Social Web Bookmarks

"[The SWF] even goes as far as wringing out the Fediverse’s own historical context as a multiprotocol polyglot network, by equating the Fediverse to just the ActivityPub protocol. Hey, look everybody, it’s Evan, the bold creator of The Social Web / Fediverse, with his one protocol that powers the entire thing!"

From the primary author of the ActivityPub spec:
"I am anticipating a crash/collapse of the fediverse in its current form at a not too distant future; hopefully we'll have more answers ready by then, but this is a multi-year project)"

Compared ActivityPub, Nostr and ATProto

"This paper examines the potential of the Fediverse, a federated network of social media and content platforms, to counter the centralization and dominance of commercial platforms on the social Web. We gather evidence from the technology powering the Fediverse (especially the ActivityPub protocol), current statistical data regarding Fediverse user distribution over instances, and the status of two older, similar, decentralized technologies: e-mail and the Web. Our findings suggest that Fediverse will face significant challenges in fulfilling its decentralization promises, potentially hindering its ability to positively impact the social Web on a large scale."

Python library for ActivityPub. Uses Pydantic for AS2 object serialization.

Interesting discussion about informal alternatives to JSON-LD. Some of the most interesting material is in the comments (by Sporny).

"This specification details a model for representing potential and completed activities using the JSON format."
A draft AS2 specification prior to the W3C Social WG. This one uses JSON, whereas the final AS2 specification uses JSON-LD.

List of user stories considered by the original AS2/SocialWG team (c. 2015).

"Mastodon link previews can lead to excessive requests at the same time, which is not Mastodon’s fault."

Compaints about Mastodon's (and the AP microblogging fediverse) link preview behavior and the performance problems it causes.