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

This sounds great Christopher. Yes, this coming meeting is full, but we
should be able to discuss this Tuesday September 5.

I'd like to see an overview and your thoughts on how Credentials CG can be
involved. There looks like a lot of interesting overlap between the
concepts you outlined in your RWoT paper and CCG efforts; it would be great
to hear more. And certainly, Eugen's involvement in the meeting would be
appreciated.

Thanks,
Kim

On Sun, Aug 27, 2017 at 9:35 AM Christopher Allan Webber <
cwebber@dustycloud.org> wrote:

> 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.
>
> --
Kim Hamilton Duffy
Principal Engineer | Learning Machine + MIT Media Lab
Co-chair W3C Credentials Community Group
400 Main Street Building E19-732, Cambridge, MA 02139
12001 N. Central Expy, Suite 1025, Dallas, TX 75243

kim@learningmachine.com | kimhd@mit.edu
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