Every time I take a stab at building for the Fediverse, I'm immediately drained for motivation by the ambiguities and contradictions of the AP/AS2 family of specs.
Oh, you want to do some validation of the actor property of activities posted to the Outbox? Good luck. It can have any number of values, and can even (per examples in the AS2 spec) mention actors from different instances.
Both Rachel and Peter suggest that some moderation functionality could/should become part of the protocol stack. #AtProto does composable moderation and that is really cool. Peter hopes that #ActivityPub may learn from it and evolve in this direction.
"In 2024, for the first time, it finally feels like we have a critical mass of people and platforms who are interested in rewilding the internet to bring back what we lost, and create something new. ... There's a palpable feeling that this just might be the year of the open web."
It's hard to imagine #StackOverflow made their decision without considering the fate #Twitter and #Reddit suffered. That they willingly chose to burn the remaining goodwill they had with their users is bewildering.
Any social web platform could implement E2EE for themselves, but a standardized format will enable users of different Fediverse services to DM each other through the lens of the social platform of their choice.
If you're a #fedidev working on an #ActivityPub/Mastodon-compatible server, don't forget that the WebFinger JRD media type is "application/jrd+json" and not "application/json". The early @feditest test results show this is a common mistake.
It occurs to me that while #LinkedData is a fairly bad choice as the extensibility mechanism for #ActivityPub protocol, it should be in theory a rather good choice for the knowledge network and navigation thereof, of the content aggregating into the various federated SO instances.
TBL once asked about using #SolidProject to create a #FAQ and I suggested adding federation to the mix:
Former CEO of Twitter wanted to build a social protocol no-one can control, like SMTP or HTTP for social media. Bluesky’s ATProto was supposed to be an open source protocol that Twitter could eventually utilize, but then Musk happened and Bluesky started taking it to the wrong direction and everything fell apart in Dorsey’s mind.
A very revealing interview. I now see even more future in W3C’s ActivityPub.
I have the feeling that Activity Pub and other new 'protocols' have a different meaning of the term 'protocol'. I mean these APIs and services would not be handled by the IETF. Or do I miss something? #Fediverse#ActivityPub
I like @Mastodon, however I am also flirting with the #XMPP could-have-been, @movim as a platform to discover. If only #Movim had proper #ActivityPub compatibility.