ActivityPub, the Fediverse, and You

Witness the rise of the Fediverse! In this episode we talk about early attempts at building decentralized social networking protocols for the web, the modern effort to craft a true W3C-published standard, challenges at scale with building out ActivityPub-based services, some of the new companies and infrastructure adopting ActivityPub, and what Meta’s upcoming entry to the Fediverse could mean for the future of decentralized social media. Note: we recorded this episode prior to the meltdown of Reddit, so we will not be covering the sudden rise of the "Threadiverse" with software such as Kbin and Lemmy. A topic for another day!

Hosted by Jared White & Ayush

Show Notes:

• Early social networking protocols:
  • OpenSocial
  • OStatus
  • Pump.io
• Finally: ActivityPub!
  • Uses Activity Streams under the hood
  • and JSON-LD
  • and WebFinger
• Mastodon: How to implement a basic ActivityPub server
• Understanding ActivityPub
• Sample Python code
• Track Fediverse growth at FediDB