote this if," "retweet this if," and "like this if").
I was on an emulation forum for several years in the early 2000s that had people from every walk of life, every stripe of politics, on essentially every continent of the planet, yet the number of regular users was still within Dunbar's number, for years. That's not going to happen nowadays. If you can reasonably attract ten users, you can and probably will attract several hundred, or more, in much smaller timelines.
This is borne out by looking at Mastodon instances right now--there are ~200 out of ~3000 that fall within reasonable estimates of Dunbar's number and there's no guarantee that any of them will be stable even in the short term. It's a Great Filter for comprehensible human communities.
Secondly, the notion that by federating or centralizing, you can avoid or generate discursal control is pretty unfounded. The 2016 US Presidential election and Brexit are more than enough evidence of that. People can and will use any capacity within their reach to influence discourse, regardless of who owns or doesn't own the infrastructure.
I'd argue that federating generally allows for more pernicious discursal control by monied and corporate interests, solely through the lack of singular points of control. If you can automate contact and distribution, which is already trivial, you can spread whatever you want as far as you please as much as you like, knowing that if 90% of administrators remove it, you still have 90% possible impressions and 10% of instances that haven't removed it. If the content is even remotely infectious, it'll immediately spread back to the 90% by the 10% of users, anyway. Chain-letters are great examples of this in action (and in their more modern forms "upvote this if," "retweet this if," and "like this if").
> Secondly, the notion that by federating or centralizing, you can avoid or generate discursal control is pretty unfounded. The 2016 US Presidential election and Brexit are more than enough evidence of that.
Control isn't binary. Facebook can exert much control over discourse while still being vulnerable to powerful actors.
Control isn't binary. Facebook can exert much control over discourse while still being vulnerable to powerful actors.
If your narrative can be derailed by pseudo-anonymous actors, you don't control the narrative.
The idea that I'm primarily disagreeing with is that Facebook, Twitter, et al. can be hegemonic in a user-populated space. I don't think they can. They can certainly exert large amounts of influence and constrain it, but it's not monolithic and they don't control it. Federation only makes that influence more invisible. It certainly doesn't remove it.
The idea that I'm primarily disagreeing with is that Facebook, Twitter, et al. can be hegemonic in a user-populated space. I don't think they can. They can certainly exert large amounts of influence and constrain it, but it's not monolithic and they don't control it. Federation only makes that influence more invisible. It certainly doesn't remove it.
You're still replying as if control is binary. No, FB doesn't fully control the content on their platform. Nor does China fully control their media. But they still exert much more control than do distributed systems.
For the sake of argument, let’s say federated social platforms will not solve "digital privacy, digital harassment, and digital overpopulation,” what is your proposal to solve these “problems?” Are you suggesting everybody stay on FB/TWTR/IG/SNAP? Are you saying nobody should use the internet to socialize? I seriously do not comprehend the point(s) you are trying to make.
Just because not all problems can be solved with Mastodon, and the like, does not mean they are not worth pursuing.
Just because not all problems can be solved with Mastodon, and the like, does not mean they are not worth pursuing.
Instead of asking why these problems are endemic to every platform, people just say "let's try silver bullet #24 so that we can keep doing the same pernicious stuff with a veneer of progress" and now you have several more problems on top of the ones that already existed.
Are humans in large numbers capable of interfacing with individual human beings without engaging in pernicious behavior? The answer, as anyone online in the last twenty-five years is a resounding no. Are humans in large numbers capable of behaving immaculately when it comes to preserving their own or their customer's privacy? Once again the answer, as anyone online in the last twenty-five years (and several decades longer if you include proto-business networks) is a resounding no. If you add progressively more humans to anything, does the output improve? If the metric is human satisfaction, the answer is no. If the metric is the rate of return in a Ponzi scheme, then yes, okay, you've got me there. The cause of almost all problems is solutions.
As far as social media goes, it's literally designed to use people to promulgate human-motivated pseudo-information for as long as humanly possible. It's not for "socializing" or "meeting people" in the same way that TV shows and movies aren't there for entertainment. It's to sell the viewer's attention to people that have anything but their interest in mind. Moving to federated enclaves is just further deregulating an already throughly pernicious industry.
Are humans in large numbers capable of interfacing with individual human beings without engaging in pernicious behavior? The answer, as anyone online in the last twenty-five years is a resounding no. Are humans in large numbers capable of behaving immaculately when it comes to preserving their own or their customer's privacy? Once again the answer, as anyone online in the last twenty-five years (and several decades longer if you include proto-business networks) is a resounding no. If you add progressively more humans to anything, does the output improve? If the metric is human satisfaction, the answer is no. If the metric is the rate of return in a Ponzi scheme, then yes, okay, you've got me there. The cause of almost all problems is solutions.
As far as social media goes, it's literally designed to use people to promulgate human-motivated pseudo-information for as long as humanly possible. It's not for "socializing" or "meeting people" in the same way that TV shows and movies aren't there for entertainment. It's to sell the viewer's attention to people that have anything but their interest in mind. Moving to federated enclaves is just further deregulating an already throughly pernicious industry.
You are comparing apples to oranges.
Self hosting a service will of course mitigate all of the issues you listed. The control shifts from a company like Facebook into the hands of the server owner.
Self hosting a service will of course mitigate all of the issues you listed. The control shifts from a company like Facebook into the hands of the server owner.
Yes, and nominally so did homeownership in suburbia vs rental in overcrowded cities. What it actually meant is that instead of being beholden to "The Man's" cultural standards, they were now beholden to the Homeowner's Association's. Instead of overt racism and segregation, they got redlining, blockbusting, and racial steering. Instead of razor thin walls leading to informal surveillance, they had to Keep Up with the Joneses.
Of course, the forces are now politically/socially based rather than fundamentally racially based, but the principle remains the same. It's another digital White Flight by any other name.^1
---
1 https://www.technologyreview.com/s/419843/did-whites-flee-th...
Of course, the forces are now politically/socially based rather than fundamentally racially based, but the principle remains the same. It's another digital White Flight by any other name.^1
---
1 https://www.technologyreview.com/s/419843/did-whites-flee-th...
You’re assuming that urban is always superior to suburban. There are many who prefer the problems you call out vs the problems with urban centers.
No it won't. You might not have to see harassment directed at you, but that doesn't mitigate it. Especially if part of that harassment is doxxing.
It won’t fix censorship. Most users will pile up in certain servers (or even just one) and the owners of that server will censor whatever they don’t like (be it users or entire servers). In the end, it’ll be like Twitter.
My buzzword antibodies have been circling "federation" for quite a while, but the email analogy in this article has made me reconsider.
Ever since quitting social networks I've been looking for a way to push content to close friends and I really had to fall all the way down to email before anything worked. So I'm hopeful for some slightly more tailored technologies to step in.
Ever since quitting social networks I've been looking for a way to push content to close friends and I really had to fall all the way down to email before anything worked. So I'm hopeful for some slightly more tailored technologies to step in.
Some background information on ActivityPub in Pleroma:
https://blog.soykaf.com/post/activity-pub-in-pleroma/
https://blog.soykaf.com/post/what-is-pleroma/
https://blog.soykaf.com/post/activity-pub-in-pleroma/
https://blog.soykaf.com/post/what-is-pleroma/
Unfortunately, at the moment it's impossible to rename/move your account to a different domain, and if your mastodon instance is shut down(which, let's face it, is likelier to happen than twitter shutdown), you still lose your followers.
You can host your own instance, of course, but that requires time/money for maintenance, and not everyone will do this.
You can host your own instance, of course, but that requires time/money for maintenance, and not everyone will do this.
I get it from a developer standpoint, but I don't get it at all from a user standpoint.
For example:
joinmastodon.org gives me two dropdown boxes at the bottom of their frontpage. One asks what my interest is, the other asks what language I speak. Then it ajaxes in some links to different instances which (I suppose) are geared toward the interest I chose.
Does this mean that for each interest I must sign up on a different instance, controlled by a different entity with their own terms of service?
Edit: clarification
For example:
joinmastodon.org gives me two dropdown boxes at the bottom of their frontpage. One asks what my interest is, the other asks what language I speak. Then it ajaxes in some links to different instances which (I suppose) are geared toward the interest I chose.
Does this mean that for each interest I must sign up on a different instance, controlled by a different entity with their own terms of service?
Edit: clarification
I've been using mastodon for a few months and it depends on your instance, really. A lot are more "this is the type of people you'd expect here" (tech people, lgbt people, art peopl, etc) but everything that isn't specifically related to that topic is OK. I'm on a semi-political one, because that's what I'd use a platform like that for. But it's not limited to that at all. Some are stricter, some aren't pegged down to a topic, but might be related to a "type" of person. I know some people who have a few accounts, to only share stuff related to that instance. Some people end up running their own instance (although that's easier with pleroma, you could probably run it off a toaster if you wanted to) or just with one or two friends.
there's added value to the local timeline, especially in smaller instances when you've just joined, because it allows you to find like-minded people. If you could do without that the easiest option might be to join a large instance or start your own, but both come with discoverability issues.
In short, no, you don't need to, but you could (just like you can make multiple emails) if it helps you separate stuff
there's added value to the local timeline, especially in smaller instances when you've just joined, because it allows you to find like-minded people. If you could do without that the easiest option might be to join a large instance or start your own, but both come with discoverability issues.
In short, no, you don't need to, but you could (just like you can make multiple emails) if it helps you separate stuff
No, thanks to federation it doesn't matter which instance you sign up on, you can follow people on any instance. You're choosing your home instance there, so basically the group of people you're closest to.
But how will they deal with the GDPR?
https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/7280
https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/7280
From the thread:
>I don't expect any major changes are needed for compliance, which is why it's been pretty low priority. it's just a matter of getting a document together that better informs admins.
Mastodon has all the features needed for compliance, and does not collect or store any data that's not for its primary purpose.
>I don't expect any major changes are needed for compliance, which is why it's been pretty low priority. it's just a matter of getting a document together that better informs admins.
Mastodon has all the features needed for compliance, and does not collect or store any data that's not for its primary purpose.
Does that mean that in ActivityPub, I can't share messages with a restricted group of people?
You can do DMs, but it's possible for admins with sufficient access on each recipient's instance to read them.
edit: I didn't see that this was in the context of GDPR.
edit: I didn't see that this was in the context of GDPR.
GDPR does not imply end-to-end encryption. Instance administrators on each and every service that isn't E2EE have the technical possibilities to read users' messages simply because they are not encrypted, and that behavior is GDPR-compliant.
Ok, that sounds like they don't comply with the GDPR then.
Also, doesn't ActivityPub allow closed groups?
Also, doesn't ActivityPub allow closed groups?
Just as GDPR-incompliant as e-mail then, or any social media platform that's not e2e encrypted?
Yes, which is why you can't use email to send sensitive personal data anymore.
That doesn't mean your mail provider isn't GDPR compliant. And with the proper agreements and technical steps in place, a business sending personal data via e-mail could be totally fine to. (a big one would be requiring transport encryption, which is a sensible choice for ActivityPub too, and made by implementations, e.g. Mastodon)
It's specific to the use case and what guarantees you have, and not a strict property of a protocol.
It's specific to the use case and what guarantees you have, and not a strict property of a protocol.
What technical steps? My business used to send personal data to normal people via email (their own data). Now we can't do that anymore.
Why can't you do that? GDPR does not require end-to-end email encryption.
Yes you can.
Why do you think that? Please explain with reference to the text of the directive.
No, you can have closed groups, by addressing a list of people (if I remember correctly, either explicitly listing people or referencing a list defined elsewhere)
GDPR compliance is handled on a per-instance basis. a lot of fediverse developers are EU residents, so i'm sure there they'll do what they can to make it easy for admins to become compliant.
personally, i don't care about GDPR since i'm not under EU jurisdiction. even so, none of my servers store logs and i don't require an email address to register.
personally, i don't care about GDPR since i'm not under EU jurisdiction. even so, none of my servers store logs and i don't require an email address to register.
Probably better than Riot: https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/787
Is ActivityPub-based federated Git part of that future?
https://github.com/git-federation/gitpub
https://github.com/git-federation/gitpub
Okay, it sounds plausible that it could be a good thing. But it seems that everything good on the Internet eventually gets weaponized by the bad guys, and these days it seems to happen faster than ever.
So maybe we should talk about the downsides of ActivityPub?
So maybe we should talk about the downsides of ActivityPub?
Well the bad guys have shown that they can make as many fake accounts as they want on facebook/twitter. If anything, they're encouraged to do so. I don't see how a decentralized network would be any worse in that regard at least.
I think spam is going to be a problem to control, it's also a matter of time before fake accounts are a thing.
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ActivityPub W3C Recommendation: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
Who's going to host thousands of petabytes of videos on behalf of others if not YouTube or a similar service?
As anyone involved on the major torrent communities knows, at least some people are willing to share the great artistic achievements of mankind, worthwhile documentary material, etc. You will usually find seeders for the great canon of films, ebooks, all manner of musical genres, etc. So, I assume that for videos that really matter to some loyal audience, at least some people will set aside storage space for that.
However, most of Google’s petabytes of video are inane "cat videos", people’s personal uploads that only ever attract one or two of their friends to look, or shills, and would it really be such a shame if their content couldn’t be hosted somewhere?
However, most of Google’s petabytes of video are inane "cat videos", people’s personal uploads that only ever attract one or two of their friends to look, or shills, and would it really be such a shame if their content couldn’t be hosted somewhere?
Yes? Aside from YouTube shows, one of the big things YouTube brought about was the ability for anyone to post a video online, even if it was just for friends and family. Saying, "Too bad, you're not popular so you don't get to have video hosting" is a huge step backwards.
Couldn't the original poster of said video be the one to seed it if it was so important to them that it be viewable to others. Why is the onus on a company or organization to host personal videos for free? (If I'm misrepresenting your stance feel free to call me on it - but that's what I'm taking away from your comment)
I'm not saying the onus should be on a company to do it for free. I'm saying that because that happened, it was one of the things that made online video really take off.
And, not everyone has the necessary stuff to be able to seed a video like that. A very large part of the world has their phone as their primary computing device. You're not gonna be able to seed a video from a phone on a cellular connection.
And, not everyone has the necessary stuff to be able to seed a video like that. A very large part of the world has their phone as their primary computing device. You're not gonna be able to seed a video from a phone on a cellular connection.
Communities would host the stuff that's valuable to them. That's a lot more manageable than trying to host everything on YouTube, and would just lead to instances dedicated to various topics (games, TV, music, sports, etc). With federation, it won't matter that these videos are all hosted across dozens or hundreds/thousands of instances.
Much like email, if ActivityPub becomes prevalent one day, there will be 2-3 main players hosting 80% of the traffic, and then the small independent players on the side. So Youtube will be a ActivityPub-compliant platform.
You could build a peer-tube compatible YouTube-like website. With control over the server, you could collect user data and probably stream ads over peer-tube. So there is possibly a profit incentive to hosting content.
I would totally host it if I got some money out of it. Maybe get paid for ads served through my computer.
In Germany we have rather socialism like structures like the "eingetranger Verein/eV" (membership association) or the "eingetragene Genossenschaft/eG" (incorporated cooperative)
These are made for things like that.
The idea with a eG is, the owners are also the customers. For example, if there is need of appartments, people found a eG to pool the money to build multi-appartment houses where they self live in later.
Since the customers are also the "stock owners" they elect the board.
I think this fits perfectly for these federated social networks.
These are made for things like that.
The idea with a eG is, the owners are also the customers. For example, if there is need of appartments, people found a eG to pool the money to build multi-appartment houses where they self live in later.
Since the customers are also the "stock owners" they elect the board.
I think this fits perfectly for these federated social networks.
Does anyone know if there are some good ActivityPub implementations in Node?
activitypub needs some kind of a badge/logo for recognition. Like the RSS button.
Was it necessary to change the title of this post a half dozen times?
Mastodon is a great Federated protocol, but the problem with /any/ federated protocol is that it is federated.
I've commented about this before, email is federated, and we saw what happened there: Everybody moved to gmail. Federation will lead to all the same systemic issues.
A better approach is to use P2P/decentralization, rather than a hosted instance owning your account/identity, you own your account/identity and you can reuse it across any/all services. Even if those services die or go away, you will always exist.
This isn't just "talk" though, we've spent the last 4 years of our lives working on giving away truly Free and Open (MIT/Zlib/Apache2) software to help people build stuff like this:
https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-wi...
Now there are dApps in production that have pushed terabytes of daily traffic. We're still working through some scaling up kinks, but we're making fast progress.
I've commented about this before, email is federated, and we saw what happened there: Everybody moved to gmail. Federation will lead to all the same systemic issues.
A better approach is to use P2P/decentralization, rather than a hosted instance owning your account/identity, you own your account/identity and you can reuse it across any/all services. Even if those services die or go away, you will always exist.
This isn't just "talk" though, we've spent the last 4 years of our lives working on giving away truly Free and Open (MIT/Zlib/Apache2) software to help people build stuff like this:
https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-wi...
Now there are dApps in production that have pushed terabytes of daily traffic. We're still working through some scaling up kinks, but we're making fast progress.
Nothing about GMail's dominance is related to centralization.
Everyone moved to Google because they offered (I think) a full gigabyte instead of the mere megabytes that was standard at the time. And it also had a really slick web interface that didn't require setting up software. People could finally use it for work, or to send pictures without managing space or an email client. "Never delete anything" was the big selling point.
Every mail host has a web interface now and provides lots of space, but it took too long. Inertia keeps GMail dominant, not centralization.
Everyone moved to Google because they offered (I think) a full gigabyte instead of the mere megabytes that was standard at the time. And it also had a really slick web interface that didn't require setting up software. People could finally use it for work, or to send pictures without managing space or an email client. "Never delete anything" was the big selling point.
Every mail host has a web interface now and provides lots of space, but it took too long. Inertia keeps GMail dominant, not centralization.
I've commented about this before, email is federated, and we saw what happened there: Everybody moved to gmail. Federation will lead to all the same systemic issues.
What are the systemic issues? Why did everybody move to gmail? I liked the ability to just let my email collect and search it. I liked the spam filtering. That's why everybody moved to gmail.
The systemic problems I saw with email had to do with server security and spam. How is it that those problems aren't solvable federated, but solvable P2P?
What are the systemic issues? Why did everybody move to gmail? I liked the ability to just let my email collect and search it. I liked the spam filtering. That's why everybody moved to gmail.
The systemic problems I saw with email had to do with server security and spam. How is it that those problems aren't solvable federated, but solvable P2P?
Everyone moved to gmail because it was free with a really high storage limit, which was unheard of at the time, and your email address would stay the same when your ISP changed. Hotmail was the hotness before that for pretty much the same reasons, minus the high storage limit.
@rainbowmverse @stcredzero @AnIdiotOnTheNet
It is true that people switched to gmail because of what you say. I don't disagree.
The point is that even with federated services, consumers will choose the most convenient one (and they should!).
But that still means users are dependent upon that service. Imagine if Facebook became ActivityPub protocol compliant.
They (like Google with Gmail) would have more resources to make the most convenient/amazing Mastodon experience. Is this itself bad? No. Is it that companies have more resources, that is bad? No.
It is simply that the following is better:
If you have a P2P/decentralized protocol, even if Google/Facebook were to create a killer app/experience for it that everybody "switched" to, there...
- data
- account
- identity
- friends
- etc.
Would and could still exist regardless of the backend (federated, centralized, or not). This is not true with ActivityPub / Mastodon.
Imagine if you could have switched to gmail and automatically "kept" all your emails? And then you could just as easily switch to a different competing email interface, and it "kept" all the emails/data you had in gmail?
That is the kicker here, by "kept" I do not mean "migrates from one to the other", by "kept" I mean the application interface just reused the same existing underlying data.
Extra point:
Very few people are going to switch for encryption/privacy alone. But if gmail/activitypub/facebook/mastodon was P2P/decentralized (like is possible with our system), then you can have competing apps (analog: gmail vs hotmail) that are still end-to-end encrypted (analog: neither gmail's or hotmail's servers would be able to read/decrypt your data) because that is happening in the app (the "client") not on the federated server (like with activitypub/mastodon) or the centralized server (gmail/facebook).
It is true that people switched to gmail because of what you say. I don't disagree.
The point is that even with federated services, consumers will choose the most convenient one (and they should!).
But that still means users are dependent upon that service. Imagine if Facebook became ActivityPub protocol compliant.
They (like Google with Gmail) would have more resources to make the most convenient/amazing Mastodon experience. Is this itself bad? No. Is it that companies have more resources, that is bad? No.
It is simply that the following is better:
If you have a P2P/decentralized protocol, even if Google/Facebook were to create a killer app/experience for it that everybody "switched" to, there...
- data
- account
- identity
- friends
- etc.
Would and could still exist regardless of the backend (federated, centralized, or not). This is not true with ActivityPub / Mastodon.
Imagine if you could have switched to gmail and automatically "kept" all your emails? And then you could just as easily switch to a different competing email interface, and it "kept" all the emails/data you had in gmail?
That is the kicker here, by "kept" I do not mean "migrates from one to the other", by "kept" I mean the application interface just reused the same existing underlying data.
Extra point:
Very few people are going to switch for encryption/privacy alone. But if gmail/activitypub/facebook/mastodon was P2P/decentralized (like is possible with our system), then you can have competing apps (analog: gmail vs hotmail) that are still end-to-end encrypted (analog: neither gmail's or hotmail's servers would be able to read/decrypt your data) because that is happening in the app (the "client") not on the federated server (like with activitypub/mastodon) or the centralized server (gmail/facebook).
It's just EEE, they'll slowly introduce better features (with a colossal marketing budget) and after they gain the userbase back they'll close it down. Until I see a solution for this problem I'm not going to advocate/adopt any of these services.
I thought Mastodon was default whitelist whereas email was default blacklist, no?
In other words, if you don't explicitly take action (i.e. follow) nobody can send you a message on Mastodon? I thought that was how it was implemented, but please correct me if I'm wrong.
In other words, if you don't explicitly take action (i.e. follow) nobody can send you a message on Mastodon? I thought that was how it was implemented, but please correct me if I'm wrong.
That's a very interesting project! I hope it catches on.
The tech and applications have existed for a while now, but adoption hasn't been comparable to large, centralized rivals.
I'd argue activityPub isn't the future, until it root causes the reason for anemic adoption.
Also, the best use case might not be in transferring an existing centralized app onto activity pub
I'd argue activityPub isn't the future, until it root causes the reason for anemic adoption.
Also, the best use case might not be in transferring an existing centralized app onto activity pub
What if there was a well-maintained library that continuously scrapes a given user's Facebook account, and publishes it to AP?
Or we could go one better and use the GDPR's "data portability" requirement to force Facebook to effectively offer such an API:
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/
A regulator / court would have to look at what is "technically feasible" for Facebook to implement, but given that there are multiple interoperating projects supporting ActivityPub (with much smaller resources than Facebook) I think it would be hard to argue that Facebook couldn't add ActivityPub support.
At a stretch, Facebook might argue that data portability only requires them (as data controllers) to publish your Facebook posts to specific accounts on other services, and doesn't require Facebook to accept inbound posts from competing platforms, but I don't know whether Facebook would want to be in a situation where their competitors have access to data on Facebook but Facebook doesn't have similar access to data from their users.
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/
A regulator / court would have to look at what is "technically feasible" for Facebook to implement, but given that there are multiple interoperating projects supporting ActivityPub (with much smaller resources than Facebook) I think it would be hard to argue that Facebook couldn't add ActivityPub support.
At a stretch, Facebook might argue that data portability only requires them (as data controllers) to publish your Facebook posts to specific accounts on other services, and doesn't require Facebook to accept inbound posts from competing platforms, but I don't know whether Facebook would want to be in a situation where their competitors have access to data on Facebook but Facebook doesn't have similar access to data from their users.
To be honest, the only data I would want to export out of Facebook would be "events" (event name, time, location, description, rsvps, image/video data, comments). Would that also be possible using the GDPR directive?
The relevant term of Article 20 of the directive seems to be "personal data", which means information relating to a person (thus being broader than the idea of "personally identifiable information").
If you ran the Facebook page for a club or society, then much of the metadata about the events you created for it would likely not be covered by the GDPR; but for a personal Facebook page, if you were publishing information about an event that you were organising and were planning to attend, it is more likely that a useful amount of metadata would be covered.
I don't know whether ActivityPub has a standardised way of handling event invitations and RSVPs, but the existence of things like the iCalendar format and its various implementations might go some way towards making the "technically feasible" argument.
If you ran the Facebook page for a club or society, then much of the metadata about the events you created for it would likely not be covered by the GDPR; but for a personal Facebook page, if you were publishing information about an event that you were organising and were planning to attend, it is more likely that a useful amount of metadata would be covered.
I don't know whether ActivityPub has a standardised way of handling event invitations and RSVPs, but the existence of things like the iCalendar format and its various implementations might go some way towards making the "technically feasible" argument.
That's not going to be very worthwhile unless that person is also interacting via AP. If the person is not interacting, then the followers would lose interest, and it becomes just a read-only account rather than the interactivity that most of us have been wanting.
The first question to answer is WHY user adoption remains anemic. Once there's an understanding of the cause, solution proposals make sense.
Well, to start, why would users want to move over away from the platforms they already are on? What benefits for them are there on these other platforms? And, what kind of marketing/outreach has been done to let them know about them?
Same as every other social network. Nobody I know is on there
I think I can name a single person I would follow who is on Mastodon, honestly can't think of a #2
I think I can name a single person I would follow who is on Mastodon, honestly can't think of a #2
How about browser extensions?
Nice tech! So where's the peer tube website I can watch and upload videos? Couldn't find it on Google or in TFA.
Thanks, I had found this. But you cannot upload here. But I figured it out now. You can create an account and upload stuff on peertube.social.
Now, some would say that, these services had the goal to make money and that's why they attracted capital and could hire top talent, but it doesn't change the fact that they had to have a strong product mentality to get to where they are today.
Most decentralized software I see have a project mentality based on idealism, but idealism is not enough. That's why desktop Linux failed to capture significant market share even if it costs zero to Joe Average to install it: it stayed at the level of idealism, of a project, while proprietary platforms like Windows an OSX had serious money and talent behind them because they weren't just projects.
On the other hand, Firefox and the Linux kernel are good example of successful open source softwares with a strong product mentality. Mozilla had a vision and they realized they need a strong product to fulfill that vision, so they needed to be able to pay their developers well, meaning they had to generates money. Same thing with the Linux kernel, which is backed by a lot of big companies.
So I guess what I'm saying is; if ActivityPub is to be the future, then there should be more than idealism behind it.