ActivityPub, Mastodon, and some practical application of this group's work

Hello everyone,

So as many of you know, I work on a specification called ActivityPub
outside of this group, which provides a linked data foundation for
decentralized social networks (think decentralized alternatives to
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc).  My work on ActivityPub is
in general separate from this group, but the needs of ActivityPub
systems did *personally* drive my interest to this group.

I wrote a paper on how I think the work of ActivityPub aligns with this
group for RWoT:
  https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rebooting-the-web-of-trust-fall2017/blob/master/topics-and-advance-readings/activitypub-decentralized-distributed.md

(or if you like dead tree versions, a slightly more nicely rendered PDF:)
  https://gitlab.com/dustyweb/talks/blob/master/activitypub/rwot/even_more_distributed_activitypub.pdf

When I wrote the paper earlier in the week, ActivityPub's relationship
was still somewhat theoretical.  I'm happy to say that as of this week
we're starting to see practical application of this group's work.

Mastodon is a decentralized social network which will begin rolling out
the start of ActivityPub support to its users in its upcoming release.
This is big news since Mastodon has somewhere between half a million and
a million registered users at the time of writing.

As of this week, Mastodon began implementing Linked Data Signatures
support:

  https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/pull/4687

So that means we're already seeing movement on:
  https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rebooting-the-web-of-trust-fall2017/blob/master/topics-and-advance-readings/activitypub-decentralized-distributed.md#signing-objects

Would this be a good topic to talk about on an upcoming call?  It looks
like this week's agenda is already very full.  Maybe next week's?  And
maybe we could get on Eugen Rochko (Mastodon's lead developer) to speak?

 - Chris

PS: If you haven't tried Mastodon I highly recommend to it; consider
subscribing to me, I'm https://octodon.social/@cwebber ... you can
subscribe by typing that address into the search bar.

Received on Sunday, 27 August 2017 16:35:12 UTC