[somat]

I always considered reddit as a "forum as a service". Give up a little freedom and we will take care of your forum for you.

And as such I have to admit I was initially baffled where federation(activity pub) enters into the equation. as forums don't really need federation.

But was stuck in the mental model of the web forum, I think what is going on is that this is more like usenet, the ur forum, which is pretty cool.

[tootie]

I don't understand at all what problem ActivityPub actually solves. To my mind it's a similar spirit as Blockchain which is equally as impressive as it is useless. There are tens of thousands of people smart enough to clone the basic functions of Twitter or Reddit but features don't make the platform. Unless you are a master at digital marketing and can solve moderation and monetization better than everyone else, you're not going to code a better platform.

[somat]

As far as I can tell activity-pub is what you get when you want a store and forward type message transport but are too embarrassed to base it on smtp. so you base it on http/json as that is the "modern" way of doing things.

[somat]

With apologies ahead of time because I suspect this post will end up as an incoherent rant about capitalism.

So activity pub is the common language of a federated system sort of like smtp is the common language of a federated system. or html is the common language of a federated system(html is strange however as it's transport model is inverted compared to the others, it moves the user to the message rather than the message to the user)

The reason federated systems work is the same reason capitalism works, and not incidentally the reason federated systems don't work is the reason capitalism does not work. my conclusion is that capitalism is a federated system of doing business.

I suspect the main reason federated systems work as well as they do is that there is individual ownership over the pieces, each person caring for their own piece. Some will win some will lose. It is not nearly as efficient as a centrally controlled system, but is far better at dynamically adapting to changes.

On the whole I think federated systems end up bringing the greatest good to the most people, but they can go very wrong, mainly this happens when one player gets too big and stops playing by the rules.

On the subject of reddit specifically. on one layer reddit is just a wep page, it provides the forum discussion pattern to people. The web is a federated system, there are many forum discussion patterns available on the web. when reddit fails to provide your forum needs you move somewhere else.

On another layer, reddits success was in no small part in that it provided a sort of ownership over each forum, and each owner was responsible for their own forums success, and when reddit starts infringing on this ownership it feels like something is being stolen from you.(At least I think this is what is going on, I have to admit I am only an incidental user of reddit and the whole situation confuses me) Where if the system were more federated from the start it would be more like actual ownership and less like feudalism.

[tootie]

I think 80% of complaints about capitalism are complaints about the fundaments of economics. Audience is scarce, network effects are scarce, advertisers are scarce, quality contributors are scarce, brand recognition is scarce. How do you acquire all of these at enough scale to make a compelling product and sustainable platform? I don't see how ActivityPub actually does any of that. I can very clearly see how venture capital and/or short-term shareholder value are actively harmful.

I think there's two avatars I'd look at for having "solved" most of this. One is Craigslist. They don't really occupy the same place in the world they used to, but they scaled by orders of magnitude without changing their core identity. And they did it because Craig Newmark was content to walk away with $100M and his reputation in tact rather than chasing every penny. The other is Wikipedia. Probably the single most valuable thing on the internet and operated purely as a non-profit. A non-profit that rakes in like 10X it's operating budget in donations. Neither of these do everything right, but they work. And they do it with a very centralized framework for operations that sets clear boundaries in which their volunteer contributors can operate. I really see that as a more promising goal. We need a fully non-profit internet. Ones that set really clear and explicit guidelines for usage and are beholden to their mission above investors. But also, organizations with publicly accountable leaders who set policy and stick to it. And leaders who can still run their orgs like a business with a tech team, a marketing team, accountants, HR, lawyers and all that jazz.