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Reply to @jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu
Phantasm@phnt@fluffytail.org (2026-06-10 20:07:09)
@jupiter_rowland @sendpaws 
>Not the whole Fediverse is social media.
>Social media is all about unidirectional followers and churning out content to as many people as possible...

The protocol is described as a social networking protocol in its abstract. That people managed to bolt on forums and marketplaces on top of it is more of a testament to its stupid levels of extensibility. And to me social media qualifies as anything that isn't a blog that allows comments. Since that is its dictionary definition more or less. AIM was social media, Twitter is social media, Fediverse is social media. They are all medias that allow social interactions.

Abstract
The ActivityPub protocol is a decentralized social networking protocol based upon the ActivityStreams 2.0 data format.
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websites and computer programs that allow people to communicate and share information, opinions, pictures, videos, etc. on the internet, especially social networking websites
- Cambridge dictionary

>It would have allowed for discussions with restricted permissions, made absolutely impenetrable even for Mastodon users. It would even have allowed for discussion groups which would have been both fully private and hidden from all directories. Most importantly, it would have empowered its users to moderate their own streams themselves with a whole arsenal of countermeasures, all the way up to the thermonuclear option of turning ActivityPub off entirely.

You can't have any of this when using ActivityPub. And if you turn off ActivityPub federation then you've created a website with comments. There is nothing private on this network besides end-to-end-encrypted DMs which are very much in a prototype stage still. This whole network operates on an implied trust that nobody does anything malicious, but that is a faulty assumption that never held up. Trying to make ActivityPub resilient to it would have reinvented XMPP with different semantics and probably much more complicated. Even stuff like Conversation
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Jupiter Rowland@jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu (2026-06-11 03:39:59)
@Phantasm The protocol is described as a social networking protocol in its abstract. That people managed to bolt on forums and marketplaces on top of it is more of a testament to its stupid levels of extensibility.
Where do you think ActivityPub came from?

It wasn't Eugen Rochko who invented it.

It was invented by @Erin Kissane and @Evan Prodromou. The same Evan Prodromou who started the Fediverse as early as 2008 with the microblogging website Identi.ca, the software Laconi.ca which it is based on and the server application StatusNet based on Laconi.ca. And I know from personal, first-hand experience that StatusNet had groups.

Also, the very first server application that implemented ActivityPub was Hubzilla in July, 2017, two months before Mastodon which started out on the same protocol as StatusNet. And Hubzilla's forums very much support ActivityPub, just like Hubzilla has full support for other ActivityPub-based groups.

The reason why Mastodon doesn't have groups isn't because ActivityPub doesn't really support them. It's because Twitter has never had groups.

And to me social media qualifies as anything that isn't a blog that allows comments. Since that is its dictionary definition more or less. AIM was social media, Twitter is social media, Fediverse is social media. They are all medias that allow social interactions.
Still, there's a big difference between how Twitter, Mastodon, Pleroma and Mitra work and how Facebook, Friendica, Hubzilla and its descendants work. And how Reddit, Hacker News, Lemmy and Mbin work.

In stark contrast what many believe, ActivityPub was never meant to be a pure microblogging protocol.

>It would have allowed for discussions with restricted permissions, made absolutely impenetrable even for Mastodon users. It would even have allowed for discussion groups which would have been both fully private and hidden from all directories. Most importantly, it would have empowered its users to moderate their own streams themselves with a w

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Phantasm@phnt@fluffytail.org (2026-06-11 04:45:43)
@jupiter_rowland @evan @kissane @sendpaws 

Where do you think ActivityPub came from? It wasn't Eugen Rochko who invented it.

I know the history, don't worry.

Also, the very first server application that implemented ActivityPub was Hubzilla in July, 2017, two months before Mastodon which started out on the same protocol as StatusNet.

Yet Mastodon is basically the reason why ActivityPub became a W3C recommendation after 2 (I think) deadline extensions. Without Mastodon ActivityPub probably would never become a W3C recommendation. And since then, they've been going on their quest of hijacking the specification and/or forcing their ideas on the network. One that happened quite early on was Mastodon's hijack of the summary field for content warnings which wasn't used for that previously. Now their "hijacks" are more on the side of centralizing moderation and overall working on features that aim to reduce the social aspect of the network and increase witch hunting. Like the new "follow packs" or whatever they called them which will definitely never turn into "block packs" that will inevitably end up maintained by heavily opinionated people like on BlueSky.

The reason why Mastodon doesn't have groups isn't because ActivityPub doesn't really support them. It's because Twitter has never had groups.

They way public groups work currently is very non-ideal and prone to spam, since it's just an account that auto-repeats all posts mentioning it. I have some ideas on how to fix groups and make them actually usable, but making the different implementations interoperable and achieve consensus won't be easy.

picrel

Except for the thermonuclear option, Forte (https://codeberg.org/fortified/forte) does literally all of this with ActivityPub Don't mix up ActivityPub and Mastodon.

But does it work outside of the few Forte instances and the few servers supporting the so-called Threadiverse? If those posts with those permissions federate as normal posts, have a public post represe
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