ActivityPub could be the future

https://blog.digitalscofflaw.com/articles/activitypub-could-be-the-future/

by jaywink • 8 years ago

288 128 8 years ago

blog.digitalscofflaw.com

jtbayly4• 8 years ago

Can somebody explain how blogging platforms are benefitted by activity pub and why there isn’t a Wordpress plugin?

StavrosK7• 8 years ago

As the author says, you can follow my blog from your Mastodon account, so you see my posts as Mastodon toots, and you can reply to them and leave a comment on my post. I don't know why there isn't a Wordpress plugin, I guess nobody wrote one yet.

jtbayly4• 8 years ago

What if I don’t want your comments on my site?

And will all of your followers’ comments show up too?

Is this essentially just the same as the trackbacks I already get from other Wordpress posts that link to my page, but with every single tweet (or rather, “toot” (oh, pardon me, how rude. Can you please tell me where the bathroom is?)) generating a trackback?

zaarn4• 8 years ago

I think some WP Plugins are in the works.

The short version would be that AP would mean you could get the benefits of both having an RSS Feed and a Comment Section without having to run either as a seperate plugin.

If WP had an AP Plugin, people could follow your blog from their Mastodon Account or Plume or any other platform that allows following. They can share and like your blog and that gets federated back, you get those directly to your blog.

People can respond to your blog and it would show up as comments and they could discuss it off and on your blog.

Though I don#t think AP is panacea, I do think it could enable a lot of interop between previously disconnected platforms.

severine• 8 years ago

I think some WP Plugins are in the works.

There's some info here:

https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg/2016-06-06-minutes#AS2_impl...

https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitystream-extension/#desc...

wslh3• 8 years ago

I wonder what is the best practice for building a search engine or mining data around ActivityPub. Centralization comes naturally when a search engine or analytics is needed.

I imagine a good search engine can be open sourced and data be available to anyone to analyze but the eyeballs and ads will end up in a search engine like Google.

mxuribe2• 8 years ago

Search - or more importantly, discovery of content - in a decentralized/federated ecosystem is where google should experiment on a bit more. This is where there is a gap in the decentralized/federated arena. (I acknowledge this even though I am a proud supporter of decentralization!) If google can bring value in this arena, then they can pivot their G+ product and offer it as an underlying platform to provide ActivityPub clients, etc. It could be used to undercut facebook, etc., and make G+ less of a ghost town. For example, people use GSuite to use the gmail email front-end, but leverage their own domain name. What if google pivots G+ to be an activityPub server, allowing paying customers to leverage their own domain name (on google's infrastructure) to interact with the fediverse? And for those users who don;t know/care about decentralization, they think they're getting their own "instance of a social network maintained by google". I think there is a market for this.

TekMol6• 8 years ago

How is a site like mastodon.social different from a site like Twitter? There is no guarantee that the site will continue to operate or continue to provide API access.

I have the feeling that people confuse 'federated' (aka provides API access) with 'distributed' (aka does not rely on specific nodes).

StavrosK7• 8 years ago

If it doesn't, you go to mastodon.host or mastodon.whatever or just use your own instance.

TekMol6• 8 years ago

The same holds for Twitter or any other service. You can stop using it and use something else.

zaarn4• 8 years ago

Federated does mean that the network overall does not rely on a specific node.

There is no true Mastodon instance, mastodon.social is merely the biggest. I run my own mastodon instance and can federate just fine.

Federation is distributed to some extend. However, unlike pure p2p where everyone has a node, it's more like little towns and cities where people live together voluntarily. Each one is a different size, each has it's own rules and if people don't like the rules, they can leave and go elsewhere.

older2• 8 years ago

mastodon.social is not even the biggest. Some of the Japanese ones is the biggest for sure.

cmiles742• 8 years ago

From the customer standpoint, I think the only real difference is that you could host your own instance and take part in the network yet still "own" your posts. I say "own" pretty loosely since they get broadcast across the network.

But in this case, even if mastododon.social went down, your posts would still be available on the network and through your own (and other) mastodon instances.

In terms of the API, this is a open source project and it needs to communicate with other nodes in the network; I believe this puts real limits on how much they can change the API.

TekMol6• 8 years ago

But is running your own instance worth anything? People use social media mainly to gather followers and likes. So there needs to be a reputation at play provided by the service provider to make sure those are real. Having a gazillion followers and a trillion likes on your own instance will not make you a celebrity.

wslh3• 8 years ago

I have the feeling that people confuse 'federated' (aka provides API access) with 'distributed' (aka does not rely on specific nodes).

I think you mean federated vs. decentralized since federated is also distributed.

And before people jump into a blockchain discussion remember that blockchain ⊂ decentralization, so, in general, you (probably) don't need a blockchain to decentralized an application.

TekMol6• 8 years ago

The info 'xyz liked this post' is not distributed as far as I know. It's not cryptographically signed or anything. It's just to be believed based on the reputation of the site the post is on. Or am I missing something?

StavrosK7• 8 years ago

I saw the article and thought I'd add ActivityPub support to my site, but it looks like static sites can't really do ActivityPub, is that right? I'd need a server to do the posting/receiving.

zaarn4• 8 years ago

To my knowledge, yes. Though in theory it should be possible to cobble together a static file version that is atleast capable of returning enough data that other users can see it as an AP post and share it, though liking or replies won't work.

cjslep5• 8 years ago

While that's true of ActivityPub, the data format it uses (ActivityStreams, which a form of JSON) could be hosted on a static site separate from the HTML version people are reading, which would at least make the content reference-able on the ActivityPub federated network.

StavrosK7• 8 years ago

Yeah, that might be worth it. Do you know how easy it would be to output something like that?

pmlnr2• 8 years ago

Good. Can you please point me at working implementation examples?

floatboth• 8 years ago

You can use a third party (or self hosted, but still separate) server for that.

For Webmentions on static sites, people use https://webmention.io

You can actually probably combine that with https://fed.brid.gy to interact with ActivityPub sites as well!

StavrosK7• 8 years ago

That sounds like the most likely solution, but I didn't know they already had those, thanks for the tip!

teleclimber2• 8 years ago

Third party services are very helpful and I'm grateful for them, but I wish it were easier to host personal server applications on the internet. I'd like to be able to host an ActivityPub server myself with only a minimum amount of fuss.

ShadowX53• 8 years ago

I didn't get a clear understanding of what ActivityPub is from your article.

est2• 8 years ago

universal API for realtime feeds.

jtbayly4• 8 years ago

Where the feeds are bidirectional, no?

est2• 8 years ago

We need a logo/badge for ActivityPub, just like the RSS icon, for awareness.

pmlnr2• 8 years ago

We need simple implementations examples for ActivityPub. For example, a how to add ActivityPub to static websites would be a good start.

NoGravitas7• 8 years ago

Gargron has been writing a few basic tutorials on the Mastodon blog lately: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/categories/guides/

yRetsyM• 8 years ago

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ActivityPub-logo-sym...

From: https://activitypub.rocks/ And: https://gitlab.com/dustyweb/activitypub.rocks/blob/master/st...

quadrangle• 8 years ago

That logo is excellent!

Tangent: I hate the use of "rocks" as a generic "is great" trend in our langage.

kickscondor3• 8 years ago

I don’t know. It feels like SOAP - or XML-RPC. These protocols that are just layered on top of HTTP keep coming, but they never seem to gain adoption. In part because - what are static websites supposed to do to participate?

This was the beauty of RSS. I didn’t love RSS, because it eliminated all the styling from blog posts - but it did achieve real widespread usage.

rainbowmverse• 8 years ago

I wouldn't mind if AP-using projects like Mastodon also let you subscribe to RSS feeds. That way RSS could keep doing what it's good at while AP handles everything else.

NoGravitas7• 8 years ago

You can syndicate static websites with ActivityPub, pretty much the same way as you do with RSS, except you're generating JSON-LD (ugh) rather than XML (ugh). I've seen a proof-by-example, but I don't have the URL where I can easily find it. The downside is that Mastodon, the most used AP server, doesn't provide a way of subscribing to a static AP feed (it might work if you also had a simple webfinger script to point to it).

I actually like the 'eliminate all the styling' feature of RSS. It's kind of a pleasure to read blog posts and news articles in my mobile feed reader (tt-rss for android).

jtbayly4• 8 years ago

Except for when the content wasn’t included. That was the problem with RSS. It could never decide whether it was supposed to be distributing the content or distributing notifications of the content.

That decision was made by the drive for “pageviews” both by ad-driven pages and others that just wanted to know how many people were reading.

kickscondor3• 8 years ago

Okay, interesting - maybe this article: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/06/how-to-implement-a-bas... ?

I appreciate the pointer! I expect that ActivityPub is the right idea, but just needs to be refined by competitors. Much like XML-RPC and SOAP eventually gave way to REST. It could be the real deal, though.

teleclimber2• 8 years ago

what are static websites supposed to do to participate?

Yes the challenges of hosting applications (anything that serves dynamic data, like an ActivityPub server) on the internet is a real problem. Hosting a static site is easy, you have lots of choices, and it's highly portable. Don't like your host? Move.

But at the moment, hosting anything dynamic is an order of magnitude more complex to set up and to maintain. You either have to spin up a whole VM, or go to closed "serverless" providers.

I just started working on a project that I hope will make hosting personal server apps trivial.

Vinnl• 8 years ago

I like Mastodon and ActivityPub, and I like that they're seeing relatively broad adoption. That said, I'm not hopeful for the future. If it ever actually sees broad adoption beyond the tech community, all Facebook or whatever comes next has to do is incorporate ActivityPub posts into Facebook, perhaps even send back Facebook comments to those posts, but not publish Facebook-originated content. At that point, you can either be on Facebook and follow all your Facebook and ActivityPub friends, or use Mastodon or whatever and only follow your ActivityPub friends.

And even if Facebook does not do that, if a particular ActivityPub client becomes wildly popular, it could do the same, much like how Google Talk started out as interoperable with XMPP, only to ditch it when Google Talk was popular.

seibelj• 8 years ago

If a major player like Facebook adopted ActivityPub it would be enormous validation and success, and I seriously doubt they would ever do that.

tambourine_man2• 8 years ago

Yeah, if they did, we’d know the had already lost

wastedhours• 8 years ago

Without wanting to fall back on an old trope, but: "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" feels pretty apt here.

Semaphor• 8 years ago

It's what they both did with xmpp

librexpr3• 8 years ago

I think that most instances would block Facebook if they tried to do something like that. They'd have nothing to gain and everything to lose by allowing FB to get away with it.

As for your other point, it's also possible it will go the way of GMail, which is still compatible with other email providers. I think a large part of it depends on how big ActivityPub gets before a GMastodon appears.

Email is pervasive and decently well diversified on the web, with multiple email providers, and many businesses and users not being on GMail, partially due to inertia (they already had an email before GMail became big). Maybe GMail could afford to cut off emails from external providers, but it would be a big risk, and it would definitely break a large part of the web.

If ActivityPub does the same, with websites integrating it into their user experience, and news organizations and businesses self-hosting or joining various instances, I expect it would gain the same kind of resilience as email for when a GMastodon shows up.

So I'm not too pessimistic about this. The more pressing concern is increasing adoption, IMO.

NoGravitas7• 8 years ago

GMail is starting to close off compatibility with other email providers, in small ways. AMP for email[0], and GMail's Confidential Mode[1].

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/13/amp-for-email-is-a-terribl... [1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/07/between-you-me-and-goo...

s73v3r_2• 8 years ago

"I think that most instances would block Facebook if they tried to do something like that."

I don't think so. Doing so would mean that their users wouldn't be able to get events from the biggest network; the one where most people are on. While today, most users of ActivityPub are likely to be people who are against Facebook and not wanting to interact with it, if ActivityPub becomes huge, then more people would be using it that are ambivalent about FB or even users of it. Blocking FB would mean that those people leave the instances, because they're no longer able to get a significant amount of their messages.

AJ007• 8 years ago

The big challenge for publishers right now is censorship. Platform censorship happens in many ways:

- Visibility hidden because an algorithm in a non-chronological news feed thinks your content won't get enough engagement

- Visibility hidden because you aren't buying advertising

- Account banning or throttling because of grey area content (everything from nipples to politics)

- "De-monetization" (Youtube specific)

Most people using the internet are now aware of these problems. It used to be a fringe issue that like people doing SEO and spammers thought about.

Will it be easy for a platform to convince content publishers to return after it has chased them off the platform?

Facebook's usage exploded just as Myspace's was struggling to keep their servers up and was users were being hammered by very invasive ads. Once those users started logging on to Facebook instead, they never looked back. May be it was inevitable, but there was a very clear value proposition to users and it benefited Facebook immensely. The users were literally chased off of Myspace, by Myspace, and went to Facebook.

My hope is that we will get open protocol adaptation instead of startups building another walled garden to replace Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Youtube. Open protocols are better for everyone, including startups.

(and few things scare me more than a startup that is going to "fix email" by creating a new walled platform.)

guelo• 8 years ago

Censorship is not the root problem. The root problem is spam. For example, the main reason that we all choose one of the giant tech corps to host our email is because of spam. Spam defenses are why it's so difficult to run your own mail server these days. Thus spam causes email provider centralization even though though there is no network effect lock in. Then with centralization you get the secondary problems such as censorship.

eeZah7Ux3• 8 years ago

Google Talk started out as interoperable with XMPP, only to ditch it when Google Talk was popular

This behavior is so common it needs a name. Embrace and Switch? Embrace, grow and switch?

edhelas• 8 years ago

XMPP spoke XML in an age of JSON

Damn, let's ditch all the XML protocols then, XHTML first :D

What does "age of JSON" means exactly? Those are two different technologies for different purposes.

Even if XMPP tried to move to JSON, how can you do namespaces in JSON for example?

You want ActivityPub in XMPP ? Just take Pubsub and put Atom in it, those are two stable and proven technologies, they fits perfectly (it's just one namespace in another) and with many many benefits.

Here is a news feed built on top of XMPP Pubsub https://nl.movim.eu/?node/pubsub.movim.eu/Movim, and yes there's also an Atom 1.0 feed generated from it, because it's easy to just extract the (validated) Atom content from Pubsub and put it back to a proper HTTP page.

zinid• 8 years ago

age of JSON

Yeah, modern and shiny JSON. IT is now a subdivision of the fashion industry. Suck it up ;)

PurpleRamen2• 8 years ago

how can you do namespaces in JSON for example?

For what is this neccessary?

gmueckl2• 8 years ago

Nsmespaces allow XML file formats flexible and extensible in interesting ways: each namespace is tied to an independent schema, allowing for a very natural nesting of validatable XML in arbitrary formats. The namespaces avoid name collision between XML tags from different schemas. The grandparent gave a good example of this kind of nesting.

JSON is incapable of the same kind of nesting because there are no explicit namespace to identify nested data formats and to avoid name collisions.

tambourine_man2• 8 years ago

I don’t think XML was the reason for XMPP not catching on.

Facebook could use a format based on brainfuck and we would have to support it.

jarym3• 8 years ago

HATEOAS could have been the future too - many people wanted it to be.

With all these standards, the successful ones need to find some magic moment to take off - like HTTP did.

Too early to tell if ActivityPub (which I like as a protocol very much) will be an HTTP or an XML.

tbrownaw• 8 years ago

The reason behind HATEOAS was that REST was in practice being watered down from how it was originally envisioned, so proponents of the original vision needed a new term.

I don't think that your origin story being "well we needed a way to tell all the practitioners they were consistently doing it wrong" is a good indicator of potential success.

jarym3• 8 years ago

Ok, perhaps I picked a poor example - but still, the success of a standard depends on some magic formula that isn't easy to repeat.

nairboon• 8 years ago

What happend with all these Hypermedia ideas? All these HATEOAS, Hydra, HAL, etc. projects don't appear to me as very widespread.

jarym3• 8 years ago

Well the purists lost is my take. The vision was a fine one, just the approach that was being proposed had too many downsides to really take off.

orthecreedence3• 8 years ago

ActivityPub really needs some decoupling of identity from server. If a server I'm using starts acting up, the answer is to move servers, right?

But, wait, my 50K followers from Server A won't be following me on Server B. Essentially, you only get to pick your original server once, without having to rebuild your network. So choose wisely!

This obviously isn't an easy problem to solve. You'd need to separate identity from hosting, and have some way to look up "identity A is on server D" so peope following identity A know where to get the content.

I truly believe it's essential to the success of the protocol, though.

chipotle_coyote2• 8 years ago

This is what the whole IndieWeb movement is about -- being distributed rather than merely federated. I'm mildly concerned that the two camps seem to be building their own protocols rather than working together (excepting the existence of Bridgy Fed, perhaps).

toomim2• 8 years ago

Good point -- it would actually be simple to combine IndieWeb + Mastadon and solve this problem.

IndieWeb's solution is to own your own domain: https://indieweb.org/personal-domain. If you control your DNS, you can move your data to a different back-end provider and just update your DNS entries.

To combine this with Mastadon, just make your own domain, like https://chipotle.coyote, and point it at Mastadon-Server-A. Then if you want to move everything to Mastadon-Server-B, just copy the data and update DNS.

kickscondor3• 8 years ago

Competition is good, right? Personally, I'm sold on the Indieweb tech, but if ActivityPub proves itself, then that's great, too.

elago3• 8 years ago

It is social media, why does this need to be handled at the protocol level? Post a final message on the "You@ServerA" account saying "This is my last post here, keep talking to me with my new account: You@ServerB"

Anyone who visits your old account will see the last message. Anyone who sees that message and can't muster the effort to make 2 mouse clicks probably isn't a follower except from a numbers perspective.

orthecreedence3• 8 years ago

If you're content losing 90% of your followers because the server you host on decides to implement draconian censorship or start charging $50/mo, then yeah, be my guest and use the protocol as it is.

I personally think tying identity to a particular server instance is the wrong approach, whether you can beg your followers to come find your new location or not.

Also, your method only works if the server is still up. If your host server is taken down indefinitely, then you truly do get to rebuild your network again. Fun.

danShumway2• 8 years ago

Can't upvote this enough.

I'll take it a step farther. One of the consequences of building a distributed network is that individual nodes are much more likely to fail than a centralized node. The overall network health is going to be better, but for a given random article or person you find online somewhere, the odds that the server does something screwy are a lot higher because the server is smaller and has less backing.

It's not just about separating identity from hosting so that content creators can move around - content itself needs to be separated from its hosting. I want to be confident that if I share a link to some content, that content is still going to be available at that link 4 or 5 years from now. Minus that solution, in some ways ActivityPub actually makes my life worse because it means content moves around more often.

Mastadon and PeerTube are great examples of this - instances are not an implementation detail of these platforms that we could swap out later for something more robust - they're a core concept that's talked about at a user-facing level. That's insane to me. Why on earth do we even have the concept of an instance or a server? Why is it baked so hard into our protocols as to guarantee that we can't possible get rid of it in the future?

Sure, someday maybe IPFS will completely solve the problem and we'll switch off of URLs. But probably not soon. So we should be trying to find mid-term solutions that allow us to separate identity and content from a location regardless of whether or not we're using IPFS. We should be designing everything around that constraint.

fullstackchris• 8 years ago

I think there are a lot of blockchain projects working on exactly that issue now - I like to think about an internet that is totally distributed yet (because of blockchain) totally secure. I'd like to think it would make the internet at large even more secure, avaliable, and faster, but I don't know enough of the technicals to know if that is actually feasible or just a pipe dream.

wmf2• 8 years ago

Own your own domain. (In the extreme you could even imagine software that forces one domain per person.)

(Oops, I just saw toomim already posted the same thing.)

smolder• 8 years ago

If you're concerned about this, can't you just host your own server to begin with?

briandear• 8 years ago

Off topic, but whatever happened to app.net? That was supposed to be the next new thing.

dredmorbius• 8 years ago

On January 12, 2017, the founders announced that the platform App.net would be shut down on March 15, 2017.[13] However, due to a significant number of user data export failures that deadline was extended until March 16, 2017. App.net finally ceased to operate as a social network at 2017-03-17-06:45UTC. The source code for App.net was made available on their Github Page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net

davepeck2• 8 years ago

Mastodon reports ~110k weekly active users and 121M "toots" across its 2+-year lifetime. That's impressive for a federated social network but, for comparison, 121M new tweets are generated on Twitter about every six hours.

Some more basic Mastodon stats that I recently collected: https://davepeck.org/2018/05/03/mastodon-stats/

ocdtrekkie• 8 years ago

How many tweets were generated when Twitter was about two years in? Early growth curves on social networks are exponential, there's plenty of time for Mastodon or an as-yet-to-be-created network to eclipse Twitter as it starts to decline.

EDIT: According to https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2011/numbers.html it took about three years and two months for Twitter to hit a billion tweets. That's well within what Mastodon could hit with "exponential growth", though I'm guessing Mastodon will fall a bit short of that rate.

davepeck2• 8 years ago

It’s a good question and one I didn’t address because I wasn’t able to find super reliable numbers. That’s a good link, though. Thanks!

dingo_bat• 8 years ago

Just signed up on mastodon social. First impressions:

- The web app is very well made, although the space utilization could be a bit better

- There doesn't seem to be any concept of friends, but there is something called "follows".

- Almost every post in my timeline was in a language I couldn't understand.

All in all, nice experience but looks identical to twitter. Not really sure of any benefits over twitter.

znpy• 8 years ago

I started using mastodon after realising that SDF had set up an instance, and I only had to activate my SDF account.

So far, so good. Social stuff is neat again, I don't get my bandwidth wasted for ads and I can trust my provider.

Hopefully this becomes the norm!

This makes me realize that I got my SDF account in 2008 when I was 16, no questions asked, and I was unemployed. Now I've got a job and I can finally sign-up for a recurring payment/support account.

irispanabaker• 8 years ago

use this tool to check JSON-LD data. https://jsonformatter.org

ActivityPub could be the future

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