Post · bonfire.cafe

As #Fedify's author, I'm contemplating its adoption beyond Ghost's #ActivityPub implementation. Finding potential users for ActivityPub tools seems challenging—perhaps I'm addressing a very niche need?

While the technical complexity of ActivityPub makes tools like Fedify valuable, I wonder about the actual market demand for federation outside specific communities.

Open, decentralized systems make sense to many developers, but businesses often prefer closed ecosystems that align with traditional models.

Still, I see potential as the #fediverse grows and digital sovereignty concerns increase. Fedify aims to lower the technical barriers to federation.

I'm curious: Which projects would benefit most from Fedify today? What would make federation compelling enough for platforms to implement?

Would appreciate perspectives from both developers and platform owners.

sef

@sef@social.coop replied · 7 months ago

@hongminhee I would love to see federated accounting/invoicing software. In my mind it’s an ideal use case for a few reasons.

Keeping books is all about perspective and usually isolated to the organization but as someone’s asset always represents someone’s elses liability, there are benefits in booking that transaction collaboratively. A federated transaction type post directed at another org (and that org’s reply confirming or rejecting its validity) is basically an invoice, etc.

sef

@sef@social.coop replied · 7 months ago

@hongminhee

The affordance of each organization running their own instance maps nicely onto the need for the accounting privacy that every org normally would want, but nothing would stop them from ”working with the garage door open” if they so desired.

洪民憙 (Hong Minhee) :nonbinary:

@hongminhee@hollo.social replied · 7 months ago

@sef That's an intriguing perspective! While ActivityPub was designed primarily for social networking, I appreciate you thinking outside the conventional use cases.

I do have some reservations about how well it would map to accounting needs. ActivityPub's semantics are optimized for social interactions rather than financial transactions, which have stricter requirements for consistency, atomicity, and compliance.

That said, there are some interesting parallels in the bilateral nature of transactions you mentioned. The “your asset is my liability” relationship does mirror certain social interactions.

For specialized business domains like accounting, a purpose-built protocol might ultimately serve better than adapting ActivityPub. But I wonder if there might be value in a hybrid approach—perhaps using federation for notifications and approvals around financial activities, while keeping the core transaction logic in systems designed specifically for accounting.

Have you explored any specific aspects of how ActivityPub's vocabulary might be extended to handle accounting concepts? I'd be curious to hear more about where you see the strongest fit.

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