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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2025

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  • Thanks for clarifying, I figured fashion had at least something to do with it given the number of actively used protocols and services that still use it, XMPP being the one I use the most myself.

    Even on XMPP I have seen several projects to “translate” the protocol into other languages (specifically Rust in one).

    Efficiency makes sense, but then also the number of devs proficient in a language due to shifts in the emphasis of training and education is just as strong a force.



  • Interesting, I have actually used Movim for xmpp chat before but not fully explored its publishing features. This is a good nudge to do so. I wonder how it handles “communities”. I have been tracking XMPP recent development and threads are just now getting support, though they function more like tags in chat streams than like threads in a Lemmy sense in current implementations. It seems like the “Spaces” concept proposed in XEP-0503 would round this out, and I have discussed how Nicolo of Slidge plans to work on this woth the Movim dev team, it would make sense Spaces would much improve the blogging/forum functionality of Movim. I was asking about it for the potential of replacing Matrix/Discord with XMPP.




  • I did not mean to say Jabber is a fascist project. You said “ActivityPub has been a fascist project from its inception.” and I was responding to that. XMPP has end to end encryption protocols and so is not a part of the open web fundamentally.

    GNUSocial was built on OStatus which actually is the closest thing to the tech stack I am talking about in my post. It did not include XMPP/Jabber as far as I can tell. Interestingly the Wikipedia article on OStatus claims that ActivityPub arose out of the OStatus project in order to reduce the complexity of implementation, so another mark towards that explanation, but I’d like to hear more from devs involved.







  • If I look at ActivityPub as simply a push notification layer for publishing then it makes me think it could be implemented straightforwardly without needing intermediating instance servers? I got some hint of this via IndieWeb discussions but haven’t seen a great description of how it would work, would it basically just cache all activity/content/objects from “subscribed” federated sources on the local host, basically a one-person instance?

    Does ActivityPub provide the ability to receive notice that content has been posted without caching the full content, essentially indexing posts?


  • Webmention already exists and is service agnostic and interoperable. My assertion is that protocols for handling the social function of ActivityPub predate ActivityPub’s development and could be unified by a client without creating any new protocols that aren’t already in use, so what is it that ActivityPub is doing better than those protocols that justifies intermediating the social graph with group servers? I’m sure there are good answers to this question, I just want to know what they are with more clarity.


  • If you read the post you’ll note I mention Webmention, email, and XMPP, which all handle bidirectional communication in different ways. Webmention in particular enables implementation of both on-site comments and pulling comments from off-site services to display locally on a post/page, as well as replies to those comments.

    I’m not suggesting RSS alone is sufficient, but rather that existing solutions/protocols appear to exist for the problems ActivityPub seems to be solving, but without the step of intermediating publishing through federated servers. A client could be built tying these protocols together as a social networking front end.

    My question is, what is ActivityPub solving that the combination of these existing services do not? Unidirectionality isn’t it, though someone’s prior comment pointed out the efficiency of push vs pull in terms of content distribution and I do see that point.


  • Good to know.

    Regarding polling efficiency, that makes sense. As I understand it ActivityPub uses a combination of push notifications at time of publishing and pull notifications at time of subscription/query for objects? I can see how offloading that to an instance for multiple users vs every user definitely increases efficiency for content discovery/inboxing. I know there are protocols like websub to add push notifications to blog publishing, but they are required to be done at the publisher/host side. I do see this as a big nudge in ActivityPub’s favor.

    Duration of caching is set by the instance admin I take it?

    At a minimum this is adding the number of instances that federate a given content streams to the multiple of storage needed to host the content, even if that storage is ephemeral. Not so big a problem at 100,000 users, but at 100,000,000 users this is a lot of storage cost we are talking about. Unless somehow the user/client doesnt cache the content they pull from an instance locally on their device when they view it?

    Regarding Authorship, if there wasn’t an issue then ATProtocol devs wouldn’t have made it the cornerstone feature of their network. The ability to move accounts between instances and maintain content control permissions is currently one of the big focuses of development on ActivityPub as I understand it. Also as I understand it many Fediverse instances dont have edit functionaly enabled, meaning once the content goes out it is out of Author control. I’d like to know how delete requests propagate, when the “Object” is deleted does a request to clear cache go out to all federating instances?

    My point was this isn’t an issue when all content is self-hosted, because the author as the host can edit, delete, or migrate all they want and maintain full direct control over the source of that content the client interacts with whenever a pull request comes in. Yes the user Caches the content when they read it, but there is no intermediary copy.