ActivityPub: a federated social web standard

The standard is awesome and looks well-designed. The biggest issue is that it was lead <i>solely</i> by the people around Mastodon&#x2F;Pump.io&#x2F;Mediagoblin. While not a bad thing per se (on the contrary, it shows a commitment to a free internet), it means that there is little chance for it to penetrate the general (social) networking scene (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, VK etc.).<p>Did you try reaching out to each of those major social networking websites to offer collaboration on this standard?<p>P.S. I understand that ActivityPub represents a radical shift from the centralised social networking, but if I remember correctly Facebook, Google and IBM previously collaborated on open widgets and related functionality until the efforts fell apart: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;OpenSocial&#x2F;spec" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;OpenSocial&#x2F;spec</a>

Small section about how Spam should be handled somehow by a server. Sigh. How about we build a federated spam&#x2F;harassment prevention system first?<p>I have little hope that a spec not designed to reduce&#x2F;stop harassment up front can have it bolted on later successfully.

So, about that federated DELETE operation. In a decentralized network, we can&#x27;t unilaterally delete a shared piece of content; that is one of the main features of decentralization. Even providing that verb seems kind of deceptive to me; it implies that content that enters the network, could conceivably be purged, which will affect how people use the network. Perhaps DISOWN would be a more accurate verb, especially if it would only be accepted from the original owner.

We know how to build protocols for federated systems - there must be at least a dozen serious efforts at federated social media by now.<p>What we don&#x27;t know (or what we&#x27;ve forgotten) is how to get people to use federated systems.

Cool, open standards are a good thing :) good discussion going on here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;w3c&#x2F;activitypub&#x2F;issues&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;w3c&#x2F;activitypub&#x2F;issues&#x2F;</a> if anyone has questions on the protocol or just doesn&#x27;t understand some of the writing.

This is neat stuff. I see immediately how it interacts with things like Mastodon and MediaGoblin. I&#x27;d like to see how it could be made to interact with IndieWeb stuff. Particularly, how minimal could you make an ActivityPub server and still have it federate with the things you want it to federate with?

Social networks function in the context of society. Which is messy. Developing a system that doesn&#x27;t have very harmful failure modes is not easy. And if it&#x27;s a federated standard, there is no easy way to fix it after the fact. I&#x27;d recommend that anyone working on something like that (or really any social network) read this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.twitterandteargas.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.twitterandteargas.org&#x2F;</a><p>Evan Williams, a Twitter founder recently said: “I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place. I was wrong about that.”

I really like the idea of a social web standard.<p>This seems like a very constricting protocol, though: the one-to-one correspondence between a user and a server means I need to individually post my activity to the &quot;inbox&quot; of everyone who wants to read it (or they poll my &quot;outbox&quot; - I&#x27;m not sure). Not a recipe for an efficient system. It&#x27;s called ActivityPub, so this was clearly a design decision to meet the goal of being decentralized.<p>But I probably wouldn&#x27;t implement this standard in a project unless I modified it a bit so that many clients could share a server.

I think It looks more like a mashup of Facebook &amp; Twitter.<p>It would really be good is some of the actions e.g liking, following, were more generalized.<p>For instance, instead of &quot;like&quot; you could have an entity called &quot;Response&quot; that could refer to a comment&#x2F;like&#x2F;upvote&#x2F;downvote etc

ActivityPub is awesome, and I&#x27;m excited that it&#x27;s reached this stage. Looking forward to the core Known platform supporting it.

&quot;They just want to be in control of their data&quot;<p>sure .. but that&#x27;s not a problem massive centralised services can solve.<p>If you put your data on someone else&#x27;s computer then who REALLY has control of it?<p>whom you trust is of course your choice and theres no &quot;one size fits all&quot; re any of it.<p>re: opensocial<p>That wasn&#x27;t about federation.<p>the scope of it was closer to webapps.<p>remember Google Gadgets? it was pretty much based on and extending that.<p>btw I think from memory Myspace was part of that group and implemented some parts of the opensocial spec.<p>I don&#x27;t remember Facebook being involved with Opensocial.

Looking at the ID format in the first example, I have to recommend against including the protocol (&quot;https:&quot;) in a key&#x2F;ID. This makes it hard for people to later upgrade from HTTP to HTTPS, because it breaks all of those references. It also makes it hard to try out new protocols side by side, like IPFS.

I like this. Very Much.<p>Adding &#x27;Build ActivityHub test server&#x27; to my ever growing to-do list! If we build it, THEY* will come.<p>*Everyone else, obv.

I don&#x27;t see any mention of encryption in this standard. Are all messages public? I&#x27;d like to see this using public and private keys so that it is guaranteed only intended recipients (e.g. people on my friends list) can read my messages. This is especially important given the federated nature of this.

The BuddyCloud [0] project also came up with a standard proposal. Is this related to that work ?<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;buddycloud&#x2F;buddycloud-xep" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;buddycloud&#x2F;buddycloud-xep</a>

Interesting standard. I&#x27;m also working on an app that you would categorize as an open source social media platform:<p>SubNode -&gt; <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sbnode.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sbnode.com</a>