"a reply to Christine Lemmer-Webber's thoughtful ... "How decentralized is Bluesky really?", Hubbed earlier, which "raises the bar on analysis in this space. However, I disagree with some of the analysis".First, agreement with CLW's "shared heap" image, and a good summary of how Bluesky works: "atp…

ActivityPub co-author Christine Lemmer-Webber "often get asked whether or not I have opinions about ATProto vs ActivityPub... I do ... but I am usually head-down focused on building... [and] anything I had to say on the subject would not be received productively". But, encouraged by a core Bluesky developer, here is her longread.It'…

An almost 30min video from Justin Garrison in July 2023 asking: "What is the difference between Mastodon's ActivityPub and BlueSky's AT Protocol?... We're not going to be looking at [apps] ... like Mastodon and Bluesky or Threads" - instead, a mid-level dive into the underlying protocols, and "some pros and cons of ea…

No one is the enshittifier of their own story

Another Bluesky guide with "the tips & tricks that I often give to friends when I send them an invite code", including a brief but informative history lesson.Of particular interest to me in early November 2024:"they promise they won’t “enshittify” the service in future... [are] explicitly building the network to be “billionaire-…

"Friendica only has about 14,559 total users ... 1692 are “monthly active users” ... [but] Friendica users are incredibly passionate about it... features-rich, unique and brilliant".These include "add and follow RSS feeds and BlueSky accounts", which is enough to pique my interest. Elena Rossini is a new user, so she links to a…

Loforo is "an ActivityPub Tumblr alternative whose vibe reminds me of the early days of Tumblr... second most active ActivityPub blog platform in the Fediverse, behind only WordPress". The author lists some areas of improvement, and claims that if Loforo can implement them it'll "inherit Tumblr's fallen crown [and] ... sur…

A report from Ghost on ActivityPub integration, starting with a nice intro for newcomers: "HTML is a standard for displaying text and images on a computer. Email is a standard for sending and receiving messages privately. ActivityPub, then, is a standard for sending and receiving content publicly.", and followed by some musings on the di…

"the distributed/federated digital garden approach is the way to go for knowledge commoning... cribbing from ActivityPub's local, global, and 'those-you-follow' timelines... you could have local, 'those-you-follow', and global gardens... [with] some kind of liquid democracy", and interest-based groups, perhaps s…

"Micro.blog can now cross-post to a Mastodon user account... Your custom domain on Micro.blog can now be ActivityPub-compatible, so that you can follow and reply to Mastodon users directly on Micro.blog ... someone can follow your blog posts".As a result "you can consolidate your identity and posts back to your own blog at your ow…

Yoyogi "breaks from the timeline... elevates the author and centers the thread".Pick a Fediverse account (Mastodon for now, Pleroma and Misskey next) that you’re following and see just their threads, in a columnar interface.You need to login and give it permission: the accounts you follow are presented at left, allowing you to select one…

convert any RSS feed to an ActivityPub

An overview of three protocols - ActivityPub, Scuttlebutt and Dat - and their complementary roles in helping redistribute power from "large centralized corporate interests and back into the hands of individual people and small groups... No one protocol [is enough] ... each protocol has its strengths and weaknesses". We need "develo…

Pretty good explanation of ActivityPub from Darius Kazemi: "ActivityPub describes ways for social network sites to talk to each other... [from] sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat... [to] New York Times ... Spotify. Basically any site where individual "users" create content and other people can subscribe to it could be A…

"We wanted MoodleNet, a new resource-centric social network for educators, to be federated... a decentralised network to empower global knowledge sharing and collaboration... we realised ActivityPub... would be perfect ..."They realised it would be useful to create "a ‘hello world’ starter project ... enable developers to build Ac…

"ActivityPub gives applications a shared protocol and syntax that they can use to communicate with each other... [but] writing software that implements federation logic and data structues has been technically challenging"Bonfire provides developers "a kit that manages the data and federation out of the box... enable end users to dep…

Reach outside your own site with federation via ActivityPub. WriteFreely lets anyone on Mastodon, Pleroma, or any ActivityPub-enabled service follow your blog, bookmark your posts, and share them with their followers. See how it works.

ActivityPub separates content from platform. Posts from one platform propagate to other platforms, and users don’t need an account on every platform ... for ex., YouTube clone PeerTube and Mastodon both implement it, so is Mastodon user A follows PeerTube user B, B's new videos will appear in A's Mastodon feed. A can even comment on it f…