ActivityPub tears down social media walls?
Copyright: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 — Brian J. Matis — 2011
Most of our social media applications can’t actually speak to each other. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc, they all keep their customers anxiously to themselves. But aren’t our posts, likes, retweets, and the relations we nurture on these social media platform, ours? Isn’t it a fundamental right to be able to transport these values to somewhere else?
Currently no, these values are theirs. ActivityPub tries to tear down walls and build bridges between the giants who seem to be very addicted to the power of their individual network.
What is notable for the ActivityPub open source community and what could cryptocurrency projects and Autonomous Identity projects learn from them?
Why is that important for us to know? What is so important in the work of Activity Pub?
Open source communities like the crypto world still accept getting locked into social media platform. Seems a bit odd and maybe even pervers?
Can you think of a better time to try to more efficiently bridge that world and the cryptoworld?
What I’d like you to realize after reading this blogpost (on a centralized medium!) is that you can start exploring the benefits of federated and distributed social engagement TODAY.
What is ActivityPub
ActivityPub is an open, decentralized social networking protocol
Hmm, this means very little to you? To me too. Let’s explore this a bit more. And hold on tight: we have to travel back in time
2021: ActivityPub is an open, decentralized social networking protocol
…based on Pump.io’s ActivityPump protocol.[1] It provides a client/server API for creating, updating, and deleting content, as well as a federated server-to-server API for delivering notifications and content.
More abut ActivityPub on wikipedia and
2013: Pump.io is a general purpose activity streams engine
…that can be used as a federated social networking protocol which “does most of what people really want from a social network”.[1] Started by Evan Prodromou, it is a follow up to StatusNet;[5] Identi.ca, which was the largest StatusNet service, switched to pump.io in June 2013.
More about Pump.io on wikipedia
2009: StatusNet is a free and open source software microblogging server
…written in PHP that implements the OStatus standard for interoperation between installations. While offering functionality similar to Twitter, GNU social seeks to provide the potential for open, inter-service, and distributed communications between microblogging communities. Enterprises and individuals can install and control their own services and data.
GNU social (previously known as StatusNet and once known as Laconica)
Back to 2021
Current status and features:
- W3C standard for ActivityPub
- ActivityPub site
- Are you a user looking for ActivityPub software to use? Check out this guide for ActivityPub users (community edited)!
Although only adopted as an official World Wide Web Consortium recommendation in 2018, the ActivityPub protocol 7 is already implemented in a significant range of projects. These include:
- Microblogging platforms like Mastodon, Misskey and Pleroma.
- Decentralized media hosting and sharing platforms like Funkwhale, PeerTube, Pixelfed
- Blogging platforms like Plume, WriteFreely
- Social network platforms like Friendica
ActivityPub supports common social network activities like following, liking, announcing, adding, and blocking. For example, if you have an account on a Mastodon instance like mastodon.social, you can follow someone on a WriteFreely instance like Qua and receive updates whenever they have a new blog post.
Why would you use AtivityPub?
Don’t you miss the days when the web really was the world’s greatest decentralized network? Before everything got locked down into a handful of walled gardens? So do we.
Christopher Lemmer Webber, one of the co-authors of ActivityPub, noted in a post announcing the standard 4:
"Increasingly, much of our lives is mediated through social networks, and so network freedom in these spaces – and thus removing central control over them – is critical. One thing you may have noticed in the last decade is that many decentralized free software social networking applications have been written. Sadly, most of those applications can’t actually speak to each other – a fractured federation. I hope that with ActivityPub, we’ve improved that situation."How could you use ActivityPub?
How to become an ActivityPub user. Adopting ActivityPub as a user can be a great way to start putting a more people-centred Internet into practice. Read more about how to get started or join one of the implementations:
Key take away for ActivityPub?
- Interoperability between open social networks
- Freedom to move from one platform to another
- API service to centralized social media platforms like Twitter, for example https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/800071# and Moa: Mastodon/Twitter/Instagram Crossposter, which links your Mastodon account to Twitter and Instagram.
A fundamental and unobtrusive advantage of ActivePub networks
One thing we haven’t discussed is the governance/moderation aspect. ActivityPub is just the replication system that allows you to follow people across 100s of servers/communities.
But each server has to post its moderation policies and enforce them. And servers can choose to DISCONNECT from one another. i.e. “don’t enable content from this server by default unless an individual user opts in”.
What does this mean? How does it nuance the way current centralized system judge who to ban or not? Do we get more capabilities. We want to governance become more reasonable and more democratic while still keeping our self sovereignty and rule autonomously over our data.
Pay attention, this is a very special point in this article, prick up your ears!
Within the “fediverse” (universe of federation) most servers “allowlist” each other, but some sets of servers allow each other but are blocked by the rest, creating a kind of “activitypub island”. this is how Gab used mastodon for a while. Read more.
For example Mastodon is “censorship resistant” in the sense I like — if 99% of people want to deplatform a child pornographer or a nazi, they can make it really hard to find their content — without actually “banning” it or killing the account
An individual or a whole community (like Gab) can be delisted without being kicked off the platform. To put it another way, you can democratically/collectively banish bad actors to a island without kicking them off the entire network. This sounds like a great trade-off: keep anyone’s autonomy in tact but the majority can democratically ignore an undesirable actor and make it “less heard”.
Why crypto world could benefit from ActivityPub
Cryptocurrency communicate via centralized social media platforms? Isn’t that a totally unnatural thing to do?
Crypto identity projects for Self-Sovereign Identity and Autonomous ID work in foundations with walled off repository and legal contracts and they communicate via centralized social media platforms…
Isn’t this against their own values and objectives?
Don’t we have a fundamental right to port our data, interactions and relations to another . And as a group shouldn’t we be able to ignore certain actors. This sophisticated fine tuning in a social network can be done in ActivePub-based infrastructure.
Well, now then start exploring the benefits of federated and distributed social engagement on the web TODAY!
References
Thanks to Juan Caballero (DIF/Spruce, Berlin), who pointed me to ActivityPub and contributed text and review of draft versions of this article.
- Twitter @by_caballero
- Mastodon @by_caballero
Image “content blocked” — Creator: Brian J. Matis — Copyright: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 — Brian J. Matis — 2011
