ActivityPub, the Fediverse, and You

Just a Spec

Witness the rise of the Fediverse! In this episode we talk about early attempts at building decentralized social networking protocols for the web, the modern effort to craft a true W3C-published standard, challenges at scale with building out ActivityPub-based services, some of the new companies and infrastructure adopting ActivityPub, and what Meta’s upcoming entry to the Fediverse could mean for the future of decentralized social media. Note: we recorded this episode prior to the meltdown of Reddit, so we will not be covering the sudden rise of the "Threadiverse" with software such as Kbin and Lemmy. A topic for another day!
Hosted by Jared White & Ayush
Show Notes:

• Early social networking protocols:
  • OpenSocial
  • OStatus
  • Pump.io
• Finally: ActivityPub!
  • Uses Activity Streams under the hood
  • and JSON-LD
  • and WebFinger
• Mastodon: How to implement a basic ActivityPub server
• Understanding ActivityPub
• Sample Python code
• Track Fediverse growth at FediDB

Chapters

1. Uh…Reddit meltdown!!! (00:00:00)

2. Introduction (00:00:35)

3. Say hello to ActivityPub (00:03:08)

4. History Lesson #1: OpenSocial (00:04:31)

5. History Lesson #2: StatusNet (00:06:34)

6. History Lesson #3: Pump.io (00:07:54)

7. History Lesson #4: W3C develops ActivityPub (00:08:36)

8. Future scaling issues? (00:12:37)

9. Single-user instances can be rought (00:15:58)

10. Not all social experiences may interoperate in quite the same way (00:18:29)

11. Software using ActivityPub today (00:20:24)

12. Meta is joining the Fediverse ??!! (00:22:49)

13. Donation or subscription-based instances to date (00:25:07)

14. The urgent need for open social protocols (00:28:00)

15. Commercial services used to be a lot more open (00:30:26)

16. Wherefore Bluesky? (00:34:27)

17. What about social networking fatigue… (00:38:23)

18. Outro (00:42:54)