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While I see your point about product mentality, and agree to a large extent, I am not sure it applies to ActivityPub. Its like saying email needed to be productized; it didn't, we just needed productized implementations of email servers and clients to get the network going.

Exactly- email would be nothing without outlook and gmail, http might have fallen without netscape.

We need products on ActivityPub that beat real products

Email was there before outlook and Gmail and will still be long after Gmail sunsets it and Microsoft rebrands outlook to something like "Microsoft xbox delayed chat system".

And it was productized before then. AOL being a huge one ("You've got mail"), and Hotmail also coming to mind.

And email was around long before AOL or Hotmail.

And nobody used it, relatively speaking vs the extraordinary scale that those email products made possible later.

Hotmail had more users after 18 months than the total history of all email services on earth combined for the first two decades of email. If email was still as annoying to use as it was pre AOL & Hotmail, the general public still wouldn't be using it today.

How many people used any internet technology before there was even in Internet? But some people did use email.

Great point. Webmail is a product that was massively adopted compared to regular clients.

Perhaps, but no particular web implementation of email really stands out. (You might say Gmail, Gmail is really comparatively recent.) So a web interface on email push adoption further.

It might be more accurate to say that a social standard would need to support productized client evolutions that outlook and others provided along the way of email’s evolutionary path.

The web was already doing fine with Mosaic, although that was also proprietary. Netscape was just the better-funded and flashier version.

You're missing the point. Like you said, Mosaic was ALREADY a great product, compared to the nerdy terminal browsers without embedded media, etc.

OP's point is not whether netscape or mosaic is better, but that the graphical web browser was what brought the web mainstream. Doesn't matter if it's mosaic or netscape (or several other graphical ui browser competitors that existed during that time)

On the other hand, ActivityPub is a just a standard, it wouldn’t be meaningful to complain about the product mentality of HTTP or JSON. The people building the websites or applications that use ActivityPub are the ones who need the product mentality, and they could use any business model they like.

The rub is that standards are difficult to productize because they're difficult to iterate on. They're rigid by definition.

Tell that to Github.

As far as I'm aware, git isn't a standard. It's a single implementation.

There are definitions for the git protocol and packfile format. There are multiple implementations of Git: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git#Implementations

Exactly this.

I did some work on PubSubHubbub based federated social networks back in the FriendFeed days. Technically it worked really well, and we had a few nodes sending posts between sites with only seconds of delay.

But no one wanted to use it.

After I while I worked out it failed for exactly the same reason FriendFeed (and Google Buzz) did: federation is actually a weakness when there is a major player.

FriendFeed gave up and took the FB money (smart). Google Buzz gave up and was replaced with the completely different (and non-federated) Google Plus (which failed for different reasons).

The only argument for it working this time is timing. I've come to appreciate timing based arguments a lot more over the last few years, so maybe there is an opportunity, but I'm sure not putting any effort into it.

This is a good point, though it's more something the products/services using ActivityPub need to consider rather than the procol makers themselves. Focus less on how neat the tech is and more on what people can use it for, with a clear purpose that your software fulfills in an easy to use way.

Too many 'hacker/techie focused' projects focus on grandiose visions and philosophical points at the expense of a real purpose.

Don't agree. Mentality is important but it will not automatically lead to success. Look at how well Windows Phone did. Microsoft put everything they had to make that product but ultimately failed.

Both Mac and Windows is successful because retail. People do not want to troubleshoot issues themselves.. They also want something they know. Apple is good at marketing and Windows is something we all know. Linux has just a bunch of small shops and does not have the same brand recognition. It takes much longer for Linux desktop to reach that level of trust. Especially when Microsoft uses their considerable capital to lobby against Linux adoption. Linux adoption is continually rising though.. It is at about 3% right now.

ActivityPub is like the Linux kernel. It is the foundation that other software can use. It took a long time but eventually the idealism behind Linux made it work. It became an important infrastructure that saved money and thus an edge. ActivityPub have the same possibility. It could become the infrastructure of social media.

Yeah, after watching this dynamic repeatedly over various projects, I've come to the conclusion that federation is a feature, not the feature. Mastodon is not the first federated network by a long shot: StatusNet kicked this all off and is more or less dead, same with RStatus and a few others. Moreover, there's multiple ways you may want to federate a service: ActivityPub, Matrix, pump/tent (dead?), IRC, even, and you're probably better off tweaking your own protocol to fit your app versus trying to adapt your app to fit the protocol which can be hairy.

You've gotta build a really compelling service first and foremost (otherwise, why bother), and then add federation later. The danger of that is it's really tempting to just skip the federation part if you get big, but it's a critical part that shouldn't be forgotten, but only after you've got a great app people are using.

I'm watching Mastodon to see if this belief is wrong and it ends up taking off, but I think there's a real danger is designing for nerds and getting small time success and validation with nerds and geeks (this is not derogatory fellow nerds), because what we want is not what matters to most people and you risk biasing your community (the Google+ effect, though it happened there for different reasons).

The idealism has to be matched with hard pragmatism. Maybe one of these projects will do that.

The main selling point of these apps is a portable social graph for everybody, the Linux equivalent of that would be the ability of being able to understand the entire stack, and job security this brings with it. Open social networks could be similarly successful with normal people as Linux was with computer specialists. That's how I see it.

Mozilla was founded out of Netscape's product failure, and survived largely on the coattails of the search revolution.

Desktop Linux's failure is a matter of perspective, but there were more than a few products built around it... they just failed. It turns out, that was the wrong vision.

Desktop Linux's failure is a matter of perspective,

It's really not.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...

That's because the place to make inroads was elsewhere... in mobile, embedded, etc., which we don't count as "desktop" (though at one point, desktop was basically anything with a GUI). You throw in Android phones, Chromebooks, browsers in embedded devices, etc., the picture looks quite different.

Desktop Linux never became significantly better than Mac OS or Windows, that's why it failed to grow. It's worse in a lot of aspects except ideology.

Firefox is arguably better than Chrome and has a much nicer ideology as well, but it's not so much better than Chrome that the majority of users is switching by default.

Non technical people need a reason other than ideology to switch. The product needs to provide a new value that doesn't exist or be so much better that it's obvious to everybody who tries it.

It failed to grow because it was never preinstalled on a sufficiently large number of machines at BestBuy, there's nothing else to it. If people were buying PCs with Linux on them, they'll use Linux and nobody would find anything weird about it.

Firefox was also not pre-installed but still beat out IE.

Installing an alternative browser alongside your existing one requires minimal investment. Backing up all your data, converting to alternative formats, adopting a whole suite of new programs, different conventions etc. is an entirely different investment if you're already on Windows - if you had purchased the PC with Linux, it would be the same amount of hassle switching back to Windows.

Firefox was pre-installed (just not by OS makers) and it didn't so much beat IE as Chrome beat IE and didn't harm Firefox nearly as much (likely because Google prioritized converting systems where neither Firefox nor Chrome were the default browser).

> Non technical people need a reason other than ideology to switch. The product needs to provide a new value that doesn't exist or be so much better that it's obvious to everybody who tries it.

It's not even that.. often it's just distribution. Often consumers don't really want to make a conscious choice, so taking it away from them in the distribution channel is the way to go. I remember doing studies on search engine switching rates. No matter how awful we made the default search engine, the vast majority of users would not even try using Google. It was AMAZING.

I would argue that the browser wars have, to a much larger degree than we're prepared to acknowledge, been driven by distribution. Users don't want to make a choice.

So that means you just need a strategy for winning the distribution channel game. Product design be damned.

> So I guess what I'm saying is; if ActivityPub is to be the future, then there should be more than idealism behind it.

Like most standards, its success hinges on the success of products/projects/whatever that employ it.

You are comparing apples to oranges. Google, Facebook, WhatsApp are companies. Firefox and Linux Kernel are "software products". ActivityPub is an open proposition about a technical standard.

Google, Facebook, Whatsapp are companies with strong products. Mozilla have a strong products. Same thing with the Linux Foundation.

The article is talking about how ActivityPub is the future, but without strong products, how can that future be possible?

Idealism alone won't convince people to switch to Mastodon instead of using Twiiter or Peertube intead of Youtube.

> Idealism alone won't convince people to switch to Mastodon instead of using Twiiter or Peertube intead of Youtube.

Just curious, according to you, is democracy an idealism that happened alone or with a product?

What I think about democracy is irrelevant. The question is: will idealism be enough to convince people to switch from Twitter to Mastodon and my answer is no.

Twitter, Mastodon can be tools for political system such as democracy. Twitter don't sell anything to the end user : it is free, it is not really a "product" for an end user. Why did people use it? Because it's a new way of expressing your ideas. If some governments force Twitter to censor itself for X reasons, and users disagree with it, people will start to look for alternative to express themselves. Also I think the Mastodon/federation system is harder to block nation-wide than just Twitter. Democracy is totally revelant to the topic imho.

Edit : so, maybe Mastodon will never be as big as Twitter, but the goal isn't to migrate everyone from Twitter to another platform. The goal is to propose alternatives. The title of the submission is a bit click-bait