Re: AP for developers in one sentence

From the peanut gallery, *as a competent developer*, I find the protocol
part of AP most intriguing. Relate it to something they understand.


I've described AP as: "ActivityPub is to activities on the web what HTTP is
to documents; servers broadcasting, ingesting, and aggregating without a
central gatekeeper."


I overengineered the sentence and omitted "social." The "social" aspect is
intrinsic, as the web is inherently social, global, and political.


-- taylor
tbeseda.com


On Sep 22, 2025 at 2:54:22 PM, Django Doucet <django.doucet@gmail.com>
wrote:

> “Web native Social interactions”
>
> Django
>
>
> On Mon, Sep 22, 2025 at 2:26 PM Kagami Rosylight <saschanaz@outlook.com>
> wrote:
>
>> "Let servers talk to each other and thus allow users of different
>> services to talk to each other"?
>>
>> (I'd like to skip "social apps", e.g. Wordpress is not really a "social
>> app" to me even if it has a social feature. But other people may disagree.)
>> On 22/09/2025 21:29, Andy Piper wrote:
>>
>> “Create, interact and follow across and between social apps, via
>> standards-based publish and subscribe”.
>>
>> Sent from Gmail Mobile
>>
>>
>> On Mon, 22 Sep 2025 at 20:23, Johannes Ernst <
>> johannes.ernst@dazzlelabs.net> wrote:
>>
>>> 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 was ActivityPub is and what it might be good for, what
>>> would you say?
>>>
>>> Context: After the basic make-it-current updates for activitypub.rocks
>>> (see milestones here:
>>> https://github.com/swicg/activitypub.rocks/milestones), our first
>>> audience is developers. So if a developer comes across activitypub.rocks,
>>> what’s the first sentence that it should say so they decide it might be
>>> interesting enough to spend another 20 seconds to read more sentences than
>>> just the first?
>>>
>>> My best take right now:
>>>
>>> “If you like to use social web site A, and your friend likes to use
>>> social web site B, ActivityPub allows you to interact socially, follow,
>>> reply etc although you use different websites.”
>>>
>>> Please propose something better! :-)
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Johannes.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Johannes Ernst
>>>
>>> Fediforum <https://fediforum.org/> — coming up again October 7-8
>>> online, and we meet an in-person in Italy in November
>>> Dazzle Labs <https://dazzlelabs.net/>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>