Loomio
Fri 1 Jun 2018 6:11PM

ActivityPub as a decentralized OAE infrastructure?

LF Lynn Foster Public Seen by 106

Several of us have been looking more closely at ActivityPub (https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#obj-id) as a mechanism for messaging between decentralized agents (people and organizations), as well as between apps. It currently is focused on social networks, but we think it shows a lot of promise in other directions too. We are focused on the economic aspects of an open app ecosystem in our discussions, and more integration of that with social aspects too.

And focused on moving towards an agent-centric architecture, some definitions of that here https://cryptpad.fr/pad/#/1/view/HCGmHSwjgSNEOONNPRLplA/CyJfwJFLO3RXcFysO0sGKmh4sGpiC4XRMVc5CE7Ozdw/.

Here is an initial set of investigation and thoughts about how this could actually work. https://cryptpad.fr/pad/#/2/pad/view/oqXdr2rfGXO04U1UWo2CIiZoL1Z9lkNkhzF5jw6pZDk/.

Feedback welcome!

JS

Jon Schull Fri 1 Jun 2018 7:06PM

Thiis looks interesting. It would be helpful to have a vision how people would use this utlity before jumping into a discussion of how it might be implemented. Is this e.g., a facebook replacement?

LF

Lynn Foster Fri 1 Jun 2018 7:21PM

Good point. Briefly, ActivityPub is already starting to be used as more or less a facebook replacement, with federated social networks instead of one big platform. Although I should note that ActivityPub is a spec and there are a number of implementations. An example is Mastodon. Some people in this group use social.coop, which is a implementation of Mastodon.

This thread is about extending that ecosystem to also include economic activity. So people would use it for economic activity already supported with platform apps, such as timebanks, mutual credit, supply chain and manufacturing, distribution, crypto-currency exchange, etc. - anything we want to do economically in the "next economy".

This group is about "open app ecosystems", ecosystems of interoperable smaller apps. This thread suggests one way that such smaller apps could communicate with each other. One focus of the proposal linked above is that it can be a way that people and organizations can communicate with each other for economic reasons in addition to the social networking currently going on. The other main focus is that ActivityPub can be configured to work for an agent-centric network instead of (in addition to?) the federated system it currently is mostly used for.

Hope that helps.... :)

DS

Danyl Strype Wed 26 Sep 2018 5:02PM

ActivityPub is already starting to be used as more or less a facebook replacement

At the risk of splitting hairs, I would say FarceBook is the one UX nobody is using AP for yet. It's being used for a:

  • birdsite replacement: eg Mastodon / Pleroma
  • Medium replacement: eg Plume, write.as
  • YouTube replacement: eg PeerTube
  • InstaGram replacement: eg PixelFed, Anfora
  • Reddit replacement: Anancus, Primso
  • GrooveShark/ SoundCloud replacement: FunkWhale
  • MeetUp replacement: GetTogether
  • PasteBin replacement: DistBin

All of these are 'social media', ie they are a means of publishing stuff to self-selecting 'followers', and the open web. In contrast, the UX that FB is built for is a 'social network', where users find pre-existing 'friends', and making 2-way connections that allow each other to access a range of private media they've shared. They may selectively share some of that publicly.

It would be awesome, but I'm not aware of any AP apps building anything like this yet. Diaspora is the closest so far, and it's really more like G+, and is the only federated app that has no plans to implement AP.

TK

Tibor Katelbach Sat 2 Jun 2018 9:06AM

Hi Lynn , we have Activity Stream implemented since it exists 2014, we still have to do the activityPub structure , it's part of our 2018 plan
all the parts are allreday out there , we just have to put it into the api interfaces
Mastodon, and Peertube and many more allready implement it , like RSS syndication it allows seemless interaction through APIs and direct cross platform messaging which is really great
the use cases applied to Value Flows work great and you can even make activityStreams better with what's missing for VF.
By lack of time We aren't that good in giving things back to ActSream , we just create our new verbs when needed and use them locally since we still have little outside interaction. It's a great OAE approach and standard, it was listed here since qui some time https://github.com/pixelhumain/buildingCommons :)

LF

Lynn Foster Sat 2 Jun 2018 11:35AM

Great, @tiborkatelbach :heart: ! When do you think you will start working on your ActivityPub implementation? Let's see if we can coordinate on it!

DS

Danyl Strype Wed 26 Sep 2018 4:40PM

Hi Tibor, what's the name of the app/ package you will implement AP for? I'd like to add it to this list:
https://gitlab.com/fediverse/fediverse.gitlab.io/wikis/watchlist-for-activitypub-apps

TK

Tibor Katelbach Wed 26 Sep 2018 4:44PM

Hi

We implmenting it on Communecter.org

we have ActivityStream since à long time now

we just have to hook up the Activity Pub compatible API endpoints

best

DS

Danyl Strype Tue 11 Dec 2018 7:29PM

@tiborkatelbach @julienlecaille any updates on your plans to implement ActivityPub in Communecter?

TK

Tibor Katelbach Wed 12 Dec 2018 8:26AM

ActivityStream is implemented since 2014 ;)

all that's left to do is to find the time , to implement the apis exposing activityPub endpoints

it should be done for febuary

DS

Danyl Strype Thu 13 Dec 2018 4:51AM

Cool. Where are you doing your active development? The GH repo I'm aware of hasn't had any updates for 2 years:
https://github.com/pixelhumain/communecter/

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