I'm going to deploy an ActivityPub server this weekend on the Threads news, probably a different implementation, but we'll see
I stopped using Twitter a few weeks back. I tried to give Elon the benefit of the doubt early on, turned out to be a mistake. The platform has become worse and worse. Eschewing moderation leads to hate, misinformation, bickering, and spam becoming the predominant content.
Federation seems like the right way to organize social media. Problem has always been the big servers each having their own protocol and not providing interoperability.
He's right. The issue we have right now is that many people stick with Twitter/X because it's the most convenient way to keep in contact with the folks they know. This is harder to do on its successors, because they're split three ways between Mastodon, Threads and BlueSky (and many more with lesser known platforms and services).
So people either use Twitter/X as a backup, or get stuck splitting their time between all these different platforms. Having at least two of them be interoperable will mean there's more of a chance of being able to follow all your friends/connections via one profile and piece of software, and less of an incentive to fall back to the old system.
While I don’t doubt that Threads addition of ActivityPub is good for both Threads and the fediverse, I wonder if it will become federated in the sense that email is still federated, which is to say email is dominated by a small number of players who control the vast majority of email addresses (i.e gmail) and their control represents a de-facto centralization of a once decentralized protocol. Is there a reason to think that ActivityPub is fundamentally different from SMTP, and Threads from Gmail, to suggest that won’t happen here?
It’s still preferable to have an open protocol, but only slightly if the related market is monopolized.
I think it's a fair question. The primary reason email has centralized is spam. The fediverse doesn't have any specific answer to this. It explicitly punts in the spec[0].
Personally, I wonder how much value there is in NxN communication where N=8,000,000,000. If your instance only downloaded and showed you content from feeds you explicitly followed, spam would be a much smaller problem. But everyone wants to see responses from everyone else and yell at each other.
Email certainly provides value in being able to cold-contact someone, but I think that could be handled separately, maybe using something like a cost-based anti-spam system[1].
My Fedi account gets more spam than my email does at this point (thanks to all the brutal postfix milters I've got on). And if we broaden it to not just unsolicited commercial email but also include outright jerks, then it's even more.
Email has spent a lot of effort on trying to implement a world-writable inbox and I'm really impressed with what they've got, with DMARC, DKIM, SPF and such.
But just to devil's advocate for Fedi for three seconds: one of the main drivers of spam was spoofing (and unsecured SMTP relays) and that's something the HTTP signatures in ActivityPub curbs.
The big fear I have with Fedi is a "domain mill", a harassment (or unsolicited commercial promotion) site that can automatically register thousands of domains and use those to set up an overwhelming amount of spamming and harassing instances.
You can mitigate that somewhat by blocking entire apex domains (public suffix list would likely be helpful here), but I think the root problem is allowing anyone to say whatever they want to anyone else in a fairly anonymous manner, and I just don't think that's a scalable concept.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 36.8 ms ] threadI stopped using Twitter a few weeks back. I tried to give Elon the benefit of the doubt early on, turned out to be a mistake. The platform has become worse and worse. Eschewing moderation leads to hate, misinformation, bickering, and spam becoming the predominant content.
Federation seems like the right way to organize social media. Problem has always been the big servers each having their own protocol and not providing interoperability.
Also, I want way more control of my feed
I'm leaning towards https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial
So people either use Twitter/X as a backup, or get stuck splitting their time between all these different platforms. Having at least two of them be interoperable will mean there's more of a chance of being able to follow all your friends/connections via one profile and piece of software, and less of an incentive to fall back to the old system.
It’s still preferable to have an open protocol, but only slightly if the related market is monopolized.
Personally, I wonder how much value there is in NxN communication where N=8,000,000,000. If your instance only downloaded and showed you content from feeds you explicitly followed, spam would be a much smaller problem. But everyone wants to see responses from everyone else and yell at each other.
Email certainly provides value in being able to cold-contact someone, but I think that could be handled separately, maybe using something like a cost-based anti-spam system[1].
[0]: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#security-spam
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost-based_anti-spam_systems
Email has spent a lot of effort on trying to implement a world-writable inbox and I'm really impressed with what they've got, with DMARC, DKIM, SPF and such.
But just to devil's advocate for Fedi for three seconds: one of the main drivers of spam was spoofing (and unsecured SMTP relays) and that's something the HTTP signatures in ActivityPub curbs.
The big fear I have with Fedi is a "domain mill", a harassment (or unsolicited commercial promotion) site that can automatically register thousands of domains and use those to set up an overwhelming amount of spamming and harassing instances.