AbstractThe ActivityPub protocol is a decentralized social networking protocol based upon the ActivityStreams 2.0 data format.
websites and computer programs that allow people to communicate and share information, opinions, pictures, videos, etc. on the internet, especially social networking websites
The protocol is described as a social networking protocol in its abstract. That people managed to bolt on forums and marketplaces on top of it is more of a testament to its stupid levels of extensibility.
And to me social media qualifies as anything that isn't a blog that allows comments. Since that is its dictionary definition more or less. AIM was social media, Twitter is social media, Fediverse is social media. They are all medias that allow social interactions.
>It would have allowed for discussions with restricted permissions, made absolutely impenetrable even for Mastodon users. It would even have allowed for discussion groups which would have been both fully private and hidden from all directories. Most importantly, it would have empowered its users to moderate their own streams themselves with a whole arsenal of countermeasures, all the way up to the thermonuclear option of turning ActivityPub off entirely.You can't have any of this when using ActivityPub.
And if you turn off ActivityPub federation then you've created a website with comments.
There is nothing private on this network besides end-to-end-encrypted DMs which are very much in a prototype stage still.
Even stuff like Conversation Containers aren't private despite the federation being done only by one party being the sole authority over the conversation. It is trivial to leak those posts as long as they've been sent to one or more malicious instances. They have the same issue as Mastodon lockposts in that regard. The only meaningful difference between the two is that a Conversation Container can stay in the same audience throughout the whole conversation, ie. only for the followers of OP for example, Mastodon lockposts don't have that capability.
>Mastodon is not the gold standard and reference implementation of ActivityPub.ActivityPub is Mastodon no matter how much that fact sucks.
>It's a highly Mastodon-centric notion that everything in the Fediverse that doesn't strictly "implement Mastodon" is broken.If you can't federate with 95+% of the network it's broken in the context of Fediverse.
Where do you think ActivityPub came from? It wasn't Eugen Rochko who invented it.
Also, the very first server application that implemented ActivityPub was Hubzilla in July, 2017, two months before Mastodon which started out on the same protocol as StatusNet.
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The reason why Mastodon doesn't have groups isn't because ActivityPub doesn't really support them. It's because Twitter has never had groups.
Except for the thermonuclear option, Forte (https://codeberg.org/fortified/forte) does literally all of this with ActivityPub Don't mix up ActivityPub and Mastodon.
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diaspora, Friendica and Socialhome via the diaspora protocol.
It's so hilarious how you who obviously has never even only tried Friendica
are trying to explain Hubzilla to me
How easy would say is it to find a hidden, private Forte group, join it and lay its conversations open without a Hubzilla, (streams) or Forte channel?
Well, Conversation Containers weren't invented for privacy purposes.
You obviously haven't seen Lemmy from close either.
Mastodon is half stretching the ActivityPub spec almost until it breaks and half semi-proprietary stuff that has literally nothing to do with ActivityPub whatsoever.
For example, Webfinger is not required as per ActivityPub. But it's a hard requirement in order to be able to federate with Mastodon.
The problem which the Fediverse has is that next to nobody even looks at the W3C ActivityPub spec. Almost everyone only looks at the Mastodon source code instead.
And then you see all those Mastodon users whine who believe that everything in the Fediverse that isn't Mastodon is bolted onto Mastodon as an add-on.
20.11% of all active instances excluding (streams) and Forte, behind WordPress and Ghost...
One that happened quite early on was Mastodon's hijack of thesummaryfield for content warnings which wasn't used for that previously.
Now their "hijacks" are more on the side of centralizing moderation and overall working on features that aim to reduce the social aspect of the network and increase witch hunting. Like the new "follow packs" or whatever they called them which will definitely never turn into "block packs" that will inevitably end up maintained by heavily opinionated people like on BlueSky.
Lemmy only recently figured out how to properly federate posts instead of just sending a post link along with a title to instances not running Lemmy.
Coincidentally looking at Fedilist I can see that there are approximately 450 running Friendica instances, approx 100 Hubzilla instances, and apparently 2 Forte instances which doesn't seem right. Streams isn't on the list. That list is acquired by crawling through the various peers endpoints on Fedi servers.
