[tptacek]

I looked at in terms of the "Fediverse", a coherent decentralized social network, with lots of instances cooperating to make one intentional thing. I'm still not bullish about that. But once you use it, you see that it's basically hyper-interactive RSS.

(Maybe you see the two at the same thing; I don't.)

[stavros]

To be fair, there still isn't an easy way (that I know of) to make sites (dynamic first, static later) ActivityPub participants.

I'd love it if my site's posts were ActivityPub posts, with ActivityPub replies being shown on the site as comments. I think that would be an amazing thing, but it's currently not very easy to do.

I guess I better get coding again.

[tshell]

This is similar to how micro.blog has implemented ActivityPub support, from what I can gather. Here's their documentation from when the feature was released: https://help.micro.blog/t/mastodon-and-activitypub/95

[stavros]

Oh excellent, thanks! I wonder how hard it is to make an RSS-to-ActivityPub service.

[rakoo]

Darius Kazemi, the creator of Hometown, made an AP server where you can register a feed and it turns into an actor (ie an account): https://github.com/dariusk/rss-to-activitypub

I made my own thing, fetching an RSS feed and posting entries to an existing account. It makes the code much simpler, but is not practical if you have lots of feeds (you need yo create all accounts separately): https://sr.ht/~rakoo/rss2ap/

[stavros]

That's fantastic, thanks! Just what I was looking for.

[kalleboo]

I believe there’s a WordPress ActivityPub plug-in now which helps with this for a large portion of sites out there

[warinukraine]

> I looked at in terms of the "Fediverse", a coherent decentralized social network, with lots of instances cooperating to make one intentional thing.

So what was your original argument against this?

[tptacek]

That it will never cohere. (That's about as much as I want to say about this right now; this gets boring pretty quickly.)

[pbronez]

Yeah. The vision of a unified fediverse at Twitter scale seems unhelpful. The whole point is that you don’t have to align with everyone else, you can do your own thing and opt into the world the way you want.

This contradiction flares up in many places. Most obviously, the existing community HATES all kinds of analytics, search, etc because they’re concerned they can be weaponized by trolls. At the same time, Mastodon has all kinds of unauthenticated APIs that make it trivial to slurp data. Mastodon doesn’t even let you post stuff to just your local instance!

I expect that the current post-twitter-collapse energy will result in ActivityPub 2.0, and that revision of the spec will make it easier to control where your posts go.

Ultimately I think the Fediverse will agree on the core protocol, splinter over activity vocabularies, and scatter over moderation standards. That Will Be Fine and we’ll have something clearly better the Web 2.0 local maxima we’ve been trapped in for the last decade or so.