activitypub

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 →

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 →