Re: AP for developers in one sentence

> If you met a reasonably competent developer, but who had never heard of
ActivityPub or the broader space, and you had one (not too long) sentence
to convey to them [what] ActivityPub is and what it might be good for, what
would you say?

it depends on what the goal is, or what the developer is trying to
accomplish...

the main mechanism that activitypub provides is Follow, so probably
something that emphasizes that

the main payload is activities (in theory), so that also should be mentioned

"Follow what's happening across the web"

i don't know if i could say more without knowing what the developer wants
or without being inaccurate or potentially misleading. if you're targeting
something like Mastodon then one potential goal statement is "talk to an
existing userbase". if you don't care for that, you might instead pitch a
benefit like "notify your audience of what you're up to"

so i guess i have two alternate sentences:

a) "Follow what's happening across the web, and notify your audience of
what you're doing" (pitching generic activitypub)

b) "Connect to a variety of social software and talk to an existing
userbase" (pitching fedi)

my concern with the latter statement is that it elides a lot of details on
what that connection entails -- namely, the practical reality of having to
juggle compatibility with that "variety of social software", some of which
are incompatible with each other. we probably don't want to scare
developers off, but we should at least give them fair warning that the
statement comes with undeclared caveats and the reality is a bit messy.

the former statement is more generally true regardless of application

it's possible for the website to have two sections immediately following
each other, where the first section talks about the spec and the second
section talks about what people have built inspired by it

h1: "ActivityPub: A standard for the social web"
p: "Specification by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for publishing and
subscribing to social activities"

h2: "Follow what's happening across the web, and notify your audience of
what you're doing"
p: "ActivityPub works by defining a Follow activity, which allows you to
signal interest in an actor's activities. When that actor publishes
activities to their outbox, they can distribute those activities as
notifications to a chosen audience. Activities sent to their followers will
arrive in your inbox."
cta: "Read the specification"

h2: "Connect to a variety of social software and talk to an existing
userbase"
p: "ActivityPub has inspired a community of software developers to develop
social software that comprises a loosely distributed network known as the
Fediverse. These softwares differ in experience, but can interoperate with
each other where there is overlap.
cta: "See a list of implementations"