Aaron Parecki

@cwebber ActivityPub is the protocol invented by Twitter's "Blue Sky" foundation. It works by appending posts to "the blockchain"— the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

someone on Twitter asked why we think ActivityPub sucks from a protocol and implementation standpoint, and we're porting it over here with minor cleanups:

several things — from a server perspective, the most popular implementation requires that you become an SRE for Nginx, Rails, Postgres, Redis, Sidekiq, and possibly ElasticSearch. IMO, these (especially postgres) are nontrivial services to maintain over the long term.

once you pick a piece of Activitypub-compatible software, as far as we can tell, you're locked into that particular branch — you cannot simply export a Mastodon database into the GotoSocial implementation, you have to set up GotoSocial brand new, and make everyone refollow you

protocol-wise, we keep finding shocking ways in which activitypub is worse than email; the biggest pecadillo (IMO) is that if i follow 100 people on 3 servers and make a post, my server has to make 100 requests, one per follower, instead of 3 posts, one per server

the way the protocol works is that if two large instances defederate each other, it causes a notification storm for everyone downstream that can overwhelm smaller instances

so! if you run your own, you pretty much have to become a cache SRE, web-tier SRE, DB SRE, queue SRE, Rails SRE, you have to know how to secure unix systems, mitigate attacks, and if you're responsible, you have to do replication and backups.

sure, Docker has made it so that you can stand up all of this easily, but long-term maintenance? are you really confident that you know what you're doing here? Oh, sure, you've offloaded a lot of this to your cloud provider, but then you're now dependent on that provider continuing to work. Unless you're a large corporation with a secure contract, your cloud provider most likely doesn't care about you.

in short, standing up our own mastondong is signing up for a whole lot of Actual Work that we don't really want to do just to talk with friends, and we absolutely must stress that we both worked for twitter for 6 years and run our own **email server* for 21*

#We_Are_Plural_Not_An_Entire_SRE_Org

This is the best article about the recent rise in the fediverse I've seen! https://thenewstack.io/devs-are-excited-by-activitypub-open-protocol-for-mastodon/

And it opens with a quote by @evan and has several by me and even @blaine appears! Someone actually did their homework!

Relatedly, here's a lovely interview with @evan from just a few months back! https://thenewstack.io/challenges-of-creating-a-decentralized-open-source-twitter/

I think it's funny that ActivityPub has done more decentralization with a few million in total funding versus what blockchain did with tens of billions.

@pilhofer Twitter just rug-pulled after 16 years (and an IPO) of me trusting them to be a good steward for my principal online presence

I don't see how ANY <month old startup could possibly convince me to trust them instead

If it's not implemented in a way that lets me take control of my own destiny (ala Mastodon/ActivityPub) I'm just not interested