Comment by _heimdall

Comment by _heimdall 16 hours ago

22 replies

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I've never quite understood the appeal of ActivityPub.

Looking at the list of goals in the article, the only benefit in addition to what can easily be done with RSS is knowing who follows me. Maybe its just me, but if I'm writing to a blog or a microblog I just don't really care who follows me or even who reads it.

There are more social features built into ActivityPub, likes and shares for example, but at that point I'm likely not running my own server and am trusting a third party to do it for me. The idea that there are multiple hosts I can choose to trust rather than one centralized one feels more like a principled argument than one based on real benefits of, for example, owning my own content or censorship resistance.

rglullis 15 hours ago

> if I'm writing to a blog or a microblog I just don't really care who follows me or even who reads it.

- if you want to have comments or backtracks, you can do it with ActivityPub without having people signing up to your site (directly or through some OAuth system)

- If you want to mitigate spam, you can set up your AP blog to only accept messages on the inbox from actors who you whitelist.

- You could have your own Substack where you only send the updates to actors who are paying subscribers.

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  • apitman 12 hours ago

    > if you want to have comments or backtracks, you can do it with ActivityPub without having people signing up to your site (directly or through some OAuth system)

    You can do the same thing with RSS+We mention, which is a way simpler stack and predates ActivityPub by years

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    • rglullis 11 hours ago

      Webmentions are a spammer's wet dream. There is a reason they were adopted only by the Indieweb crowd.

      Anyway, my point was less "ActivityPub can do everything people can do with RSS" and more "having a mechanism to for bidirectional authenticated messages opens up the possibility of new applications".

      The real interesting part will happen when/if more developers realize that ActivityPub can do more than "federated versions of popular social media platforms".

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      • freosam 4 hours ago

        Spammers would have to host a page (permanently) that links to your post, and even then they don't get to control what (if anything) from that page gets displayed on your site.

        I guess one danger is that they only serve the page that contains your link to the webmention-validating request. That way they get a backlink but don't have to keep a public outgoing link. They'd have to know that a given request is that validation though, and I'm not sure that'd be very easy.

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      • apitman 11 hours ago

        I might be misunderstanding what you're saying here. How is ActivityPub more authenticated than Webmention? WM requires the poster to host their content on a website. This is exactly what the AP spec says to do. Now, since the spec was published, most AP implementations also support HTTP signatures[0], but this doesn't provide additional guarantees that you can't get with WM. The authentication is still tied to a URL.

        As far as spamming goes, I don't see how WM is any worse than AP. In both protocols your only options are passlists and/or blocklists.

        [0]: And an old version that doesn't have an official spec. ActivityPub's issues with spec stagnation and de facto standards is a whole other thing.

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  • _heimdall 15 hours ago

    The OP here specifically wasn't including any auth features, which I was pretty sure would mean backtracks and comments aren't supported but maybe that's wring. It is possible with ActivityPub, but I'd personally be hesitant to run my own OAuth server just for a microblog.

    Regardless, my underlying point really is about what I expect of a microblog. If I'm hosting it myself I just want it to be my little corner of the internet, not a full fledged social media site that I have to maintain. That doesn't mean I'm right or that others don't expect more.

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    • rglullis 14 hours ago

      > If I'm hosting it myself I just want it to be my little corner of the internet, not a full fledged social media site that I have to maintain.

      I think the problem is that OP is focused on developing a framework for AP, and he is dogfooding it by developing an application that other people can understand without too many new concepts.

      This is good if you want people to get experiments, but it is terrible as a way to present the true potential of the protocol: https://cosocial.ca/@evan/113143389340566731

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rpgbr 12 hours ago

The appeal, at least for me, is having a social layer on top of your own stuff. Are you familiar with POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere)? With AP you skip the whole second part because it's automatically syndicated everywhere the moment you post on your own site.

I'm having good results with the WordPress ActivityPub plugin on my blog[1].

[1] https://manualdousuario.net/en/

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vhcr 8 hours ago

I hate that the conversation online has moved from distributed to federated, I understand that running p2p software is harder for the user, but I feel like actually distributed microblogging / social networks are the right choice going forwards.

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  • zamalek 8 hours ago

    Not even microblogging, jut blogging in general. ActivityPub could be a replacement for RSS readers. I consider a platform that allows you to mix microblogs, blogs, podcasts, videos, and livestreams/events the "endgame" - all of which can be done with ActivityPub (albeit with different projects today). Unfortunately this is not the type of project that I would find interesting at all to write.

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  • harrison_clarke 6 hours ago

    p2p stuff looks like it's getting better

    there's iroh, which looks like a nice balance of batteries included, and not a bunch of bloat

    and pkarr, which does exactly one thing: maps ed25519 keys to DNS records via bittorrent's DHT

    i think the big blocker for wider adoption is that browsers, ISPs, and airport wifi are all hostile to general purpose network protocols. you're mostly stuck with TCP, or the quagmire of WebRTC right now. (iroh works in the browser, but it has to go through a relay)

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genghisjahn 16 hours ago

I used to think running my own server for blog stuff was a waste as well. But it’s incredible what can be done with local mini server running Ubuntu and cloud flare tunnels.

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  • gessha 15 hours ago

    With the rising VPS costs I'm starting to wonder if it's better to move my VPS in-house(:D). Electricity-wise I might be break-even but I wonder if the bandwidth I get from my ISP will be the same, not that my services are high-traffic anyway.

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    • harrison_clarke 6 hours ago

      the main issue you'd run into is probably your ISP's NAT

      you generally need a stable IP, and a firewall that'll let people initiate connections from outside your house

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      • bigstrat2003 5 hours ago

        I find that most ISPs provide that. Generally you have a stable (though not permanently so) IP through DHCP, and most ISPs aren't doing CGNAT.

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  • _heimdall 15 hours ago

    Sure, I have a small homelab and use Tailscale for a similar setup to CF tunnels.

    That's a bit besides the point though. I'm not saying hosting ActivityPub yourself seems unnecessary, I'm saying that ActivityPub itself seems unnecessary (or at least not worth the costs and overhead).

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