N3M
I’ve got an interest in the decentralized protocols and have written about them before, so I’ve got a bit of a disorganized treasure trove of articles, opinions, and blog posts I’ve gone through at some point. As a side note, shutout to the single file plugin for Gecko & Chromium based browsers, it’s a great way to grab an archive of anything you might want to reference later.
I went through my list of archives plus a few things that came to mind that I’ve read/watched, below are things that (at least in part) take a more critical look at Activity Pub as a protocol or community.
Blog Posts & Articles:
- How Decentralized is Bluesky really? - A post by Christina Webber who goes over pitfalls of both AT and Activity Pub
- ActivityPub - one protocol to rule them all? and ActivityPub - Final thoughts, one year later. - two posts by Dennis Schubert, the Diaspora dev, on why Activity Pub was not integrated.
- Mastodon is fun and easy, except for when it isn’t
- Mastodon is dead in the water
- Community is not enough - A post about funding issues
- Please Don’t Share Our Links on Mastodon: Here’s Why! - Mastodon starts DDoSing servers if your link goes viral
- Microblogging Protocols Compared v2 - My own post comparing the big three protocols. Be warned, it was supposed to be a smaller updated & corrected version of an older post, but it ballooned in size.
- Mastodon isn’t decentralized and won’t be the next big thing
- Something About The SWF Makes Me Feel Icky - The Social Web Foundation has taken on some big corporate donors and it’s leader has a very protectionist/anti-other-protocols position.
- Fringe Mastodev - A collection of thoughts regarding what Mastodon developed into
- Nostr is Identity for the Internet - A post discussing the values of Nostr’s identities (and decentralized identities in general) as beneficial over other alternatives (such as Activity Pub’s server controlled identities)
- Scaling Mastodon is Impossible
- Twitter rival Mastodon rife with child-abuse material, study finds
- Linux Elitism…Again - Guy is nearly bullied off the fediverse for saying it should be tolerant of Windows users
- Op-ed: Why the great #TwitterMigration didn’t quite pan out
Lemmy Threads:
- What made everyone move to Bluesky or Threads instead of Mastodon?
- Why is Mastodon struggling to survive?
- Why are people preferring BlueSky over Mastodon?
- Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem
- Do you think the mostly limited range of political views is a strength or a weakness of Lemmy? - Post discussing Lemmy’s echo chambery-ness
- Off-topic flamewar about US domestic politics - There were a bunch of low effort political bots discovered on Lemmy (key word: discovered; meaning high effort bots are probably flying under the radar). I was unable to find the original thread, it may have been nuked but most likely I just couldn’t find it.
Vids, Social Media Posts, & Misc:
- Cristina Webber thinks Activity Pub as it is now may collapse
- Technology Connections left Mastodon - the comments are particularly not nice to Activity Pub
- Child Safety on Federated Social - A study on child abuse materials permeating the fediverse
- Chris Titus leaves Mastodon for BlueSky
- Activity Pub doesn’t handle usernames or migrations well
There’s a few technical and non technical reasons someone might be on Bluesky/AT instead of Activity Pub. Protocol specific there’s:
) Account ownership (theoretically at least, migration is still in development). Though it’s hidden behind domain based identification there’s a cryptographic key that let’s you migrate to another PDS even if yours is down or banned you.
) Performance. Hosting something like a PDS is lighter than an Activity Pub instance.
) User level configuration. Bluesky let’s you set custom moderation lists and algorithms, something you can’t on Activity Pub.
) Compatibility. Building something like a link aggregator on AT that is compatible with a microblogging platform like Bluesky is likely a lot easier then Activity Pub since AT is broken up into PDSs and Relays. (To be fair compatibility does work on Activity Pub, but it’s got jank).
There’s also some less technical reasons as well:
) Bluesky is a platform and you don’t need to learn a protocol to use it. Yeah it’s not that hard to learn how any of the big three protocols work, but it’s also not that hard to change your car’s oil or sew ripped cloths instead of replacing them - but how many people do those? I’d guess 80% of Lemmy is an IT guy between 20-45 so it can get a little echo chambery on how easy tech is. One if the reasons Threads makes up 99.5%+ of the fediverse.
) Defederatiation is becoming a mess. If some random Joe has a friend on Bluesky & Nostr (both bridged), a few on threads, and a few spread across different instances; yet he can’t reach all but 1 or 2 of them from the instance he chose to join on joinmastodon it might be time to reconsider how things are done. Techy people might have no problem sifting through a long list of servers to find the right one, but somebody who’s already on the fence is probably going to quit at that point.
) Bluesky has a more mainstream culture, while the fediverse has very specific thoughts and ideas. Had I said I was on Windows you all might have put a hit out on me 😆
Cool
I tested/wrote about it recently, you’re welcome to copy my metaphorical homework if you want
(I’m getting an Nginx error trying to load Nerdica, hopefully it’ll be back up soon)
Cross Compatibility portion of blog post
The long in the short of it is that Lemmy can communicate with Mastodon & Friends, though since Activity Pub servers handle everything and microblogging platforms have no clue what Lemmy is doing there’s a bit of jank.
You can post to a community by "@"ing it, although it can only be a text based submission. You can follow a community by following it’s name (say @fediverse@lemmy.ml) and you’ll get submissions in the form of boosts/reposts. You can also grab a link to a post or reply and search for that on a microblogging server to reply to or like.
My test went pretty well, although the post I made was slightly wonky (title and “@” appeared in the post text). I also didn’t see all the Lemmy replies make it back to my home server. If nomadic identities make their way to activity pub most of the jank could be resolved.
As for a testimonial about compatibility something that sticks out is cross compatibility between Activity Pub, Nostr, and AT (BlueSky). I’m usually on Nostr, but I follow Activity Pub and AT accounts; and thanks to a copying of a json file you can search out the same username on Activity Pub or Nostr and find my Nostr account.
Hello me, testing replies
I’m far from an expert, but anything on standards JIS X6257 / ISO 18630 would probably be a good start. It’s an open standard for 100+ year discs.
Otherwise probably best to look into accelerated aging studies. For technology that’s less that 100 yrs old to claim 100 or 1000 is a bit uncertain but accelerated aging is probably the closest to a best guess. I recall skimming over a third party lab saying Verbatim gold foil archival DVDs were estimated to last 30-120 years depending on storage methods and luck, but never saved the link.
Kinda funny, I was just writing about archival media this morning. Verbatim makes DVDs & Blue Rays that last ~100 years, and M-DISC makes ones that’ll last ~1000 years. And the Verbatim Blu Rays run ~$0.036 per gig.
The account ownership one is definitely my first thought too. Using keypairs to identify accounts controlled by the user would be great. You can hide it behind a normal looking username with your (or a third party’s) domain on both Nostr and AT (though AT’s not fully developed, but it’s totally in control of the user and doing that with activity pub could hand the metaphorical keys of your account to you instead of the server. Another way would be to allow users to use their own domain with an existing third party server, or use something similar to Zot’s (Hubzilla) “Nomadic Identities” that let you mirror your account on another server.
Implementing quote posts is a little above my pay grade, but I actually think that the link option might be a great idea. Nostr does quote posts by just embedding the post into your post where the nevent is pasted in, making both regular quote posts and the general ability to embed any post anywhere in your post. That sort of functionality, just using links to posts instead of nevents could be neat to standardize into activity pub as well, especially if all the other activity pub software already is doing that. Though again, not exactly a dev, so who knows if that’d break things.
Actually one already exists at https://mostr.pub. A dual Activity Pub/Nostr server called ditto is also in the works.
