Today, we're beginning to federate a selection of publishers based in Germany and the U.K. We've also introduced @FlipboardDE, a new profile for the Mastodon community in Germany. In the first test, we are partnering with 21 publishers to federate their profiles and Magazines. Follow the profile to see all the stories they are posting on Flipboard, or topically curated Magazines to get coverage on specific areas of interest. Here's a blogpost that explains more.
Here are all the accounts you can follow for federated publishers in the United Kingdom. To find their Magazines, simply search for the publisher profile and you should see a list of everything they're curating.
There’s about $5000 of budget ready for someone to help me build ActivityPub deeply into Known such that it can interoperate with Mastodon users. Email me at ben@benwerd.com if you’re interested.
What’s the BBC up to in the Fediverse? What have they learned so far from their experiments? And how is all this like the early days of the internet? In the latest episode of Dot Social, Flipboard CEO @mike chats with Ian Forrester (@cubicgarden), Senior Firestarter at @BBCRD. (How cool is that title, btw!)
Flipboard curators have seen over 100,000 boosts, likes and replies from people across the fediverse since April 11. Given this positive signal from the community, today we're federating another 100 accounts representing more than 2,500 Magazines about everything from climate to culture. Read more here:
With Meta beginning to test federation, there's a lot of discussion as to whether we should preemptively defederate with Threads. I made a post about the question, and it seems that opinions differ a lot among people on Kbin. There were a lot of arguments for and against regarding ads, privacy, and content quality, but I don't...
Meta joining the Fediverse is like AOL joining the internet: something that will bring a mass amount of people in, create some friction, but ultimately make the net better as more people federating on #Mastodon, #kbin, #lemmy, #pixelfed and other parts of the Fediverse make open protocols that much stronger.
New blog post: Understanding ActivityPub - Part 3: The State of Mastodon
Have you ever wondered why replies to a post show up on some instances but not on others? Or why the boost and like counters on your instance are different than on the original instance? It all boils down to how ActivityPub works. Find out all about it in my new blog post.
The #ActivityPub plugin for #Wordpress is an absolute game changer when it comes to reader engagement. I published a #blog post yesterday and it already has 8 comments and 7 of them are from #Fediverse. The total number of comments is actually much higher, the plugin doesn't handle reactions to comments yet.
Meanwhile the blogpost has received 4 views from #LinkedIn and 2 from #Facebook.
Back in late July, we took a chance and applied for the @NGIZero NGI0 Core August 2023 call for projects. Our application dealt almost entirely with bringing #ActivityPub to #NodeBB, and we're happy to announce that we've been officially greenlit!
Looking forward to working in tandem with some other highly esteemed colleagues @helge and @tchambers with their testing suites too 🙂 (edit: @J12t too!)
The other small part of our application dealt with much-needed accessibility audits and fixes 💪
Every now and then, technologists are able to translate their strongly held beliefs into action for the benefit of society. Sometimes these actions result in new features, apps or platforms but it's especially powerful when this happens at the protocol level.
In the latest episode of Dot Social I talk with @evan about how he helped get #ActivityPub started, how it's going, and what he hopes for next. Check it out here.
🆕 blog! “A (tiny, incomplete, single user, write-only) ActivityPub server in PHP”
I've written an ActivityPub server which only allows you to post messages to your followers. That's all it does. It won't record favourites or reposts. There's no support for following other accounts or receiving replies. It cannot delete o…
In order for the open social web to happen at scale, lots of companies and apps, big and small, need to adopt #ActivityPub. Threads is the largest player so far to do this and the implications are huge.
Why is #Threads doing this? Is federation just another feature or is it foundational to their entire experience? How is the Threads team thinking about moderation, monetization and privacy in these early days and going forward?
I asked @rklambo and @pcottle, two thoughtful and genuine leaders on the Threads team who joined me on the latest episode of #DotSocial. Check it out on our #PeerTube instance or wherever you get your podcasts.
It always amazes me in how in discussions of the future of #ActivityPub services that moderation is generally an afterthought.
Okay, we add nomadic identity, how does that impact the ability for servers to moderate, given all moderation tooling is built on user + server identity?
Okay, we add the ability to put people on lists without following, how does that impact moderation and privacy?
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?
My friend Evan Henshaw-Plath wrote recently about some concerns with ActivityPub. I want to go over his concerns one by one and give some assessment of how accurate and important I think they are. Rabble’s words in italics; my responses in just normal text.
User identities are tied to a server. This is only partially true; your user identity is tied to a domain, not a server. But most servers only handle one domain, and most people don’t move their domains between servers. We have a section on domain portability between servers on the ActivityPub Data Portability report.
Using domains is also how much of the Internet works. Email addresses are tied to a domain; Web sites are tied to a domain. You can move the domain between different implementations transparently. It’s a really robust architecture that has stood the test of time for almost 50 years.
Users can’t migrate between servers. Partially true. Rabble covers the essentials; you can move followers and not much else. It’s also possible to move your “stuff” between identities; that’s most of what our Data Portability task force is working on.
On a single server, it is impossible to change your username! Somewhat true. ActivityPub identities are URLs like https://social.example/user/vtles1XgZkPUEulBsFmRX . That identity URL is immutable; you can’t change it. Some implementations include a username in that url, like https://other.example/user/evanp. With that kind of server software, it’s true, you can’t change the username.
Also, we use a standard called Webfinger that maps an identity string like username@domain to an URL. You can read about it in the ActivityPub Webfinger report. Some servers use that string, instead of the ActivityPub ID, as the unique ID for a remote user. That’s discouraged, but if someone does that, changing your user ID will make you no longer findable for those other servers. I think as we stabilize our use of WebFinger, some of these usages are going to get better.
Fediverse servers have total control over your account and data. True. This is the “federation” part of the fediverse. It’s how Web sites and email work. Don’t use a fediverse server without a good trust relationship with your server admin; ideally someone you have a business relationship with, or your employer, or your university. Same goes for email!
It also means that if you control your own server, you have total control over your account and data. That’s a feature, not a bug.
Another option is using a cooperative server, like cosocial.ca or social.coop. A cooperative is a legal structure in which members pay for and manage their own service. I think cooperatives are awesome.
The fediverse is a network of fiefdoms, each server admin having total control over their users. This seems about the same as the previous statement, but OK. I think the key strength of the fediverse here is that we can have dozens of different models for server governance — coops, enterprises, city libraries, family servers, individual servers. That level of experimentation is a feature, not a bug. Governance is not baked into the protocol.
Each kind of fediverse server is isolated. This one is just plain wrong. ActivityPub is based on an open data standard called Activity Streams 2.0 (AS2) which models social data. There is an extensive standard vocabulary that can represent Web content like text, images, video and audio, and the social graph, but also well-known social interactions like check-ins, events, and groups. More importantly, Activity Streams 2.0 is extensible, meaning you can add properties to existing types, or whole new types of objects or interactions. And every ActivityPub server is built to handle AS2.
What is true is that we have had a lot of servers that only handle a subset of the AS2 vocabulary, and reject content they don’t know how to handle. This is mostly due to mimicking the siloed social networks; we’ve gotten used to thinking of different social networks for different kinds of content. I think this is changing, especially as new kinds of content hit the network. Developers are just learning how to effectively handle extension content with fallback representations. I look forward to this improving over time.
The fediverse has no privacy; there is no system of end-to-end encrypted messaging. The first part is false; you can mark your posts as followers-only, or directed to a single person, or a group of people. Servers enforce this privacy. You can also mark that you don’t want your public posts to be indexable or your public account to be discoverable.
However, the second part is true; we don’t have end-to-end encryption. So, if you send a private message to someone on another server, you message can be read by both your admin and their admin. It’s stored in the clear on both servers. This is also how email works, as well as most direct messages on commercial social networks. However, it’s something worth working on. I’ve sketched out an architecture for end-to-end encryption over ActivityPub, and I’ve got a proposal out to work on it for Summer of Protocols. I think it will be good to level this up!
The fediverse has no system for micropayments. This is true. The fediverse is also first and foremost for social networking — connecting to friends, family, colleagues and neighbours. Most of these interactions are not mediated by payment; in fact, payment cheapens those interactions.
However, there are other relationship types on the fediverse — supporting creators, journalists, or publishers. The main way to do this today is with paid subscriptions; for example, you can subscribe to evanplus@prodromou.pub to get access to premium content I publish. You have to send me US$5 out-of-band or I won’t approve the follow; that’s the state of play right now on the fediverse.
I think in-band payments are kind of cool for this kind of work, as well as for marketplaces — buying and selling services or goods over the fediverse. I think the easiest structure is adding payment URLs like a PayPal account, or blockchain wallets like a Bitcoin Lightning address.
Lastly, and most importantly for me, the culture of fediverse server admins and developers is vindictive. I don’t think this is the case; I love the culture of the fediverse, which is playful, conversational, and collaborative.
I think there are a plenty of good points in Rabble’s critique, but there’s one way that I think he’s extremely wrong. There is still a lot to do in the ActivityPub ecosystem, but we have the architecture and extension mechanisms to make them possible. It’s totally not required to go start a whole new social protocol to build those things in from scratch. In fact, it’s a real mistake; it’s far better to work from the existing standard and build on it. Open standards like ActivityPub have a legitimacy that ad hoc systems like Nostr can never have, and it’s the reason that there is so much interesting development going on in the ActivityPub world.
I'm just a humble country chicken admin, but I've been thinking a lot about the cost of the fediverse and how we can improve it for all of the instances... in a coop kind of way
The cost of handing all of the media is THE major problem for me atm.
A case for preemptively defederating with Threads
With Meta beginning to test federation, there's a lot of discussion as to whether we should preemptively defederate with Threads. I made a post about the question, and it seems that opinions differ a lot among people on Kbin. There were a lot of arguments for and against regarding ads, privacy, and content quality, but I don't...