This is exciting. I think code forges are one of the biggest opportunities for ActivityPub to really go mainstream and change the internet. Not only because it’ll make working with open source way easier since you can work with any compatible forge, but developers will be more exposed to ActivityPub just by working with the software and so more likely to participate in AP dev. It will be interesting to see what effect this has on the fediverse. There’s been a lot of talk from various organizations/companies but this will be the first large project adopting AP. I’m interested to see how development goes for them and for other fediverse projects.

I wonder what changes it will force on Mastodon. Masto won’t be the biggest project anymore and won’t be able to throw its weight around as much. Just like the recent influx of users forced the implementation of full text search and has reenergized conversations about quote posts, I think federated gitlab would force masto to rethink some things.

The numbers for lemmy are probably way outdated. Take a look at https://lemmyverse.net/communities. It lists 636 instances but FediDB only has 302. And remember most of this growth has only come in the past week or two.

Also, mastodon only has 1.25 million active users according to FediDB, though that’s probably outdated too.

ah you’re right. I misread the section that mentioned that and thought there wouldn’t be any public post pages. Thanks for the clarification.

Here’s hoping that the mastodon team actually pays attention to this when they start their group implemenation

Not only is it exciting that they’re adding ActivityPub support, but its great that they’re basing their implementation off of Lemmy. Up til now, most implementations have been from scratch and implement federation after the project has gotten up and running and then do federation testing. That leads to different assumptions about models/flows and inconsistencies and hacks to get it working. Working off of another implementation’s federation guide will mean less hacks but still leave room for impl-specific features and workflows.

I don’t know much about open source licensing. What’s wrong with the SSPL and what does that have to do with mongo?

Yeah, I know. I shoulda put a /s on that; my bad.

Disappointing. It’s too bad there’s not a standard API that clients could use to communicate with servers.

EDIT: That was a sarcastic response. ActivityPub has a Client-to-Server (C2S) API that would solve this problem if anybody would ever implement it.

A favorite is treated like an upvote

Copy the post’s link and search for it within pleroma. This is also how I upvote and comment on lemmy posts from pleroma.

If they wanna do both, they can. I’m just saying I don’t think it’s the best use of their resources because running a mastodon instance is a huge task. And companies having a Twitter profile was only necessary to get their blog posts noticed. On the fediverse, there’s no reason for that extra step when you could just follow the blog directly. That’s less work for the reader and less work for the poster and no extra service required.

It probably makes it more likely.

I disagree. Running an instance doesn’t give you any insight into how to implement ActivityPub and anybody can study the source code without running an instance. There are quite a few orgs running instances, but, as far as I know, WordPress is the only widely known software that has actually integrated AP and they never ran their own instance.

Having an official fediverse presence makes sense for a company, like you say. But I think there’s better ways to do it than running a mastodon instance and encouraging your employees to make their acct their is a bad idea.

Medium is a blogging platform and companies usually write full length blogs for announcements. To me, integrating AP into medium and using that as a direct fediverse presence makes more sense.

Individuals shouldn’t have to make multiple accounts (like a personal, fun acct & an official, professional acct) and having your acct controlled by your employer is a pretty shitty situation.

In this thread, the CEO mentions they might add AP but he believes shortform and longform content should be completely separate. I don’t think he realizes there’s no way to keep them separate on the fediverse. Any long form content that is federated can be found on microblogging fediverse software (as it should be; the idea that they should be separate platforms is dumb)

I guess I fall into the author’s webhead category and I still don’t understand the issue with search. I’m specifically talking about third-party search engines, not built into AP software.

All fediverse posts on all software (that I’ve used or know of) have an ActivityPub representation (the json blob) and an html representation (the page you see if you click the post’s url). Search has been a part of the web as long as I’ve been using it and as a commenter on the post said, decentralization is heavily dependent on indexing/search. Without it, you have a major discoverability problem, which is a consistent critique of the fediverse.

I’ve seen ppl mention users have an expectation of privacy, but I find that hard to believe. Post from multiple social sites (Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Reddit, etc) are indexed in most search engines and users are used to that and know that public posts are searchable. As a user, you have multiple tools to keep your posts from being indexed and most fediverse software has decent moderation tools so you can handle any incoming issues that do occur.

EDIT: A relevant comment from the HN post:

It’s also unethical to make promises to users, like privacy for posts published to a semipublic social network, that software can’t possibly keep.

This has been the case since mastodon’s inception. Feature requests that were supported by a wide swath of the community have been shot down by gargron because he controls mainline. Changes have been made before without any discussion with or headsup to admins, even changes that instance admins can’t control.

If ppl want that to change, they need to move software. Move to a completely different implementation or move to a masto fork. Stop donating to the mastodon patreon and donate to the forks or other software. Help other groups in the fediverse get more influence so garg doesn’t get to run over everyone else.

The spec is probably your best bet. I don’t know if any other resources for it. It’s pretty underused right now so nobody has really written about it

While we’re starting this exploration on Mastodon — as a mature, stable project, it’s an ideal first step into the Fediverse — we believe the potential of the Fediverse is bigger and broader than Mastodon alone.

From the thrid paragraph

There is no mastodon hegemony and won’t be in near future

This is demonstrably not true. Check any of the network trackers like https://fediverse.party. You’ll see mastodon instances greatly outnumber instances of every other fediverse software combined and mastodon users greatly outnumber users of every other software as well. And the mastodon team uses this to their advantage. There are myriad instances of the mastodon team deciding not to implement greater compatibility with other (perfectly spec compliant) implementations because it would be too much work for mastodon (there’s an outstanding issue about lemmy compatibility that the masto team has no interest in fixing). Webfinger is a defacto requirement for the fediverse because mastodon won’t interoperate with (perfectly spec compliant) implementations that don’t use webfinger. Check https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/ and you’ll see alot of AP development is focused specifically on interoperability with mastodon. Brand new implementations start off testing against Mastodon and only test against other services later (if at all).

That is a hegemony and because of it, Mastodon receives more contributions, has a larger patreon, and receives more public funding than any other AP service. The fediverse is powerful because of its diversity, but if its controlled by a single project, that project can dictate its direction and capabilities.

Disagree. There are already thousands of mastodon instances; having one more doesn’t have a huge effect. And the downside, as I mentioned, is reinforcing mastodon’s hegemony, which is a net negative for the fediverse. Organization/company instances have a wider reach than small instances and so does their choice of software, especially when that organization is one that stands for openness and decentralization.

It’s pretty disappointing that Mozilla chose to go with Mastodon. There are already plenty of org-backed mastodon instances. It would have been nice for the supposed primary steward of the web and decentralization to really show the power of the fediverse and use a different implementation. Mozilla, and any other orgs starting up instances, could really help expand the fediverse, instead they’re helping to cement mastodon in it’s Gmail position.