Episode: 3005
Title: HPR3005: Is ActivityPub Paving The Way to Web 3.0?
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3005/hpr3005.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 14:54:54

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,05 for Friday 7 February 2020.
Today's show is entitled, Is Activity Pub Paving the Way to Web 3.0
Quote
And as part of the series' social media, it is hosted by Ahuka
and is about 12 minutes long
and carries a clean flag. The summer is
Activity Pub Conference 2019.
A talk about whether Activity Pub is leading the way to Web 3.0
This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com
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Hello, this is Ahuka. Welcome to You to Hacker Public Radio
and another in our series on social media
and I'm going to continue taking a look at the Activity Pub Conference of 2019
and move on to another talk.
This is a short talk, so this will be a short program
by a woman named Marie Axelson who also has a
NOMD internet of Maliki.
And you can access or talk at archive.org.
I've put a link in the show notes.
Maliki is a former project manager at Mastodon
and since then, among other things, she is part of a group that has forked the Mastodon code
to create something called Florence.
That is an acronym, somewhat tortured one, as these things frequently are.
Fediverse loves open, responsible, ethical networks for communicating with everyone.
Okay, this is going to be about her talk, not about the other stuff,
which I may or may not get to.
But we'll just point out that, of course, the code is entirely open.
And when the code is entirely open, it's free software code.
This means that anytime you are dissatisfied with an existing platform,
you can take the code and use it to build something new.
Whether it thrives or not is up to the users, ultimately.
A new web application only requires two things, a resentment and a code base.
And then you see what happens.
Now, the question that Maliki presents in this talk is,
is activity pub paving the way to web 3.0?
And not to postpone the suspense, short answer, yes.
But why?
You know, why is she saying that this is leading to 3.0?
And I'm not sure it ever got entirely answered.
She may believe that that's happening, but then the question becomes,
what do you mean by web 3.0?
Well, she starts by taking a look at web 2.0 and saying,
where did that go wrong?
And her analysis is that the internet was developing into a commercial entity.
Well, yeah, that's been kind of obvious.
But one that people were not interested in paying for by and large.
So the solution was advertising.
That is an interesting point.
And that's what leads us to surveillance capitalism.
How do you make money?
This is what people used to say about Linux.
How do you make money selling free software?
Well, some places did it by selling services,
which has been the Red Hat model, for instance,
and something that John Mad Dog Hall likes to talk about.
But you know, take a look at some of these other things.
You know, how does Facebook make money by grabbing your information
and packaging it and selling it to advertisers?
And that's what surveillance capitalism is all about.
Well, that doesn't just happen in a vacuum,
because what happens is that people start developing ad blockers.
Well, I have ad blockers.
You know, it's not that I hate.
The problem is that when it becomes a war,
you know, if we were just talking about a few display ads,
I could live with that.
It's when the websites turn into, no,
we're going to show pop-ups and every possible annoying thing
to force you to view all of this stuff.
And then it's like, okay, I have technical means of stopping you.
You know, what these media are doing
is saying that users are simply a product to be sold,
but most of us don't want to be sold.
We don't want to be a product.
Well, that leaves open some very important questions.
And when we talk about an open federated web,
how do we fund it?
You know, that's always the problem.
I saw, for instance, just recently, as I record this, Twitter.
There was an announcement that, you know,
they were looking at some kind of a federated solution
that would be like Twitter, but federated.
And I think a lot of people point out that exists.
It's called Mastodon.
And, oh, by the way, you're going to use ActivityPub
for your federated solution.
And, you know, the answer was, well, you know,
we'll let our team look at that as a possibility and blah, blah, blah.
And the problem is Twitter's model is based on surveillance capitalism.
And all of Silicon Valley is based on surveillance capitalism.
So, you know, why would they be interested?
The free culture side of this is important, but it's hard.
I know Chris Weber, for instance,
one of the people who originated ActivityPub has a Patreon account.
So, people can help fund him.
And I do.
And there are several developers that I have, you know,
thrown a few bucks to over the years, but it's, you know,
I'm not fabulously wealthy.
So, I'm not giving thousands of dollars away.
So, we do have a real issue.
Should there be a mechanism to facilitate giving funds to admins
and developers, and if so, how should it be structured?
Now, ActivityPub itself is non-commercial.
It is an open source.
The code is there.
Anyone can use it.
People who develop ActivityPub are encouraging other people to use it.
Now, people do run servers, and someone is paying for it.
But not everyone is paying, because it's about community and not profit.
You know, I'm on a server, Octadon.Social.
I'm not paying for that.
I was allowed to have an account on it.
Interesting.
Now, I know that my friend Michael W. Lucas,
and he's one of those people you probably should be following if you aren't already.
And Michael W. Lucas made the point that, you know, be nice to your server admin.
And I think I mentioned this before, because this was at a talk I saw last year at PenguinCon.
And I'm looking forward to PenguinCon again this year.
And what he talked about taking care of your admin, you know, he's on a BSD spot.
Well, you know, it's a site for BSD users, and we put it that way, which he prominently is.
And so he was going to a conference, and he was going to see his server admin there.
And the way he put it is, this person is not going to have to buy a single beer as long as I'm around.
Yeah, that's one way to do it.
And, you know, servers are not super expensive, but they are an expense.
So there's a question there.
Now, one advantage of the activity pubway is that there's not just one solution.
Activity pub is simply a protocol.
It can work with any number of potential solutions and allow them to interact with each other.
And that's good.
You know, one of the nice things about activity pub that has attracted me all along is you don't even have to be on the same social media platform to interact with people.
Because someone can be on PixelFed, and I could subscribe to their PixelFed stuff on my Mastodon account and get notifications and what have you of what they're doing on PixelFed.
And that's brilliant.
You know, imagine if, you know, not that it would ever happen, but imagine if Twitter was also showing you all of your Facebook activity.
And that's the kind of thing we're talking about here.
So, with activity pub, you can see what your friends are doing on another platform without having to join that platform yourself.
But that opens up another can of worms.
How do you find people?
We don't, as yet, have the tools that can accomplish this.
That's one of the weaknesses of Federation.
If someone tells me their address, you know, I'm so and so, such and such a node, I can plug that in and say, hey, I want to connect to you.
And that's great.
There's a lot of people that I would follow if I knew how to find them.
And I think they're on Mastodon.
So, mostly what happens is I will find one of them because someone that I'm following copies them in a reply or something and that shows up in my feed.
And it's like, oh, goodie.
Someone I want to follow.
Then I can add them because I can see their address.
But that's an interesting problem.
You know, if Web 3.0 is this federated, non-commercial community-oriented thing, and we would like it to be, there are some problems to be solved.
I think Activity Pub is a great step in the right direction, but it is not everything.
So with that, this is Ahuka signing off for Hacker Public Radio and reminding you it was always to support free software.
Bye-bye.
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