Episode: 3280
Title: HPR3280: What We Need For the ActivityPub Network
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3280/hpr3280.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 20:03:36

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This is Haka Public Radio episode 3284 Friday, on 26th of February 2021.
Today's show is entitled, what we need for the activity per network and in part on the series,
social media, it is the 210th show on the UK and is about 17 minutes long and carries a clean flag.
The summary is, this keynote address looks at where federated social media can go if we make it work.
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Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio in another exciting episode.
And I'm going to return to my series on social media by reporting on the activity pub conference 2020.
And what I want to do on this episode is talk about the opening keynote which was provided by Evan
Prodromu. Now, I suspect a lot of people listening to this are familiar with Evan, but I would
consider him as perhaps the father of federated social media. He was the creator of Identica,
which I once had an account on, status.net. He was the chair of the W3C's federated social web
community group and then served on W3C's social web working group and is a co-author, co-editor,
I should say, of activity pub. Now his keynote talk was titled What We Need for the Activity
Pub Network. And the idea of an opening keynote is usually not to get extremely technical,
but to set a vision. That's what keynotes are for at conferences. And I think he did an excellent
job of it. Now, he begins by making a very pertinent point which is that federated social
media does not need to and indeed should not replicate the media of surveillance capitalism
with just some added free and distributed sauce poured over it. Now, those media take their
form for specific reasons that aid in about the business models of the companies such as Facebook
and Twitter to the detriment of our communities. That is why they have to promote engagement
above all else because that's their funding source. And if promoting fake news from Russian
hackers and QAnon will promote engagement, they don't have any problem with it. They will lean
towards it. Now, federated social media, in contrast, does not have that business model,
does not need to scale to one billion people, does not have the same legal requirements,
and usually does not need to worry about app stores. And if we think back to the early days of
social media, we might remember that Facebook and Twitter had APIs at one time that let other
people write apps using the platforms in interesting ways. Of course, once the platforms reach
critical mass, they close the APIs and kill all of those other apps. Federated social media has
no need to do this. We could build within activity pub and API to let people connect and use
information. And when you add the idea of a server you can trust, it gets better. Now, remember,
you can at any time run your own server for any federated app or you can join with others on a
server you can trust. In fact, Evan addresses the idea of your own server very directly, which
will get to in a moment. Now, once you do that, you can have a social media that meets your needs,
and not Mark Zuckerbergs. And no one is mining your posts looking for hooks that they can use to
guide your thinking or sell you something. Now, these are what he thinks of as his guiding
principles and they make sense. But of course, the point of this opening keynote is to say there
is still more to do. And what are the more things we could do? What do we need here? Well, Evan starts
by looking at the fundamentals. Social media is about receiving, storing, and redistributing posts.
At the most basic level, that's what it does. Now, Evan suggests we need a lot more
independent servers doing this because a diverse population is more robust. What you don't want to
have is a single point of failure or a monoculture. Now, he would separate this back end from the
lights and lipstick side. He wants to see these servers just focus on the three tasks of receive
store and redistribute. Then let other layers in other places work on building the web and
mobile interfaces of which there could be many. In a way that seems similar to the web,
where the basic plumbing of HTTP is common to every use, but on that plumbing, you can have
different websites, different web browsers, and so on. On Facebook, they have rolled out a new
interface recently, which most people hate, but it doesn't matter what people think. If it helps
Mark Zuckerberg, they'll get it anyway. Now, to get there, when the first things we need is the
standardized API within activity pub for client apps. Now, what kinds of client apps are we talking
about? Well, first one, games. We had a lot of games on social media. Remember Farmville? Scrabble?
Things like that. Now, my wife loves to play word games online with her friends, and after all,
isn't that what the social in social media is about? We could have that in federated media,
but without needing to monetize every eyeball. How about some different media? All right. We could
have apps that helped us to record audio and video that we then share with our friends.
And they could just plug in within API. We could even have something like the Yo app,
which, to be honest, I had never heard of before, he brought it up in this talk, but I put a link
in the show notes anyway. And it's basically, it's an app that sends a text to your friend saying, Yo.
But now, it does include, I understand they've updated it, and it includes some additional
information like your location and stuff like that. Suggestors. Finding people when you're new
on a network is difficult. Now, I have now connected to a number of my Hacker Public Radio and Open
Source friends on mastodon, but it took a while. Repostors. Now, activity pub is already pretty good
for this. It can do better. For instance, I can post a photo on pixel fed and have it automatically
repost to mastodon, but we could do better. And one of the big missing elements right now,
diaspora is out of the loop because diaspora does not use activity pub and shows no interest in it.
I find that unfortunate, but it is what it is. Blockers. You could subscribe to a block list.
I'm seeing some activity like this on diaspora because various neo-Nazi and QAnon types have been
coming in to troll people. But on diaspora, each person has to actively manage their own block list.
So you see a lot of posts back and forth from people. Here's another name you can add to your
block list. That kind of manual intervention is a pain in the butt. The block lists are not
perfect, but the point is giving people choice is a good thing. How about a trimmer app to
pare down your list of friends? If you have an exchange message with someone for over a year,
maybe they don't need to be on your friends list. They might not be exactly friends.
The next thing Evan gets at is what I would call thinking small.
We've all heard go big or go home, but sometimes small is beautiful to quote another book from
the 70s. Since we do not have a business model that requires monetizing every possible eyeball,
we don't need to have monolithic servers that bring the whole world together.
We can focus on affinity groups of various kinds such as churches, neighborhoods, cities,
families, schools, universities. I think about universities. Remember how Facebook began?
It was a university app at Harvard. Groups like this are frequently already a social network.
They just don't have all the infrastructure. I see in my own family how awkwardly we try to do it
with email. We send things around to people and discover, well, so and so, didn't get copied,
so now I've got a forward that message on and it's a pain in the butt.
Anyone who's ever belonged to a church, synagogue, mosque, etc. knows that these are definitely
social networks. No doubt about it. Along with thinking small and this dimension, Evan also
envisions a whole different type of server architecture, like zero config, zero maintenance boxes
that are essentially home appliances. You would buy one, plug it in to the outlet for power in your
house, and it would automatically find your Wi-Fi and connect to it, get an address from dynamic DNS,
and then you could connect with your phone, laptop, or tablet. This is where you can really
begin to talk about distributed social networks. The way he put it was, here's a box, plug it in,
it works. It's a very interesting idea and I would love to see something like that.
Another possibility that is opened up is what Evan calls the Federation of Things. Now,
we've all heard about the internet of things, and if we've heard about it, we probably know that
in many ways it's awful and unsafe. But what happens if you have super simple smart devices
that report back to a server you control? We can start to see a different possibility here
because the focus is on our control. You could have sensors all over, but instead of reporting
to some company far away with its own interests at heart, they could be reporting to your own server
in a way that is safe, secure, private, and respect your autonomy. Now, it will take a lot of work
to get there, of course, but activity pub opens up possibilities we did not have before.
Now, another possibility, quantified self. I wear a Fitbit, and it reports back to the Fitbit servers.
The data is for me an opportunity. I like having it, it helps me in some ways, but having it on someone
else's server is a liability. Who else might access that data? What would they use it for?
Now, as someone with several health issues, which I have discussed previously on Hacker Public
Radio, I have begun to live by the numbers. I test my blood sugar every day. I keep track of my
exercise, my weight, my sleep, my blood pressure, my heartbeat, and so on. Now, these are always
I stay healthy, but I don't necessarily want to share them all with the world.
Now, as with the Federation of Things, imagine what happens if instead the data only goes to a
server I control, and I can decide who gets to see it. In my case, my wife, and my doctor would get
it, but the point is that I get to decide. I am gathering cool data now, which I sometimes share
on social media, but that is through companies who may use my data in ways I would not like.
Having an activity pub server would give me more control.
Personal digital archive. How about a server you control that has your life history?
I do a lot of that right now with websites and web services, but the degree of control varies.
I own a few domains, and have set up websites on them. Right now, they're hosted by a hosting
company, but at least I get some control over the content this way. There are costs involved,
but the obstacles to running my own server right now are not trivial, and there would be costs
there as well. My photo account on Flickr is not free. I have some audio stored on the internet
archive. I've got a video or two on YouTube, and those I have somewhat less control over.
But family history is valuable, and worth maintaining if you can do it safely. I'm seeing that
right now with my family. It really was kicked off by the fact that my mother, who is 96,
is declining. We basically, we just called in hospice, like a week ago.
We are rummaging through family history, looking for photos, and starting to go back.
Where was the house where my grandparents lived, which I think is the one I was born in,
in finding photos and things like that? It's wonderful when you can do that.
I have a photo frame right next to my monitor that runs continuously,
and brings up all of my photos, so I can relive some of the trips I've taken and some of my own
past history. I love that. Would it be nice to be able to pass that on to the next generation,
and be able to do that safely? Now, some of these things that we've talked about here,
the personal digital archive, quantified self-feteration of things,
it's really just hinging on the idea of having your own server, and that doesn't have to be
activity pub necessarily. On the other hand, I believe next cloud is, in fact, implementing
activity pub on their server, so it's becoming part of that ecosystem as well.
Evan is really talking about here is something so simple that plug it in, turn it on, it works,
that anyone could do it. I know a lot of the people listening to Hacker Public Radio can
set up their own server, but, you know, can your parents, can you not? So that's what Evan is looking at.
So in conclusion here, the social media we have exists to engage us continuously for the
purpose of making money. Have you ever heard or read, you won't believe what happens next?
Yeah, that's the kind of stuff we're talking about. That is peddling lies,
and it's making us less happy, and it's not the point exactly, but it's an acceptable byproduct
of maximizing engagement. With federated decentralized social media, we could instead
devise platforms that make people happier and more satisfied. We could optimize for connecting
people in a good way, instead of feeding conflict. Instead of doom scrolling, we could move to
awesome scrolling. So instead of replicating social networks that never served us well,
we can look to building networks that serve us the way we need to be served, and we should strike
out in a new direction. So I would say Evan Padromu is clearly someone who has thought both long
and deeply about social media, and I thought this was a great opening keynote for the Activity
Pub Conference of 2020. And so with that, this is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio, signing off,
and encouraging you to support FreeSoftware. Bye-bye.
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