The rise of the Fediverse is only accelerating as companies like Mozilla and WordPress make moves to support it. Even Meta is rumored to be working on a decentralized social network.
But there's one particular start-up that seems determined to go its own way.
I spoke with @tchambers and @evan about what's driving the Fediverse migration - and the obstacles that can thwart some would-be users.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/mastodon-social-media
#fediverse #mastodon
But there's one particular start-up that seems determined to go its own way.
I spoke with @tchambers and @evan about what's driving the Fediverse migration - and the obstacles that can thwart some would-be users.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/mastodon-social-media
#fediverse #mastodon
Decentralized Social Media Rises as Twitter Melts Down
Mastodon is just the start—here comes the FediverseMatthew S. Smith (IEEE Spectrum)
Evan Prodromou
•This may be surprising for people who have known me for a long time. I've generally been supportive of trying new protocols and tools.
Evan Prodromou
•Building extensions on top of AP is useful and necessary, but starting over with incompatible protocols is a bad plan.
Blue Sky in particular is a bad project. It started after AP was standardized. The team had access to many many people's time and all the docs and experience of the fediverse.
But they opted to make a snowflake protocol instead. I think because they want to capture value at the protocol level.
Don't use Blue Sky.
Evan Prodromou
•I think the acquisition of Twitter raised the stakes significantly. We need to all be working towards growing this network. Sowing confusion by launching incompatible products today may be well-intentioned, but it's clearly counterproductive.
Evan Prodromou
•My sincerest hope is that the Blue Sky team has a change of heart and starts building on well-established protocol standards like AP.
If not, there is a long-shot option that they will be able to cannibalize the existing fediverse, eliminate us, then use that momentum to push out to even more users. I think this is really unlikely.
So the next best option is that they fail quickly and are forgotten soon.
Samir Al-Battran
•Evan Prodromou
•Evan Prodromou
•We know from Metcalfe's law that a network that takes up half the available audience doesn't have 1/2 the value to users; it has 1/4 the value. The division makes each network much worse.
Most people and companies, when presented with the choice, won't bother. They'll wait until someone else figures it out.
Evan Prodromou
•vruz
•They are not what they purport to be.
Luke
•Evan Prodromou
•22
•Evan Prodromou
•Evan Prodromou
•Evan Prodromou
•22
•Longer answer: no innocent 😇 I have long admired the decentralization of platforms like Secure Scuttlebutt—decentralized down to the physical network layer! Works over bicycle-net, sneaker-net!—even though their use of Merkle trees and resulting inability to delete/forget made me sadly give up on SSB. I’d love to see a lighter more energy-efficient ActivityPub. The Mastodon REST API is also incredibly heavyweight (several kilobytes for a single toot).
But. Your point is very well-taken.
Evan Prodromou
•I think a low energy implementation of AP would be great. A lot of the fields in AS2 are optional.
I think there are some best practices that could work to make an AP server that is in low-power mode until the client connects, and then delivers outbound activities and solicits delivery of inbound ones.
John Panzer
•Evan Prodromou
•I think it's an interesting problem. A server running in low-energy mode most of the time would miss any incoming messages.
So you'd need a way to signal to other servers that your low-energy server is back online, and wants to collect any incoming messages.
One way to notify them is by delivering outgoing messages. We should probably make a best practice that if you're doing exponential backoff, and you get an incoming message from the server, it's a good time to retry.
Kevin Marks
•Mike Garuccio
•That feels like an interesting implementation but I’m not convinced this needs to be solved at the application layer. An idling raspberry pi 3 pulls ~1.5w, some hardware likely gets that below 1w at idle, and I’d applicable for all use-cases, not just a bespoke AP implementation.
Evan Prodromou
•Mike Garuccio
•it may actually be possible to make that transparent to the rest of the network with some creative use of DNS and PKI but hard to say exactly how much benefit there is to a setup like that
22
•This is very much a Mastodon complaint, not ActivityPub! I’m hopeful Mastodon will add a GraphQL layer or some mechanism to let clients ask for subsets of data, but no doubt there’s going to be (already is!) a lot of innovation in this area.... show more
This is very much a Mastodon complaint, not ActivityPub! I’m hopeful Mastodon will add a GraphQL layer or some mechanism to let clients ask for subsets of data, but no doubt there’s going to be (already is!) a lot of innovation in this area.
John Panzer
•One must ask some hard questions about an effort whose predictable outcome is to do that.
Sebastian Lasse
•just btw
et al. Bluesky is the name for the bad umbrella and the bad protocol is called "The AT Protocol" - don't confuse it with the existing "AT Protocol" cause those people were angry (until their twitter profile got banned).
Also "AT" makes clear that it is independent from both AP and twitter. Just keep in mind, you can “speed access up” if you homage Elmo.
On the other hand, specifying extensions for ActivityPub is mostly easy cause it's just open and transparent Linked Data with a brillant Core Vocab.
Rather think some `type` like `Relationship`, `Profile` and `Collection` are so much underrated in fedi-reality.
And also `Question`:
I mean, some people really love polls 😀 but if we force `Question` to be poll only, we can't federate surveys. Only opinion, no knowledge…
And I think we should just have 1 meeting to talk about
• enhancing ActivityPub Client To Server
• Prodromou & Snell brainstorming ideas from old protocols like ActionHandler which didn't make it in the final spec.... show more
just btw
et al. Bluesky is the name for the bad umbrella and the bad protocol is called "The AT Protocol" - don't confuse it with the existing "AT Protocol" cause those people were angry (until their twitter profile got banned).
Also "AT" makes clear that it is independent from both AP and twitter. Just keep in mind, you can “speed access up” if you homage Elmo.
On the other hand, specifying extensions for ActivityPub is mostly easy cause it's just open and transparent Linked Data with a brillant Core Vocab.
Rather think some `type` like `Relationship`, `Profile` and `Collection` are so much underrated in fedi-reality.
And also `Question`:
I mean, some people really love polls 😀 but if we force `Question` to be poll only, we can't federate surveys. Only opinion, no knowledge…
And I think we should just have 1 meeting to talk about
• enhancing ActivityPub Client To Server
• Prodromou & Snell brainstorming ideas from old protocols like ActionHandler which didn't make it in the final spec.
Helge
•What do you have in mind with: "Building extensions on top of AP is useful and necessary"?
Are you referring to Fediverse Enhancement Proposals or do you have something else in mind?
Thanks!
fep
Codeberg.orgEvan Prodromou
•Building on top of AP is easy, because of Activity Streams.
Adding new verbs and object types is quick and painless. On top of this, existing AP processors can handle unknown verbs and object types, because every activity and object has a fallback HTML and optional image representation.
Does that answer your questions?
Bob Wyman
•I'd like to see either the existing "FEP" process, or something like it, incorporated into the work of the SWICG. Whatever issues may have caused folk to splinter off from the core W3C community group should be addressed and resolved.
We may want to implement decentralized systems, but having some centralization to the standards maintenance process will make that easier for everyone.
Matthias Flor
•Lesenswerter thread von @evan
Evan Prodromou
•They are not critical design flaws.
Dying servers is only a problem if you don't use your own domain. We're in an intermediary period; more people and orgs will run their own servers in the future
Scalability isn't a problem reserved for AP. Fanout of messages to thousands of recipients takes time and resources. True in siloed networks as well as federated.
Search is not a technical but a cultural issue in the fediverse.
Evan Prodromou
•We have a rich representation for a link ("Link") in Activity Streams 2.0. Before sending out a post with a link in it, the sending server should do ONE opengraph query, and add the metadata as a Link to the outgoing message.
Evan Prodromou
•