Friends, I need your help. I'm working on the Far Horizons chapter for the #ActivityPub book, where I discuss future applications for AP. I've got dating, enterprise software, job search, IOT, marketplace, and others.
What's a far-out application of ActivityPub you've thought of that I might not have?
@evan
I think it's complicated to build, but: Amazon Marketplace / Ali Baba etc -- an e-commerce system with federated carts, multiple suppliers, federated catalog/search, and choice of multiple payment processors. So it feels like a single large e-commerce site, but it's really a bazaar with lots of small sellers. Your data stays with your trusted local instance, which negotiates payments with other "store" instances.
@evan electronic decentralized decision making (I'm explicitly not saying "voting" cause I do not mean replacing actual votes but allowing communities to make decisions collectively)
@tante interesting! You got some context how that is an ActivityPub specific undertaking?
My brother has been involved in facilitating consense-finding mechanisms in self organizing structures and would sure love to see software applications. Thx!
@jakob you could use ActivityPub messages to model processes like "support option a", "cast a ballot for option b", "delegate my vote to @test" etc. Some service would need to aggregate things of course.
@tante Thanks! I can see how vote delegation via identities in a social network are useful properties of the protocol. But if I understand correctly, AP is a bit incidental and other software might work just as well. Got curious, if e.g. developments around liquid democracy or new frameworks at the intersection between tech and politics had gained renewed prominence.
@jakob not really from what I know. It's also a bit of a strange case because you probably might want to do that kind of stuff at server level where you have established trust relationships
@evan Space probes! A federated network of solar system (and beyond?) probes reporting their updates on science data readings, space weather, imagery etc. Various nation-state science programs, but later other institutions and private exploration firms, and enthusiasts join in. A layer of secure messaging allows for command and control.
@evan I think CMSs for classic media sites might be a cool part of the fediverse: They could bring their communities tonthe fediverse and the fediverse to their communities.
@evan bullish on the idea that we could build a better version of Nextdoor using ActivityPub. Lots of hyperlocal data exhausts from various silos could come together in a better way, could stimulate local conversations and democracy. (I'm an optimist! :) )
@evan Sharing your medical profile with new doctors, allowing them to communicate with each other easily on your case even if they aren’t in the same organization.
All the difficulties of privacy, security and government policy will make this a reach goal for sure, at least in the U.S., to the disadvantage of public health.
@evan I think ActivityPub could bring back webrings. If I write a blog post and add a tag to that post (either by adding a hashtag or just using the "tags" section in my CMS), a user could click on that tag and see all the other blog posts that mention that tag. Then they could filter to posts by authors they follow or by posts by other people the original author follows. Thus connecting totally different blogs based on a topic.
ActivityPub could do the same for search results on a blog.
@mapache@evan Was going to say this one. AP would work well for turn-based games such as Diplomacy. Or any digitalised turn-based board game, for that matter.
@andy@mapache@evan Hah no worries, I’m especially equipped for giving people a jonesing for something. And always happy to bring division and distrust into long-standing friendships by suggesting people play diplomacy 😁
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