Recent searches
Search options
The network effect for #ActivityPub is gaining some serious momentum right now. As more services adopt the protocol, more people, more communities and more content are added to the network making it increasingly more valuable for everyone. This will only accelerate in the coming months as Threads, Wordpress, Tumblr, Flipboard and others federate.
We're still in early innings but there's no way to put this genie back in the bottle. The open social Web / the #Fediverse is going to be huge.
@mike Question: What is the difference/innovation of Activity Pub over RSS for a blog/CMS like Wordpress?
@kajkandler This is a really good question because ActivityPub is similar to RSS with two really important differences. 1) ActivityPub is two way. While RSS broadcasts content it does not have a way to know if someone liked, boosted or commented on that content. 2) RSS forms a connection between a blog and an RSS app. ActivityPub forms a follow connection between an account and another account. This means if you move from one reader app to another the connection is maintained.
@clacke @mike @kajkandler was OpenMicroBlogging really the start? That came out of the OpenSocial project that was sorta associated with MySpace and Orkut/Google if I remember right?
@liaizon OpenMicroBlogging was created for laconi.ca and only ever implemented by laconi.ca and a shortlived project OpenMicroBlogger that wanted to federate. Google and friends were not involved.
> When I first designed StatusNet in the Spring of 2008, there were no distributed social networking protocols. So, I made one up. OpenMicroBlogging (OMB) 0.1 [ . . . ]
"We wanted more sites to implement these protocols so the network becomes even more valuable. Some parts have been implemented already by sites like Google Buzz, LiveJournal, WordPress.com, and Tumblr." - @evan
I guess Tumblr and Wordpress have been working on joining the fediverse for 13 years!
@liaizon @clacke @mike @kajkandler yes, if I remember correctly, Tumblr and WordPress both supported PubSubHubbub. We could follow accounts there but not reply.
@evan @clacke @mike @kajkandler wow I had no idea https://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-publishing/tumblr-goes-real-time-with-pubsubhubbub-006273.php
crazy how close we came way back when to everything federating. I wonder if anyone has written any longform pieces about how that all fell apart
@liaizon @clacke @mike @kajkandler Here's my best guess: not enough client software used it (just StatusNet and Buzz and Cliqset), so it wasn't valuable for publishers. Without support for feedback through Salmon, it was one-way syndication. And it was hard to find and subscribe to feeds. Our clients made you find the right Tumblr URL, instead of saying "fred179 on Tumblr". My company went out of business around 2013, so that didn't help, either.
I had to look up Cliqset, didn't remember it.
"Now the Cliqset FeedProxy tool will normalize feeds from more than 70 other services into new feeds in the ActivityStreams format. It may just be an initial inroad to interoperability between these networks, provided by a 3rd party and not yet extensively used – but it’s an important step none the less." https://readwrite.com/cliqset_activity_streams_api/
@liaizon @clacke @mike @kajkandler I think we also had a real underground of open social web hackers spread throughout the tech world for about a decade between 2005 and 2015. They'd advocate for standards like OpenID and OAuth internally. Today, I think that network has been frayed.
@evan @clacke @mike @kajkandler
"Facebook, MySpace, Netflix and other services are already making user data available in ActivityStreams format, but there are far more social networks that don’t." -2009 oh how far away that seems