Thoughts tagged "ActivityPub"

Short thoughts, notes, links, and musings by . RSS

is this feeling... hope?

At various points we revisited our old idea for networked publishing in Ghost and tested a few prototypes, but we were never sure how to make it scale; nor how many other platforms would ultimately adopt it. For all its promise, ActivityPub (like many open standards) seemed to generate products with user experiences that were often confusing and convoluted.  But something else happened in the intervening period between 2016 and 2024:  People became increasingly fed up with the behavior of centralized platforms, and increasingly hungry for alternatives. The motivation for exploring and understanding new technologies, rough edges included, meaningfully increased.  In 2024, for the first time, it finally feels like we have a critical mass of people and platforms who are interested in rewilding the internet to bring back what we lost, and create something new.  In the past week alone, we've had conversations with Mastodon, Flipboard, The Verge, Buttondown, WriteFreely, and several co-authors of the ActivityPub spec. There's a palpable feeling that this just might be the year of [begin strikethrough] the linux desktop [end strikethrough] the open web.
In 2024, for the first time, it finally feels like we have a critical mass of people and platforms who are interested in rewilding the internet to bring back what we lost, and create something new.

anyone have any good suggestions for lightweight local testing when implementing ActivityPub? would be nice to test signature verification and simulate various activities without spinning up a whole local Mastodon server or prematurely deploying my super alpha software