activitypub-and-threads.html

So Meta just came out with an app called Threads which seems to be in competition with twitter, though that’s not what interests me. It’s going to be able to interface with other apps on what’s known as the fediverse using the ActivityPub protocol. The fediverse is like the DarkWeb. Or just Websites basically. It’s another collection of servers. This is interesting and exciting to me because instead of relying on instagram, or twitter, or facebook, or youtube, or telegram, or vimeo for your content you can interface with all of it through any application you like so long as it interfaces with the ActivityPub protocol.

It’s RSS feeds. We’ve come full circle. But I’m not complaining. No one I talk to really understands RSS feeds and that’s fine, but all it was is if I made a blog back in the day you could add it to an app. And all my friends RSS feeds to that app. Everytime that app starts it grabs the RSS feed links and checks if anything has been updated. If so, I get a notification and can check it out. Was a cool way to interface with all your friends blogs because they’re all running on different platforms. Instead of checking each blog individually for an update my app tells me if someone posted something. This is basically the same thing. If you’re running the equivelant of discord, I’m running the equivelant of teamspeak, and someone else is running the equivelant of their own homebrewed server then we can all interface with each other still and hang out. It’s effectively the same thing as when fortnight finally forced Microsoft and Playstation to admit that if games are running the same protocol (game) then they can talk to each other.

Other applications like peer-tube are also exciting because they run on the same ActivityPub protocol as well. So a person can host all of their own content with the only limitations being their own hardware. This also means that if you don’t like the terms and conditions of Twitter or Threads you can spool up your own server and post naughty or illegal materials to share with your friends. And if your friends keep sharing porn from some fediverse server that you don’t like you can just blacklist it and now your feed is cleaned up while still staying in contact with the things you want to see from that friend.

Remember when youtube was making a bunch of ad changes and people were like “find me on vimeo” or whatever site they were migrating to? The main killer for that is people were in the youtube ecosystem. If I post a video on vimeo I have to go to vimeo to even find out if you posted something. What a pain in the ass for me to spend 30 seconds to find something out. And so youtube maintained it’s monopoly. But if people using things like peer-tube and other video sharing platforms that use the activitypub protocol then the problem of going to another site to check for updates from my creators that I follow is gone. It’s all right there in front of me.

Another good example is this is just emails. Pretty much every email server uses either POP3 protocol or IMAP protocol (though IMAP is way more popular.) If I’m on hotmail and your own outlook it doesn’t matter that we use two different service providers. We can still email each other because they’re communicating with the IMAP protocol. That’s all ActivityPub is. It’s just a way that if I’m using SageSpeak and your using Threads or Discord or Teamspeak or Mastadon then we can still talk to each other. Because SageSpeak is just hosting the data and displaying it to me. I can still grab your data from Threads or whatever.

I remember seeing the ActivityPub protocol first back in November 2022, messed around a little with it but it was a very niche and small community at the time. With Meta creating Threads it opens up a whole new market of people to the fediverse because now instead of making an account an another social media platform or having to spool up their own server just to see a message they can just import their instagram user and get going. It’s really easy and I think that’s a good thing. Because while I don’t like that Meta’s terms and conditions say that they keep your data even if you delete your account atleast more people can go onto the fediverse now without hassle. And the people that had instagram accounts were already subjected to the worst of Meta’s terms of use anyway, threads uses the same base with some changes. People during covid called this the dawn of web 3.0 and some people didn’t like it because the basics were that it would require some level of technical skill to interface with. But if threads is jumping in to use the ActivityPub protocol then big companies might jump in too the way playstation was forced to allow Fortnite to bring in crossplatform play. And that’s just a good thing for everyone in my opinion. With threads coming into play I can see web 3.0 being an actual thing now instead of something people just speculated on. If people actually migrate to it then I think it’s a good thing. People that don’t care about data restrictions and privacy can see what they’re friends are up to and people that do care about data restrictions and privacy can host their own servers to host their content. But both those people can interface with each other. And that’s all I want.

It’s very likely I’ve gotten some things wrong here but I don’t care. I’m excited to see where this might lead.