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.
