53: Fediverse reflections while the bird burns

Twitter is burning, and people are flocking to the fediverse. Is the fediverse ready though? How did we get here? Where should we be going? Since Christine is co-author of ActivityPub, the primary protocol used by the fediverse, Morgan decides it's time to get Christine's thoughts recorded and out there... so we hop in the car as we talk all about it!

Links:

• ActivityPub, the protocol which wires the federated social web together, of which Christine is co-author! Be sure to check out the Overview section... it's actually fairly easy to understand!

• Some of the implementations discussed (though there are many more):

  • Mastodon

  • Peertube

  • Pixelfed

  • Pleroma

• A lot has been written about Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter. Here's a pretty decent timeline (though it's missing the transphobia stuff).

• W3C Social Web Working Group is where ActivityPub was standardized

• OcapPub (while not complete, it lays out a lot of the core problems with the way the fediverse has gone)

• The Spritely Institute

• Previous episodes on Spritely: What is Spritely?, Spritely Updates! (November 2021), and sorta kinda the Terminal Phase episode

• The Presentation of Self on a Decentralized Web (PhD dissertation by ActivityPub co-author Amy Guy, partly covers its standardization)

• SMTP and XMPP can be seen as decentralized "social networks" before that term took off

• OStatus

• pump.io is where the pump.io API came from, which is the direct predecessor to ActivityPub

• StatusNet / GNU Social

• Diaspora

• MediaGoblin

• APConf videos

• Context Collapse

• Early writeups from Christine some of these ideas, but are old:

  • ActivityPub: from decentralied to distributed social networks

  • magenc

  • crystal

  • golem