Skip to main content


#askmasto #askmastodon #askfedi

What do you think are features that must be or should be included in #ActivityPub in the future?

Additional info:

For example, "liking" and "sharing" are part of the specification.

Note that e.g. Mastodon implements more than just the ActivityPub specification. So the question is also what features should be implemented by all instances on the Fediverse (incl. e.g. PeerTube).

FYI: Current ActivityPub specification:

https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

boosts welcome

reshared this

in reply to Floppy 💾

I would love hover cards like what we saw at Wikipedia and Twitter to follow/unfollow people more quickly and easily.
in reply to Liaizon Wakest

To emphasise @liaizon's point, here is an a list of all W3C official "Recommendations":

https://www.w3.org/TR/?status=rec

From W3C's FAQ: https://www.w3.org/standards/faq

Q: What does "Web standard" mean? What is a "Recommendation"?

A: W3C publishes documents that define Web technologies. These documents follow a process designed to promote consensus, fairness, public accountability, and quality. At the end of this process, W3C publishes Recommendations, which are considered Web standards.
in reply to Floppy 💾

defining the bounds of how hashtags should actually function seems really necessary. Webfinger (how you look up an account by pasting the url into the search on mastodon) should really be added as an 'official' part of the standard. Internationalization really needs to be figured out. The fact that so much english is being encoded into the protocols is really concerning.

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks is a lot more active then whatever the w3c has up right now btw
in reply to Liaizon Wakest

Important questions addressed here. Important to stress is that all valuable discussion in this thread will be forever lost in history in a couple'a days.

Aforementioned #SocialHub community is where you should really bring the results of these fedi chats, and create a new topic.

There's also a companion, more non-technical brainstorm area at #Lemmy here: https://lemmy.ml/c/fediversefutures

Also https://fediverse.town is a non-technical forum.

(Note: #Discourse will be federated too)
in reply to smallcircles (Humane Tech Now)

Good points! I agree, the fleeting nature of this kind of microblogging is sometimes sadly inadequate for such kind of discussions.

I never really thought about getting into SocialHub or Lemmy, but actually you made a good point there, I will consider it!
in reply to Floppy 💾

Moving accounts between instances is essential for network reliability and sustainability. I'd love to see it as a standard feature.
in reply to Justinas DÅ«dÄ—nas

I agree.

In such a context I also like to point out that "nomadic identity" might be an interesting feature in that regard.

Hubzilla is providing such a feature for example.

https://zotlabs.org/page/hubzilla/hubzilla-project

IMO nomadic identities are a significant step towards decentralisation and some other related virtues (those that you mentioned, also data privacy, ownership, control, and other things).
in reply to Floppy 💾

To add.. because the network is non-commercial (if not anti-commercial, which is a weak spot in my view), the burden of reliability cannot be put on server hosts, which are already doing a lot for the community for free.

You cannot make hosts liable for your data, server uptime and basically for nothing at all. They are free to shutdown their servers whenever they are tired of caring.

That means, all responsibility for the content is left to the user. So the user must have tools to easily backup and move his data.
in reply to Floppy 💾

Make it run from any desktop computer instead of a server. Make the computer act like a node to decentralize the fediverse. I think that's the biggest change and most important you can make. So you can make local accounts.

Floppy 💾 reshared this.

in reply to Tio

I completely agree. Would love to see this client-side self-hosting functionality. I think the Fediverse is slowly moving towards this over the next years.

One issue there might be that self-hosting on a desktop computer will often also mean that the host/node/instance is not available all the time. This would need to be addressed I think.

I find the idea of "nomadic identities" exciting and maybe it can help in this regard too. See also here:

https://fosstodon.org/@floppy/106997469951254246
in reply to Floppy 💾

What if the nomadic identity is a server and the main one is local? So you sync with the server when the local is not available. And whenever the local is online is resyncs with the server. Like a bridge between local and a server so that in time the local becomes more reliable and can use other "local" nodes to store information until they get back online. There are protocols out there that I think do just that, using other nodes as backups for information transmission.
in reply to Tio

Indeed I think that's pretty close to how Hubzilla understands it too.

https://zotlabs.org/page/hubzilla/hubzilla-project

Here is some brief overview how the syncing between instances of Hubzilla would work. I think it comes close to what you described, assuming one has a local instance of Hubzilla set up that is reachable from the internet.

Nomadic identity, brought to you by Hubzilla
https://medium.com/@tamanning/nomadic-identity-brought-to-you-by-hubzilla-67eadce13c3b
in reply to Tio

Regarding the "reachable from the internet part" of local nodes, part of a nomadic identiy setup:

There are some developing services and protocols that might simplify this part, i.e. remove the requirement of meddling with routing, port forwarding, NAT, etc. and the security implications.

IPFS and the Beaker Browser seem to provide some means here. Tor with hidden services has some easy to use local hosting capabilities too.

https://beakerbrowser.com/

https://ipfs.io/
⇧