julian
@julian@community.nodebb.org  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

⁂ Article

What drew you to ActivityPub?
Danyl Strype
@strypey@socialhub.activitypub.rocks  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

My story is a bit different. I've made a conscious choice over the years to maintain a user PoV, by being a tester, tech ethicist and evangelist, rather than a software dev or server admin. So AP kind of came to me, because I was already using the fediverse when it came into being. As it happens, I shifted from an EU-based GNU social service that shut down, to a locally run Mastodon service, around the same time it was adding AP support on top of its existing OStatus federation.

But to answer the deeper question about what drew me to the fediverse, what @rimu1 said; network effects.

I've started and supported a lot of anti-corporate online projects over the years. Getting a critical mass of people to create yet another account was always a major obstacle. I could see the benefits of an open federation of disparate services in email, and to a lesser extent Jabber (XMPP). So as soon as I saw projects like Identi.ca and Diaspora applying that concept to social media, I could see the potential.

After more than a decade of pushing this concept uphill with a pointed stick, it's very exciting to see it start to take off in the wider open source dev world, and beyond

Rimu
@rimu@piefed.social  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

The problem with starting a new social media app is the chicken and egg thing where people need content (and other people) and content only exists if there are people. Network effects. ActivityPub avoids that hurdle.

So that makes it possible to enter the game with much less capital. That's nice but personally I'm here for the billionaire-resistant nature of it and the better moderation.

  • No one can 'do a Musk' to Mastodon and if they did everyone would just fork it and defederate from his instance.
  • Without an advertising-based business model we don't need to encourage controversy and nurture dickheads, we can just ban them. Same goes for fake news sources.

We have the potential to create something far more human and revolutionary than any of the ad-based mainstream platforms.