foreign
hi welcome everyone
for our one o'clock session on activity
pub just a couple of reminders put your
phones on vibrate stun whatever you want
to call it
make sure you stay hydrated
just so you know there's fire exits if
in the case of an emergency please exit
calmly
if you have any questions or comments uh
you'll see people with the radios
walking around also folks in
blue shirts blue volunteer shirts feel
free to ask them any questions uh right
now again i'd like to introduce roll
time who's going to give a synopsis of
activity pub four years later welcome
hi everyone that uh that second coffee
was a mistake um
all right so first of all hello everyone
my name is roll time i want to thank you
all so much for being here uh and i want
to say thank you to the organizers of
the 2600 conference for allowing me to
be here also for sorting the talks
alphabetically because this one is right
at the top it's great um
yeah this is activity pub four years
later the good the bad and the fetty
verse
uh let's get right into it
first of all i want to introduce myself
uh i am not an expert i am not an author
of the activity pub spec i am just a
user of activity pub i've been on
activity pub and mastodon for a couple
years now i'm here to proselytize i'm
here to tell you about what activity pub
is like and about how you can help by
joining us and help by you know working
on improving the spec it's still
evolving there's still an opportunity
for innovation here so
i hope you come away from this talk with
a greater understanding of what activity
pub is the ways that you can use it and
you know
i hope you come away enthusiastic about
this protocol and in the future
the first question that's really
important to the activity pub question
is what is federation the best way to
answer that question is by saying
federation is a network protocol
okay
the first network protocol that you may
be aware of or familiar with is the
client to server model this is what we
see on social media servers today
wherein all six of our clients are
speaking to this server if a client
wants to post anything or receive any
data they talk to the server
the server will then fetch data from
other clients as appropriate again this
is the model used by facebook instagram
google plus no wait uh facebook
facebook instagram all the mainstream
social networks today and it has some
vulnerabilities it has some problems we
see vulnerability to corporate
censorship we see the vulnerability to
to downtime when people misconfigure
their dns stuff we see vulnerability to
if the uh
if the single server is down everybody
is down the single server has control of
everything so it's safe to say this is
not a desirable protocol or architecture
for social media networking
another one you might be familiar with
is a peer-to-peer model we dispense with
our centralized server entirely and we
see all six of our clients simply
exchange messages amongst one another in
an open space with no control this isn't
vulnerable to censorship no one can
control which clients are connected and
what they say
but it's also inefficient because every
client has to send a message to every
other client if clients aren't online at
the time a message is sent then they
can't receive any data
i'm still wearing a mask
and they can't receive any data
and this is a big problem
you know
it's not really viable to have your
phone or your laptop on all the time
connected to stuff all the time
so while this would be sort of an
idealized great way to implement social
media that's vulnerable that's uh
resistant to censorship it's again it's
inviable for an actual network
architecture the solution or the
compromise is federation we call it
client to server to server to client
networking what we see is that our three
clients here are talking to server a
server a then talks to server b which
then talks to its respective clients
what this gives us is a best-case
scenario between centralized networking
and decentralized networking it's
semi-centralized server a can implement
its own rules its own guidelines and
have its own downtime meanwhile server b
can fetch data from server a whenever it
needs to with its own set of rules and
guidelines if server a is down server b
will still be accessible you can tell
because it's still on the screen there
i want to go back to this architecture
and i want to give everything some
labels just so it's clearer i'm going to
walk you through how a federated network
social network might actually function
so we have on free radical.zone tech
pepin and dade i heard some class for
free radical.zone
thank you uh and on post.lurk.org we
have kate pixel and henry who is
slightly behind the times let's say dade
wants to post a message and then all of
his followers will get it so if dade
wants to post something on his status he
notifies his home server free
radical.zone
and so then everyone on his home server
as in a centralized network can simply
fetch his message but
freeradical.zone will then post his
update to
post.work.org where anyone following
dade on post.org can also get a copy of
this message and read it for themselves
even if free radical is down so dade
says to free radical.zone i want to send
a message free radical says great it's
now in the database and for radical
knows
that somebody on post.look.org let's say
kate is following dade that message gets
pushed to post.org and then anybody on
that server can read that message
that's the essence of federation that's
how you build a censorship resistant
open democratized social network
i think at this point i'm a little ahead
in time anybody have any questions at
this point it's pretty important to the
rest of the talk so if anything isn't
clear anything i'm missing
great question um not at this time uh
that's
unfortunately something we don't have
implemented but if your server is down
other users on different servers can
still access copies of your data that
their server may have
but
your server is your server
yes
sorry i cut off the bottom of the g but
that is a g um that's a great question
thank you for asking it standardization
um so what we have is called the fitty
verse um this talk does have emojis in
it we have it's called the fetiverse
it's this wider network of standardized
ideally
ideally standardized servers and clients
that all know how to talk to each other
using this one single language but we
didn't always have a single language in
2008 we saw the first kind of federated
system come out it was called identica
identity.ca and it ran gnu social
which implemented the o status protocol
but not everyone was using the o status
protocol o status uh wasn't a new
project gnu social was about as
featureful and useful as gnu heard right
so um diaspora was a competing protocol
if you were on o status you couldn't
talk to somebody who was on diaspora it
was this messy situation of competing
standards and people not being able to
have a cohesive experience
so out of this comes the w3c social
working group headed up by christine
lemmer weber who's the primary author of
activity pub she'll come up a little bit
later
uh the mission of which was to create a
single standard which would unify
everyone's experiences and be the be all
and end all for a federated social
networking experience and i know what
you're thinking you've seen this xkcd
about standards
and you're thinking surely this couldn't
have worked um unfortunately i have bad
news for you it did
activity pub was born in 2018 as this
unified standard which created a way for
anybody to talk to anybody else using
federated networking it was beautiful it
was open it was accessible and it was a
w3c standard so now what you see is
everybody doing federated networking
these days is using activity pub
i want to give a brief technical rundown
of activity pub
in about three words json over email
in more detail i'll tell you that
activity pub uses email like addressing
you can send messages to address at
instance
and you send json posts so that'll be
something like a post you'll have the
author the content the date things like
that it's essentially a spec for pushing
data using email like addressing to
various servers uh a moment for some
technical uh terminology i want to say
an instance
is a specific server which hosts a
protocol a specific server which hosts a
platform a platform being activity pub
enabled software so if you are on an
instance you're hosting some kind of
software that might be like mastodon or
something like that that's instant
specific server platform is software and
of course the protocol is activity pub
again the technical rundown i'm not
going to go into too much detail on that
because this is not the first talk at
activity
first activity pub talk i hope uh
certainly not the best normal would be
the last i encourage you to go and do
your own research and look into this
more
um but what this led to was a case of
what i call activity of evangelism
suddenly in 2018 we had this gigantic
open standard everybody could use it and
everybody would be right now that
anybody could host their own social
media server what was stopping anybody
from doing that surely this will be the
end of facebook this will be the end of
twitter this will be the end of google
now this will be the end of facebook
twitter instagram
right
and so we saw at hope 2020 these
wonderful five people one of whom is in
the audience can i get a quick round of
applause for tech the admin of my home
server who pays money to host
yeah
he pays money to host the things that i
say which is crazy to me um
anyway these five people uh hopefully
some of them are watching one of whom is
here
came out at hope 2020 and said this is
your moment start your own activity pub
server take your data back take your
experience back
it didn't work right four years later
the activity pub spec has received zero
updates since its release one of the
links on the activity pub homepage now
502s
that's on the w3c website
there are about six to seven million
users throughout the total fetiverse
some of whom are active which is a large
number and an absolute sense but it's
safe to say activity pub has not taken
down social media giants we have failed
in our goal of bringing a constructive
social media experience to everybody we
have however brought a constructive
social media experience to people who
are using the fetiverse right now
so we're going to address four topics
today we're going to address
architectural benefits of activity pub
the ways in which activity pub is really
good we're going to address
architectural limitations problems with
the spec that have prevented it from
proliferating and becoming really useful
we're going to address instance benefits
what's it like to actually use the
fetiverse today and we're going to
address instance limitations so the
benefits limitations and problems with
both the standard and the way that we're
using it
first of all architectural benefits
the big thing about a standard is it's a
standard we have cross-platform
federation anybody who speaks the
activity pub language can talk to
anybody else who speaks the activity pub
language here i am on uh frendica
specifically venera.social frenica is a
facebook-like platform
and i'm actually looking at my own
profile on mastodon which is uh
twitteresque
so you can see this is space filling
curvy that's my username i can see my
profile i can see mastodon ap means i'm
following myself via activity pub we can
see some of my own posts on here i don't
know if you can read those unfortunately
i don't think activity pub made me any
funnier but uh but i can in fact see the
things that i've posted even if they're
not that good
there is a problem here and that this is
not actually the four most recent post
on my profile
uh there are discrepancies here between
the mastodon version of my feed and the
friendica version of my feed which
shouldn't be there
we're gonna talk about problems in a
moment
the really other great thing about
democratized social media this isn't
specific to activity pub but the
fetiverse as a whole is we can have
instance specific rules and guidelines
right so free radical.zone my home
server has focuses on leftward politics
infosec cat pictures generally
interesting people doing interesting
things and what i see in my home
timeline
post on my instance is people who have
done cool projects or found cool things
it's it's very in-depth technical
discussion and that's what i like to see
i don't like to see as much of those
kind of slice of life hey i went to the
bank today posts that i might see on
other instances but i can still follow
people on other instances and i can get
information from them on other instances
i just get to choose where from and the
central focus of my experience revolves
around my instance and its guidelines
free radical.zone also has some rules uh
has for instance some very strict rules
against hate speech and misinformation
um one of the great things about
activity pub we get freedom of speech
freedom of filter right if you're on
twitter twitter gets to decide what is
okay for anybody to say which you may
agree with or not but take it or leave
it right if you're on twitter you're on
twitter
hopefully you're not um activity pub
lets you host your own server and do
your own thing up to and including the
actual user interface and user
experience
so
i'll give you an example of this there's
a platform you may be aware of called
gab which is a right-wing fascistic
social network reporting itself as a
free speech zone whatever the hell that
means
and they are running on activity pub
they have an activity pub network and
various servers within the the gab
verse thing but i've never heard from
anyone on gab and i certainly don't
intend to because my server and all the
servers that my server talks to have
de-federated from gab we've strictly
blocked communications from them they
have a space to say whatever they want
they have their freedom of speech we're
going to filter them out we're not going
to listen
but again nobody gets to decide what's
okay to say you just get decide what you
want to hear
there are some architectural issues with
activity pub when it was released it
came without any kind of authentication
or consent spec what that means is that
in an ideal fetiverse we'd see a user's
identity as wholly separate from their
instance right i shouldn't be beholden
to the admin of free radical even though
i i trust you um i shouldn't be beholden
to the admin of free radical to define
what i'm saying
i should be cryptographically guaranteed
to be myself and if i don't like the
terms that periodical is providing me i
can pack up my stuff and leave and go to
another instance or start my own but
activity pub didn't release with any
kind of consent mechanism meaning that
if an admin wants to
they can simply say that their one of
their users said something and there's
no way for anybody to verify that
outside of a manual pgp key
going back to christine lumber-webber
she's aware of this issue it's mentioned
in the activity of pub spec hey we know
this is a problem we're we're working on
it we'll get back to you it's been four
years um but christine lumber weber
founded the sprightly institute
and they've been working on some really
cool stuff including ocap status
i think that's what it's called ocap
status and that lets you define a wholly
cryptographically guaranteed identity
independent of anything that's hosting
you and so if we see that reach maturity
and integration into one later version
of activity pub or a later open protocol
we'll see this problem solved
the other problem that activity pub has
and that federated networks have in
general is instant tribalism which is to
say that communities don't live at the
instance level communities live at the
level of tags at the level of topics at
the level of common interests and it's
really impossible for an instance to
address that with granularity instances
can be groups of people with a lot of
interest in common but you can still see
things you don't want to
and so
we have to find the balance between
granularity accessibility and creating
communities around what we want them to
be
uh created around so that is an
architectural issue
implementation benefits i'm going to
stop right here and say if you are not
on activity pub which basically means if
you're not on mastodon it's like the
biggest platform we'll talk about that
if you're not activity pub join please
dear god join it is so much better than
twitter
um
i know that's not a low bar uh or that
is a low bar rather but activity pub
mastodon is incredible it's full of
great people and you should join and i
want to make that clear even though
we're going to talk about some of the
problems there is nothing better for you
to do than joining and helping us fix
those problems
so our case study is mastodon as i've
said it's far and away the largest fatty
virus platform to the degree that if you
visit the website fetty.guide you'll see
a page called what is mastodon even
though fetiverse guide is an accessible
guide to federated decentralized
services mastodon is the fetiverse
experience
and so when we're talking about the
day-to-day experience we need to be
talking about mastodon
here's the user interface master as i
said is is twitter-like so we have a
home timeline and this is what i'd see
similar to a twitter timeline it's posts
from people that i follow and posts that
they have boosted or retweeted as you
may be familiar with um i've got
somebody in here who's posting about
seals and the word boo
um
this is only people i've post followed
it's not algorithmic it's entirely based
on the order in which things are posted
so mastodon doesn't attempt to hijack
your attention or radicalize you in
various ways mastodon is just trying to
bring you the posts from the people
you've agreed to see
there are two other timelines and this
is what really separates mastodon
experientially from twitter the local
and the federated timeline and they're
both really interesting the local
timeline is posts from people on your
instance that is free radical.zone
in my case or whatever instance you may
be following and if you've picked the
right instance that has a guidelines and
rules specific to you you'll probably
see posts from people you find
interesting and on topics you find
interesting that can give you an idea of
who you want to follow or teach you
about something new you might want to
engage in so a local timeline is like a
little community it's who's close to you
and it's people you may want to reach
out to it's a great way of discovering
things that doesn't rely on an algorithm
like you'd see on other services
our third option here is the federated
timeline this is every post
from every server that someone on your
server follows
uh it is a lot um and it's basically all
the data that your instance is getting
and it's
again it scrolls by quickly i don't know
why someone wanted to follow arch linux
arch linux package updates but somebody
did
and now they can see everything
happening with the one true operating
system um in any case that's not
something i want to see but the
fetiverse or the federated timeline is a
useful kind of way of graphing what
people on your instance are interested
in and what's the zeitgeist of the
entire
network at that time your corner of the
verse so it's useful i wouldn't browse
it all the time
uh mastodon has some really interesting
cultural mores that make it really good
to use for anybody and let's talk about
it
content warnings
are a big thing on mastodon so you'll
see a user here demi mom elect.xyz your
name is june posted something with this
content warning physical health ph minus
this is a negative statement about a
user's physical health and she's using
this shorthand
which is kind of common on macedon so
that people are clear on what she's
talking about
i want to see this post i click show
more here it is it's her talking about
how she woke up felt worse today and
went to the doctor but if i didn't want
to see a post that was negative about
physical health i wasn't interested i
could simply scroll right past that it
wouldn't have bothered me right so
mastodon lets you kind of define your
experience
and decide what you want to see
at any given moment you see content
warnings uh for gore for different types
of nsfw posts porn uh you see stuff for
physical health mental health
politics so if you're not feeling
something if you have triggers related
to something you don't have to look at
anything you don't want to and there's a
really strong culture of making sure
that we are filtering and creating a
positive wholesome experience here
one of the ways you'll see these content
warnings used is with
one of the ways you'll see these used is
with jokes we have this person what do
you get if you insult a bowman
i didn't post this it's a crossbowman um
anyway i i
but so you've used it as a joke set up
here right so what do you get if you
insult to bowman you click show more
there's a little bit of a setup payoff
by the way i did ask both of these users
if i could like post their content
and one of them said yes but i hope to
see 52 100 follower increase after that
talk
that's their username you all know what
to do
so they should be the second person you
follow after you join mastodon after of
course me
the other thing we see a lot of is alt
text and this is great let's say i found
this wonderful comic from saturday
morning breakfast cereal it's my daily
dose of existential crisis
uh talking about how these people
uh are not even dead but never existed i
hope you're all having a great day um
we see this comic here i decided this is
great i have to share this with my
followers they have to see it
so i put it in my compose box and
mastodon and i'll actually get a warning
that says no description added
mastodon is giving me a warning that
this content might not be accessible so
if i go ahead and click on no
description added i can actually see on
the left described for the visually
impaired
and it gives me 1500 characters to
transcribe the text in this image so
that anybody who can't see images
whether that's because they have
vision impairment or they're using a
text only browser or they don't have a
fast data connection anybody who can't
see images for any reason can still get
the alt text and can still see what this
image says
i can also define by moving that circle
around i can also define
where this preview will be in our 16x9
preview before someone actually opens
the image so mastodon has a really
robust toolkit to allow me to edit
markup and apply alt text to images so
that again they're more accessible and
useful for people actually browsing this
experience all of this comes together to
say that mastodon is probably the best
place to be for any given person who
wants to customize their social media
experience who doesn't like interacting
with twitter for some reason who may
have triggers they don't want to see
mastodon gives you tools and people use
those tools importantly we have a
culture of using those tools
to create a better social media
experience for everyone mastodon is also
um
the most probably the friendliest place
on the internet when it comes to queer
people
i do want to say that it leans left and
tech heavy and so is friendly to white
queer people there are still issues with
integration of people of color and favor
struggles with that we're working on it
again the best way to fix it is people
to join
there are implementation issues and the
big one i'm going to talk about is
platform feature diversity
so when i followed myself from frendica
like half an hour ago when i followed
myself from frendica i sent a follow
request and frank informed me i'm now
following roll time at radical.zone what
theoretical.zone told me was that i had
a follow request from frendica frendica
doesn't get updates from mastodon on
whether the follow request was
successful that's a feature diversity
issue
because these platforms don't have the
same implementation for follow requests
and they can't talk to each other so we
have this theoretically interoperable
system everything built on activity pub
but the actual experience day to day is
that it's really hard to follow somebody
else and actually interact with them
yeah
yes
i don't this just doesn't work and i
don't know why not
and i don't know if anybody knows why
not and that's kind of the problem is
that it's really hard to standardize
things
another thing activity pub has support
for is language specification you can
say this toot is in oh we call them
toots i guess it's quirky um this tude
is in english or german or whatever like
dutch as it were um you have language
support but mastodon didn't implement
that until two months ago and so i was
seeing lots of posts in german which
wasn't that helpful to me instance only
posts are a thing on some platforms like
hometown which is a fork of mastodon
on hometown you can create a post that
is only shown to people on your instance
it won't federate
and that's really useful if you're
creating a community for your friends
and you want only them to be able to see
this thing about you right
activity pub is for creating communities
instances only posts are really useful
for that but mastodon as a whole doesn't
have it so there are various platforms
all of which have thought oh it'd be
cool to have this because this isn't an
activity pub or we want to do it
slightly differently
but it doesn't work there's no
interoperability there when these
platforms diverge
okay the big thing the big the big
recommendation at the end of this talk
starts with a question
why is social media
and we know why facebook we know why
instagram we know why twitter the answer
is money
the answer to why is facebook is to sell
you things to harvest your data
and to manipulate you with abusive
algorithms
why is activity pub
is the answer to why is activity pub
just to take users away from facebook is
the answer to why is mastodon to make a
twitter clone that just doesn't show you
ads or have an algorithm
right now that's what the fetiverse is
an alternative at best to social media
platforms and an alternative that your
friends aren't on so why would you be on
it
but activity pub can be a lot more
i'm going to scroll through the
instances uh some various instances some
various user interfaces for some
platforms i want you to take a look and
see if there's something you see in all
of these uh a kind of common factor
right
here's mastodon again with our three uh
our r3 home
local federated
here's lemmy lemmy's kind of a reddit
style clone
here's pixelfed pixelfed is like
instagram
friendica again let's go through it
right mastodon
lemmy
pixelfed
frendica
what's the common uniting factor here
what's the thing that all of these
supposedly disparate unique interesting
platforms have in common
[Laughter]
as they should
timelines right the answer is timelines
why are timelines a timeline is a is a
corporate thing right facebook shows you
a timeline because they have an
algorithm that is supposed to pick for
you what they think you'll find
interesting twitter wants to show you
ads in your timeline and they want to
show you things you'll find interesting
interspersed with things you won't so
they can skinners box you into staying
on their platform for six hours a day no
one should be on social media for six
hours a day and i know that cause i'm on
social media for more than six hours a
day
timelines are not an interaction
mechanism they're a consumption
mechanism they're designed to lull you
into this endless doom scroll and i
think we can all relate to how unhappy
that makes us
timelines suck
here's mastodon they have it on their
homepage joinmastodon.com.org
john mastodon
this says i want i want you to know be
careful they're very they're very
careful about their language here
your feed is chronological ad-free and
non-algorithmic you decide who you want
to see you can only follow people
you can't follow content
so corey doctorow who is at this
conference and i think he was inspired
by me um recently made a blog post about
this um he talked about the title of it
and if i'm gonna link it you'll see it
in a second the title of it is uh
so you've unfollowed me we're good and
it's talking about how he has issues
with people who message him saying corey
i love your blog posts or i love your
long-range twitter threads but i hate
these pictures of your dog i hate these
are the things you're posting why are we
following people
a timeline only works if you have an
algorithm designed to pick the most
interesting posts from the crud of the
internet right a timeline
is made by an algorithm which dredges
all this and then will sieve it for you
the mastodon timeline is frankly pretty
boring and it's because you can't decide
what you want to see
you can only decide in aggregate who you
want to hear from
power to the user
that's the theme of this talk that's
what we're going to talk about and i'm
actually going to change it i don't want
it to be power to the user power to the
participant when i want someone to log
on when i want to log into a social
media site my goal should not be to sit
there and scroll and hear from people it
should be to participate
i want to go and see what my friends and
the people whose opinions i respect are
saying about this and then i want to
contribute to the conversation i want to
be able to collate topics bring them
together curate an experience that i can
then modify and send out to other people
that's the power of social networking
that's the power of the internet that's
what we're not doing
i should be able to browse a topic a
really robust topic like a hashtag and
then say okay people are also looking at
this thing there's a lot of
interoperability and i can make
connections between these two topics
right i need to be able to follow the
zeitgeist
and i need to be able to do it in an
active sense creating the things as i'm
consuming them because again no one
should be able to do this for six hours
a day it should be interesting and
engaging and take mental effort because
that's what gets people to wake up and
stop just listening
whoever has ever hosted a minecraft
server
okay who knows a child who's hosted a
minecraft server
yeah yeah yeah right right so
you can host a microsoft you can you can
spin one up in five minutes and then you
can create a world a universe and your
friends can join and they can create a
world a universe you can sculpt the
thing that you're interacting with and
that will school and that will also
sculpt your future interactions in
minecraft
there's unity between what you make and
what you see
and that's the experience that we need
to bring
to social networking there's a word here
that maybe in your minds that i'm
creeping up on it's metaverse nobody
likes the metaverse because nobody likes
meta facebook they're stupid right i i
hope at this point we're all clear on
the fact that they suck um but the
metaverse already exists it's called
gary's mod i don't know if any of you
have ever played but the metaverse is
really what it needs to be what it isn't
but what it should be
is just an experience that you can
create and have other people help you
create it we need to take these
paradigms these ideas that have existed
in gary's mod in minecraft and
multi-user dungeons in online text
adventure games take these paradigms of
interaction and creation and bring them
to the social media networking
experience our goal should not be to
make a better version of twitter our
goal should be to create something that
makes twitter feel really really lame
because it is really really lame
i've hated on twitter all at this talk
in any case
that is about all that i have for you um
here are there are my socials on on uh
theoretical and then also twitter that
link will post you to some resources
thank you all very much for coming and
listening i really appreciate it
[Applause]
and so i assume i'm pretty short here so
we have some questions i hope
this is a professional conference
hi
um so you mentioned that you know
a lot of your friends might not be on
these social media platforms and you
know you've spent this talk talking
about how awesome some of these features
are and how much i want to use this um
what how do we get people who
aren't like as tech savvy like how do i
get my mom to use this you know
because
i feel like
with social media the more people on the
better and the more people that use
social medias like mastodon or whatnot
um the better it is for everyone because
it's just you have more control over
everything we're not feeding our data to
twitter or blah so i guess my question
is how do you make this appeal to people
who aren't like as tech savvy or
interested in that sort of stuff like
what's the driving factor i mean great
question and i think if there's one good
thing about the platforms we have right
now is that they're really easy to
approach for someone familiar with
facebook or twitter um they're easy to
join and you'll get an experience that's
similar but with a better culture that's
driving it
and so what i'm hoping is with adoption
comes adoption if you're on there and
you endlessly tell your mom to get on
there until she gets fed up and joins um
hopefully she will join maybe her
friends will join we have to kick it off
the thing is that activity pub is four
years old it hasn't kicked off yet but i
hope that as we see standards evolve as
we see the situation improve more people
will join and more people will join but
there is a thing here which is to say
right now most people using it are very
techy um and
i don't have a good answer for you on
bringing it outside of the tech universe
it's going to come with people hating
social media in aggregate as well
it'll come with time and adoption and
improvement of protocols and hopefully
your help and there are other people
standing at the microphone hello hi um
uh i'm sorry maybe you maybe you covered
this all over already and i didn't quite
follow it but i'm just trying to follow
the concept of pushing and pulling so if
there's an instance and i i have
somebody i know who's active on that
instance a friend of mine set up a
different one that i'm active on and i
want to follow that person
does my instance
go and pull data from the other instance
or does when that friend accepts my
request to follow them do they push
their
stuff to my instance yeah that's a great
question thank you for asking um and i'm
sorry if i rush past this a little bit
i've been trying to talk slower since i
started talking um so what we have here
with these two servers
once you've posted something to your
activity pub works on an inbox outbox
system right so clients have inboxes and
outboxes you'll push something from your
outbox to your home server your home
server then gets it in its inbox and
then we'll push it to the inbox of any
server that has one of your followers on
it
and then that's then on the inboxes of
all the clients who follow you
so yes to answer your quick question yes
um that's how that's how the model works
it's inbox outbox email json over email
yes
hey there um thanks again for the
amazing talk uh this activity pub seems
awesome but i had
one thing that that was running through
my mind when i was when you were
presenting everything is that um with
all the different examples of the uh of
the implementations that you showed they
all seem to have text pictures and
videos and i'm sure they can implement
instant specific features but um the
protocol itself seems like it's um it
only handles the lowest common
denominator kind of like email you know
it handles text and maybe pictures but
um
i feel like um that's that that could be
hindering adoption because all the
platforms that you're trying to compete
with like twitter instagram facebook
they all have
specific functionality that sort of
drives people to the platform like
instagram stories or like retweets so
how does activity pub sort of handle
this i don't know if i got a clear
answer to that
so activity pub has mechanisms for all
of the common social media paradigms
like boosting liking
following people with follow requests
activity pub has mechanisms for all of
this but you're exactly right it doesn't
have anything unique
um and that's really the problem because
any given any given platform or version
of that activity pub software
is mostly a clone of another one at this
point
which is what i'm talking about which is
why i think that as a spec activity pub
needs to change or be replaced by
something which has unique features and
i'm hoping that those unique features
which don't yet exist those ideas which
haven't yet be had been had will be had
by people like you who have come to this
talk and who can uh start to work on
building a better social media
experience i know does that answer your
question it's like you're exactly right
it's not that featureful it only has the
features that everybody else has
we don't have anything unique yet except
for a culture but i'm hoping our culture
will translate to new features because
we have a lot of awesome people on this
platform um and if you don't mind a
follow-up question just i saw all the
different like like a copy of all the
different social media types like reddit
and twitter in your examples is have you
heard of anything that sort of mimics
something like twitch
like video streaming seems to be one
thing that i didn't
puretube is actually really cool and it
is something with a pretty unique
feature set i i think now i should have
talked about it but i get the chance
peer2
uh can do two things can do hosted
videos or peer-to-peer videos so anybody
with a peer tube instance hosts videos
and they can be accessed in a federated
manner
but you can also get these videos
directly from other users who have
opened the same video
so it's like a little in-browser
torrenting client basically and i
believe peertube has support for live
stuff
again i don't know how complete or
usable it is as a platform i haven't
really tried but it is out there we have
that
the problem is that nobody's using it
and that's the big problem
thank you
hi uh first i wanted to say uh thank you
for this talk because
like before this i didn't know anything
about any of this stuff aside from the
fact that like the existing options suck
um but that doesn't you know like where
do you go from that so thank you um but
i'm wondering like that said
what if i want to set up my own instance
what how do i how can i do that yeah
this is a really great question um right
now as i said you'd probably want to run
a mastodon instance it's just the place
where everyone else is there's a really
great service called masto.host they
will create for you a managed mastodon
instance which you could administrate
and then they will do this has been part
of everything and you can scale that as
your instance grows depending on how you
want to do things if you want a
self-host too it's really easy if you
have a spare vps somewhere
mastodon is a ruby on rails app with a
postgresql database postgre sql i don't
know there's a big old warp here but
yeah massdown has a rails app with a
database you can implement it on a
server in an afternoon it's not that
hard um but if you want a really easy
experience master.host is the the place
to go thank you yeah
hi uh it seemed like from the existing
implementations that you showed that
most of the time people who are using
this protocol are mostly trying to
imitate other
existing social media platforms and my
my question is
um is anybody trying to do anything a
little outside the box like um
a social activity that always comes to
mind to me is is gaming and you
mentioned minecraft uh is there anybody
working on uh say video game matchmaking
or something like that yeah um sprightly
is which is really cool there's a
wonderful talk which i think i linked to
on that qr code
and if not
i'll add it and i'll add it to that page
in a minute spritely is attempting to
create a cohesive experience where you
can join a game on somebody with
somebody else that's federated and with
common items and things like that stored
on respective servers all of this sort
of cryptographically
ensured but without the blockchain i
don't know exactly how it's supposed to
work out
um
yes there are people doing cool things
none of them are usable or used yet
but i encourage you to go and take a
look at them and see what you can do to
help all right thank you very much yeah
all right
on
mobile apps if somebody replies to
one of your posts is there any way for
activity pub to do push notifications
because typically that would be
that would have to be associated with
the app right but then yeah they're not
the same as the servers they wouldn't
that wouldn't necessarily know that's a
great question
it does depend on the platform so
mastodon and the most of the mastodon
like clients and mobile apps do have
push notifications but the platform does
have to implement that separately from
the spec
so they get the notification from so
your your home server
is like oh i just got a reply i'll send
that to the mastodon app server and then
that sends it through ios and android
okay cool
thank you so much real time that was a
really good i'm glad i came to this talk
thanks um
you were talking about how activity pub
is an unmaintained standard and it's
just kind of
bad
um
yeah okay well it's good but you know
missing some features
are there any up-and-coming
new standards that
aim to replace activity pub and do you
think it's even worth it to
try considering already we're having
adoption issues
yeah yes first of all yes it is worth it
and i think we should be working on this
stuff and there are people who are
i i refer you back again to sprightly um
who are doing some really cool stuff um
and they have links to other
organizations i think the new social is
actually still maintained even if no one
is using it so there are other platforms
there is stuff happening the problem is
that if nobody's using activity pub
which is the wider standard right now
very few people are going to want to
implement something entirely different
from
that so again
trying to call attention to all of this
and and hope people start working on it
because some people are but not enough
thank you
so fantastic talk by the way thanks uh
before i take a swing at you um
so
you're saying that you know activity pub
is a failure because there are only six
million people on it was your
expectation that within the last four
years that they would displace all of
facebook and twitter i mean what's the
number that would make this
even a reasonable success in your eyes
if where they are now is so bad a great
question um and i think it comes back to
what i was talking about with why is
social media i mean i i if you see
activity pub as a way to replace and
from taking power away from
centralized corporate social media
platforms then it's failed and i think
you'll call that success when the
average person who wants to sign up for
social media account doesn't go to
facebook they go to frendica that would
be a success if you're trying to replace
existing social media platforms because
as it is right now
big tech can't exactly coexist
um
i think when you're talking about
evolving what social media looks like
from a passive to an active experience
that's a difficult question and i think
it comes again to that point when
all your friends are on it and you can
see interesting things and maybe that
can co-exist with existing platforms
that people don't want to leave but uh
there's not a number so much as like a a
question of when is this the better
experience and that relies on standards
it relies on features and it relies on
people to actually come and join the
platforms and make them better yeah
better experience is a little tough to
define though it is yeah that's that's a
very nebulous because i think the
experience is better
yeah but that's
because the nerds that i like
no exactly i love it makes it easy i
gotta mess it on every day i get on
twitter never it's great um and i think
if you're looking for a good social
media experience right now mastodon is
the place to go
but a better experience is also not just
for the people sitting in this room all
of whom are very smart and technical it
needs to apply to everybody and again
it's nebulous i don't have a good
definition for you off the top of my
head
but i think that will come with time
and uh and hopefully with participation
that was my that was my point is it may
take more time it does it's gonna take
you can't have vc backed billion dollar
company
meteoric growth with no money and
grassroots
i think if it's going to be grassroots
and it's going to be successful it's
going to take time you raise a great
point it is um
thank you yeah thank you
all right so we have a question from uh
online uh from uh
the matrix anyone know of any mastodon
instances focusing on cyber stalking
related to fighting it prevention and
how to take action cyber stalking
um that's a really good question tech
any ideas no
yeah um there is again on that page an
instance finder called fetiverse.2 and
you may be able to look there um you can
search for instances of various
platforms which is i think a really
helpful thing and you can migrate from
there but you know ask around um and and
see if you get any any helpful stuff i
don't know of one off the top of my head
yeah
a question i guess um is there any
functionality planned or thought about
um
if you're on a federated um platform to
pull from other platforms and then to
post out to those platforms
compatibility you know that kind of
stuff great great question thank you um
there are at this moment fetiverse
mirrors between twitter and i believe
also reddit so you can get posts from
twitter feeds in your fetivers timeline
and you can mirror posts from what you
say on the fetiverse to twitter and vice
versa which really does ease the
transition for people so those are out
there and they're pretty pretty widely
used
hi hi thank you for the talk thanks do
you know of any vetivers things that are
similar or alternative possibly to
linkedin
to linkedin no
um
yeah any ideas
yeah mastodon did get me a job
cool thank you yeah
and i think that is
the last question and also near the end
of my time thank you again everybody for
coming and hearing from me i really
appreciate it
[Applause]
thank
good you