So, Richard McManus asked me about how ActivityPub supports cross-server usage. As an example use case, let’s say a user with the account eric@social.example wants to comment on a photo by dionne@photos.example. In this scenario, Eric would go to the page https://photos.example/users/dionne/photos/1 and enter a comment. How would that work? I can talk about how … Continue reading Cross-server Interactions in ActivityPub
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My friend Evan Henshaw-Plath wrote recently about some concerns with ActivityPub. I want to go over his concerns one by one and give some assessment of how accurate and important I think they are. Rabble’s words in italics; my responses in just normal text. I think there are a plenty of good points in Rabble’s … Continue reading Responses to Rabble on ActivityPub
Just a few minutes ago I sent my development editor Sarah the news that I’d finished another chapter of the ActivityPub book I’m writing for O’Reilly Media. This was the hardest one so far — the one on the ActivityPub federation protocol that connects different servers on the fediverse. I’m now at 5 out of … Continue reading Another chapter done!
As I often do, I made a poll on the fediverse about two concepts I am interested in: Big Fedi versus Small Fedi. Although I think these are interesting topics, I couldn’t come up with exact summations of what the “Big Fedi” and “Small Fedi” positions are. So, I wanted to write down what I … Continue reading Big Fedi, Small Fedi
After a couple of months of deep writing, I’ve just turned in my first two chapters for the ActivityPub book for O’Reilly Media. It’s been a really tough process for me. I’ve never written a book, or really any text of this size, before, so learning how to organise the process and my time has … Continue reading First two chapters turned in
I’m really happy to see the ActivityPub plugin enabled for all free and paid WordPress.com accounts. I’ve been using the plugin on this blog for about a week, thanks to Matthias Pfefferle at WordPress, and I have some thoughts about it so far. The first thing is that it’s definitely more like having a fediverse … Continue reading ActivityPub on WordPress.com
I’ve signed an agreement to write a book about ActivityPub for O’Reilly Media. ActivityPub is the protocol for connecting social networks across the Web; it’s what currently underpins Mastodon and will be used by Threads.net. The book should be available sometime after summer 2024. The book will be a developer guide that will help programmers … Continue reading ActivityPub Book for O’Reilly Media
One important pattern in social networking is end-to-end encryption for direct messages. This is a structure in which the native or Web clients encrypt the message on the user’s device, and no intermediate actor — neither user’s servers, nor any network node — can read the message. This wasn’t a big part of our planning … Continue reading End-to-End Encrypted Messages Over ActivityPub