(2023-04-21) Can ActivityPub Save The Internet

Can ActivityPub save the internet? The hottest new thing in social isn’t vertical video, and it’s not AI-driven algorithmic feeds. Instead, it’s a little-known, years-old protocol called ActivityPub that could help rewire the entire social fabric of the internet.

there’s Mastodon, the ActivityPub–powered platform that has become a haven to Twitter Quitters all over the internet.

there’s a growing set of people who will tell you the future isn’t Mastodon but what it represents: a scaled ActivityPub-based social platform.

And there will be plenty of competition in the race to reinvent social media: social upstarts like Artifact and Substack Notes are building their own closed platforms, and Bluesky, Farcaster, Nostr, and others are building their own open protocols that also aim to decentralize social networking entirely.

For most of the last 15 years, the social web has felt like a settled market

And then Elon Musk bought Twitter. (Musk Buys Twitter)

When Musk spent $44 billion to acquire Twitter and then systematically destroyed everything people loved about the platform, users went looking for something better

here’s the simplest way I can think to explain it: to decentralize social networking is to completely separate the user interface from the underlying data

Any time you sign up for a new social app, you won’t have to rebuild your audience or re-find all your friends; your whole following and followers list come with you

“We had this vision of a more peer-to-peer internet,” says Christine Lemmer-Webber, one of the co-editors of the ActivityPub standard.

Over the years, Evan Prodromou says, there has been a parade of protocols aiming to open up parts of social networking. OStatus; pump.io; Open Social; Pubsubhubbub; WebFinger; ActivityStreams; XMPP; RSS; OpenID. There are plenty more, and you’ve almost certainly never heard of most of them.

*In July of 2014, a new group convened, known as the “Social Web Working Group,” that was explicitly tasked with figuring out federated social networking.

The group fought and debated for the next three and a half years. “At one point,” Lemmer-Webber says, “it looked like we were going to run out of time and ActivityPub wouldn’t happen.”*

Even in the rosiest of measures, it’s still several orders of magnitude smaller than Twitter

Ultimately, the bet all these developers and companies are making is not just that Twitter will die and hundreds of millions of users will need a place to go. (Though they’re definitely betting on that.) It’s also that the possibility of a TikTok ban will open people’s eyes to how fragile these platforms are and how foolish it can be to give your audience and content to a platform that could simply disappear.

But ActivityPub is a protocol, and you can’t download a protocol. For this new future to take hold, it needs a killer app. I asked almost everyone I spoke to for this story, Do you think Mastodon is going to win? Is it going to be the next big thing in social? Most said probably not. In part because, if ActivityPub really takes off, there might not need to be a next big thing at all.

If you want a reason to bet against ActivityPub taking over the web and bringing us a better, more open future, I’ll give it to you in one word: money

A startup takes VC money, spends its way to massive growth

The best and worst thing about the Fediverse is that its values don’t allow for most of that

There’s also the problem of the existing social networks, the giant thriving businesses with little incentive to play nice.

right now, billions of users are still happily logging into Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the rest

Right now, the best reason to bet against Mastodon specifically is because Mastodon is hard. Using it exposes the biggest problem with ActivityPub: the protocol doesn’t allow for any kind of universal system of digital identity.

These are things ActivityPub will have to learn from protocols like Bluesky, which everyone agrees handles questions of identity and discoverability much better. “We’ve designed a protocol that has three big things we think are missing from the Mastodon ecosystem: account portability, global discoverability, [and] composable, customizable curation and moderation,” Bluesky CEO Jay Graber recently told The Verge.

But of all the things left for the Fediverse to figure out, content moderation will be the thorniest: it’s an expensive, complicated thing to get right, and without good content moderation, social platforms simply don’t work. (This is a simplistic/stupid claim, not expanded on at all in the article.)

“We want it to be true that if you have a Firefox account, you can use that to sign into our Mastodon instance,” Teixeira says.

But the advice you’ll hear from most people in this space is this: own your own domain.

“If you solve identity with domain names, it makes things easier because it fits the way the web has been for 20 years,” says Manton Reece, who runs an ActivityPub-supporting microblogging platform called Micro.blog. “On the other hand, no one understands DNS, no one understands how to configure your domain name.”

If it works, if ActivityPub becomes the underlying infrastructure of the social web, your identity becomes your identity for everything (AP doesn't work with domains as ID, right?)

There will be big players in the ActivityPub-led future, Dash says. Maybe not Facebook big, but big nonetheless

After nearly two decades of fighting for this vision of the internet, the people who believed in federation feel like they’re finally going to win.

Tantek Celik notes I was very happy to see that he also clearly communicated several #IndieWeb principles, practices, goals, and reasons why.

Pierce also noted: “you might soon be able to turn your personal website into your entire social identity online”. I already can. I replied to Pierce’s post about his article noting this, from #federating directly from my website for the past ~6 months, to over a decade of using it as my social identity with the POSSE method with various #socialMedia silos. But his domain isn't his identity on Mastodon, he resorts to POSSE to mirror all his posts on his own complex server.