Hey fediverse admins, have you made sure your instance is being counted by https://the-federation.info/ ? I love being able to respond with that stats site URL when people say "nobody uses federated social networks" elsewhere on the web :) It now counts nodes running any one of 36 server apps, across 9 federation protocols, including #OStatus, and #ActivityPub, reporting about 2 1/2 million users.
@LWFlouisa that's a little bit misleading. MG instance aren't actually part of the fediverse yet AFAIK. @cwebber might be able to share more up-to-date news on the prospects of MG implementing #ActivityPub and joining the fed. @joshim
@joshim it depends what you want to use it for. The main differences are; * #MediaGoblin supports any type of media, including audio, photos, documents, slideshows, and so on. #PeerTube is just for videos. * MG instances are stand-alone. You can only find media via searching on the instance its hosted on or a web search. PT supports #ActivityPub, so your videos can be found via searching on other instances, and #WebTorrent, so if one of your videos goes viral, it won't #SlashDot your instance ;)
Implementing #ActivityPub in some form, would allow Diaspora users to connect with about 3 times as many users as they can using only the Diaspora protocol standard. That's with a number of apps/ instances not yet rolling out AP support that's in the works. Regardless of how good the Diaspora UI might be for existing users, denying them such a massively increased network reach is poor #UX design.
However, his comparison with #XMPP is mind-blogging. Yes, the #XMPPFoundation has developed a good process for formalizing extensions to the base standard (#XEPs). Yes, this is something #ActivityPub folks could learn from. But the XMPP spec was first published in 2004. The final AP 1.0 standard was only published last year, give it time!
I wrote up the API I'm thinking about for my #ActivityPub#PHP library! If you're interested in building federated PHP applications, I'd really appreciate if you check it out:
I opened an issue where people can give feedback and discuss the API so that we can make sure it will meet the needs of Fediverse developers. If you have any feedback or suggestions, please contribute to the discussion:
Imagine a comms #UX, where I could choose a contact, choose a rough message length (say, short, medium, or long), and the software would give me an appropriate compose UI for that length of message, and poll the receiver's comms app to determine what protocol they prefer to receive each length of message on. Eg. I could set my app to tell senders I want to receive short messages by SMS, medium ones by #ActivityPub, and long ones by email.
I had the idea a bit ago to make an #ActivityPub version of last.fm/gnu.fm. And I still think itโs a good idea, and would fill a need in the fediverse.
But the more I think about it the more I realize that any solution pretty much *has* to implement the AudioScrobbler protocol, including its oauth1 authentication.
Which gnu.fm already does. So maybe I should start there? But gods DAMN I do not want to deal with that api.
@dragnucs What you said about #OStatus is not really true. #GNU_Social downloads more than just 1 or 2 posts when I subscribe to people, and #Mastodon also does and it did long before they added #ActivityPub.
As for "Private" posts, GS used to have a private post mode (using advisory privacy) ... but it was removed because people thought it was really private, but it was leaky at best. And yes, the private posts were federated across #OStatus.
When I hear about all the "new" halfway-working things in #ActivityPub, almost all of them were tried and discarded in #StatusNet / #GNU_Social before #Mastodon existed.