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Comment by qwertyuiop924 | Hacker News Reader

Ironically, these decentralized microblogging and social platforms are getting too diverse. We're all trapped in wall-less walled gardens.

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This is exactly why the W3 is developing a standard called ActivityPub, so that all of these platforms can communicate amongst each other. It shouldn't matter what platform or node you choose to host your social media profile. They should all be able to communicate with everyone else (like email!).

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

Now that is good news. At the moment, we have a xkcd/927 situation on our hands.

ActivityPub is a successor to ActivityStreams/Salmon which Mastodon and GNU social are currently using. At least with these it's not really a xkcd/927 situation.

Diaspora? Pump.io? Patchwork (the SSB thing)?

Why do you drop other names? Diaspora is a tool, not a standard. If they are still developing that then they may actually implement to read and share data in the standard as well.

However, they haven't done that yet. So they're competing "standards," even if one isn't standardized.

An announced successor is still xkcd/927 until it actually replaces all use of the predecessors.

Case in point: pump.io is the successor of OStatus and StatusNet.

Tangent: I just typed `xkcd/927` in Safari and it took me directly to the XKCD page. Is this some kind of Safari easter egg? It doesn't work in Chrome or Firefox.

I want this to be true.

Confirmed here too.

I think you're on to something. It worked with xkcd/<anything> for me.

some browsers add .com automatically, try again with example/1234

Hmm, you may be correct. The pattern seems to work generally.

example/123 --> http://www.example.com/123

facebook/someusername --> https://www.facebook.com/someusername

I tried on Mobile Safari too but it didn't seem to expand there.

That's fine as long as they're compatible with each other, isn't it? Different software, same social network.

...But they're not. Are you using diaspora, pump.io, gnusocial, or something else? Sure, there are bridges, but they're kind of awkward.

I can't speak for Diaspora but Pump.io, GNU social and Mastodon don't need bridges, the users are actually equal.

Indeed. Which is why they weren't mentioned.

pump.io and OStatus are not compatible.

Not really. That is what open standards are for. If you make sure your tool communicates and stores data in open formats you are not locked in, since any other tool that can read these standards can work with your data as well, import it, represent it in its own flair etc.

But we don't have one yet. Work is being done, but the standard isn't finished or supported by the majority.

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