Often times people ask me, "But how do I learn about how ActivityPub works? Where do I get started?"
Friends! The ActivityPub spec itself is here to help you! There's a really lovely story-driven tutorial about ActivityPub right at the top of the spec in the "Overview" section! https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#Overview
Give it a read! I tried really hard to make it easy to follow, and it has beautiful illustrations from @mray!
@cwebber outstanding work, congratulations to all involved. By the way, would you happen to know what is the easiest way to get the latest version of the full spec in printable format?
@cwebber Itβs so exciting to see this take off! You get tons of credit for sticking to it & getting #ActivityPub out the door way back in the day when few others saw the vision. A warm hug to you! #SocialWebWG#W3CSpecification
@cwebber I remember when we were waiting for the bus at RacketCon 2019 and you were trying to explain to me how Spritely addressed the shortcomings of the Fediverse and I could hear the gears in my head turning trying to grasp it but it was difficult and I really only kinda got half of what you were saying
now I'm on the other side of those conversations! it's tricky, especially when talking to people who have only known corporate networks
but on the other hand, explaining why user-empowering social networking in general is important has gotten a lot easier!
@cwebber I remember when we were waiting for the bus at RacketCon 2019 and you were trying to explain to me how Spritely addressed the shortcomings of the Fediverse and I could hear the gears in my head turning trying to grasp it but it was difficult and I really only kinda got half of what you were saying
There's so much I haven't said about the making of the fediverse, ActivityPub, this moment. And so much of all of this feels really emotional for me *personally*. How we got here. The making of the spec. The huge role transphobia is playing in Twitter falling apart paralleling the huge role that trans people played building the fediverse. What I am trying my damnedest to build for the future of decentralized social networks.
There's so much I'd like to say, but talking about it feels dangerous, forbidden, selfish.
Sometimes I do kinda feel written out of all this history, but maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe it's for the best.
I didn't realize how fucked up that is until the other day when I commented out loud that I was "lucky" that I didn't get BlueSky because, given what's happening with Twitter, I'd almost certainly be getting a ton of transphobic attention right now. And a friend pointed out how terrible it was that I was even put in a position to *think* that.
Heck, up until pointing that, that's a thing I never even mentioned publicly. There you go, now you know: I was, I believe, second in the running to run BlueSky. It's not a shock they gave it to Jay Graber, I think she's great. But... (cotd ...)
There's so much I haven't said about the making of the fediverse, ActivityPub, this moment. And so much of all of this feels really emotional for me *personally*. How we got here. The making of the spec. The huge role transphobia is playing in Twitter falling apart paralleling the huge role that trans people played building the fediverse. What I am trying my damnedest to build for the future of decentralized social networks.
@cwebber Thanks for sharing. For a newcomer like me with very little understanding of the history and context of ActivityPub, the Fediverse and Mastodon I appreciated hearing your perspective.
There's some scary things on the internet, but let's not forget that the #1 distributor of scary hard-right-wing content isn't anything new on the internet, it's Fox News.
I watched a video of Meta's Horizon Worlds, in a sense it looks both okay, it's obvious work went into it, but also kinda bland, and reminded me of... something https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6Ni5S56lec
@cwebber Racket is doing such interesting things with Scheme. This is why I hope they don't ruin it with their variant on trying to remove parens and make more like Python. I think that's a Perl6-level mistake in the making.
@cwebber My mind has been blown. This is not something I would have ever thought about, yet it seems like something that is so obvious in retrospect. So much respect for the Racket community.
It's been a few years and I feel it's safe to say: removing the feed icon from browsers was one of the biggest net-negative impacts to the decentralized web we've seen
okay this has been a fairly informative poll for me actually!