 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! 50 comments
@cwebber why is Prodromou not in the fediverse (if indeed he isn't)? Is there a story there? @manolomartinez because he keeps meaning to run his own instance before he joins and he keeps not getting around to it :P @cwebber lol, thanks! I have fond memories of identi.ca and everything that followed. @manolomartinez me too! The number of people who were around for that era are getting proportionally small, though I've also seen many of them re-appearing on the fediverse. But most importantly that's because the fediverse has grown *so much* that those people are just a small part of the fedi's population, which is pretty neat! @cwebber it was just 10-ish years ago, though! Which is admittedly millennia in internet years  @mcg @cwebber @manolomartinez I miss Evan, too; I came across him on the internet because I used to play a silly click-click web game with his brother, Ted 🙂 @manolomartinez Unrelated, but what physical manifestation of a color doesn't like to see a little love in naming? 😅 @cwebber @manolomartinez Big Knuth vibes on that. "Hmm, I'm not happy with the options available, I'll make my own protocol!" That tracks with procrastinating on joining because you don't have your own instance. 😆  @cwebber @erincandescent @tsyesika @rhiaro :bongoCat: :coolcat: :firedoge: :eve: :KEKW: :owi: :tinking: :thinkhappy: :ThisTBH: :unarist: :toot:  @cwebber @erincandescent @tsyesika @rhiaro Think the earliest I've used is GNU Social. But OStatus sounds super familiar so I might have to do some digging. It's been incredible to use over the years! @cwebber Has there been any discussion of creating a URI scheme for ActivityPub identifiers so browsers could forward them to a consuming application? @cwebber @erincandescent @tsyesika @rhiaro Loved identi.ca , always grateful to Evan for that @cwebber @erincandescent @tsyesika @rhiaro I’ve read my fair share of dry docs, and yours is a really great—and super readable—spec! Thank you!  @cwebber @erincandescent @tsyesika @rhiaro You should all be giving interviews to the Time magazines of the world... @cwebber @erincandescent @tsyesika @rhiaro Oh wow, I recall reading about Pump.io way back in my startup days Thank you for mentioning this. I've been wanting to get to know these people more. @cwebber @erincandescent @tsyesika @rhiaro Great to see that Evan Prodromou has been working in that space for more than 12 years. I remember following Evan's work at the time of StatusNet. A great success story, congrats  @cwebber @evan @erincandescent @tsyesika @rhiaro you guys belong in the Internet Hall of Fame. @cwebber thank you very much for all that work. as someone who worked on the W3C Mobile Web Initiative way-back-when, I super-appreciate what perserverence and hard work went into developing that consensus over & over, and then writing coherent explanations. and by “thank you”, I very much mean plural ;^} ::chefs_kiss:: @cwebber @mray thanks I'll look them up. Earlier today I saw this talk by @rolltime it was quite insightful https://youtu.be/vnciCz83t70  The example given in this tutorial is of a private message. Which raises a question: if A is following B and B makes a _public_ post, will A be pulling it from B's outbox or will B be pushing it to A's inbox? If B has a million followers, push would be very expensive for B's server. And if A needs to pull the feeds of everyone s/he follows, it's again expensive and wasteful and likely high-latency. @cwebber @mray I ran across this last week. Maybe a little less dense than the actual docs for folks just looking for a more simplistic overview. https://activitypub.rocks/ @cwebber @mray This overview is (and has been) fantastic. I’ve always had a harder time digesting W3C specs (just in general, not just ActivityPub), but a lot of that is just necessary complexity, since it has to be robust and work in a lot of cases. I’ll need to steel myself and give it another try. |
Gregory's Server
A lot of people contributed to ActivityPub, but I'm going to give a breakdown of the authors and what they did:
- Evan Prodromou designed the core prototol, derived from the federation API of Pump.IO (itself a "lessons learned" from his experiences co-authoring OStatus, ActivityPub's predecessor)
- @erincandescent converted Evan's set of notes into the spec format and language style
- @tsyesika was the first major editor of the spec once it was being standardized at the W3C
- @rhiaro separated out client-to-server support from server-to-server support and made many, many edits
- And I carried the spec through probably the majority of the bureaucratic process and tried really hard to get inter-project buy-in on its ideas. And most importantly, I wrote that "Overview" tutorial at the top of the document, which is the part I'm most proud of!
A lot of people contributed to ActivityPub, but I'm going to give a breakdown of the authors and what they did:
- Evan Prodromou designed the core prototol, derived from the federation API of Pump.IO (itself a "lessons learned" from his experiences co-authoring OStatus, ActivityPub's predecessor)
- @erincandescent converted Evan's set of notes into the spec format and language style
- @tsyesika was the first major editor of the spec once it was being standardized at the W3C
- @rhiaro separated out...