Why ActivityPub Is the Future | Hacker News Reader

Why ActivityPub Is the Future

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7 pointsberkes8 comments

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Shatter the social and news medias!

Rebuild on a decentralized system of trust without blockchain (totally possible in my understanding)

Separate the data from the interfaces

Decentralized comes with its own sets of difficulties.

Federation is far less complex, but hard enough in itself.

Right now, the most important tasks for the fediverse are (on no particular order):

* convince more people of the need. Explain the problem it solves and reach those who feel that problem.

* avoid spam, trolls and bullies. Moderation, tools, and lots of finetuning all the intricacies.

* improve accessibility. Running an instance is unavaialable for many people and orgs.

Solving the problems that the fediverse faces today, is not by throwing "blockchains" at the issue. That will only make them harder, sometimes impossible to solve. It is not solved with even more decentralisation either, for the same reason.

> decentralized system of trust

no need to reinvent the wheel when DNS exists.

Eh? Not following, how does the postal system of the internet relate to breaking up the social and news media machines? If anything, it needs to be strengthened with something like HNS

With ActivityPub, you can have news media and public agencies prove their own legitimacy through their own domain names.

Example, you'd expect an ActivityPub instance on "cnn.com" to represent the CNN corporation, and you'd also expect one that exists on "nj.gov" to represent the state of New Jersey. What would you propose instead? I don't know what HNS is.

edit: Oh, I'm assuming you're referring to the Handshake experimental root.

https://handshake.org is one of the very few good use cases for a public permissionless blockchain. It essentially will supercede ICANN

I'm all about that activity pub, my point is more that we should pass legislation to force social media companies to comply with the format, much like the US healthcare system and FIHR.

This would enable competition in interface, data custody and monetization strategy while allowing better interoperability. Should this be successful, I'd expect the news orgs to shatter much like social media had. The idea is that in an AP based decentralized system, competition around trust and truth could happen, as well as the greater echo chamber effect.

There's a lot more to say here, but we could start with an ActivityPub / FHIR like legislation against the social media system.

> pass legislation to force social media companies to comply with the format

I think it'll be easier if legislation is passed requiring public officials / agencies to use the format, on public infrastructure.

Again, DNS exists, why re-invent the wheel? ICANN/IETF is not going anywhere.

The DNS / ICANN is separate from the legislation. We have successfully passed legislation to force healthcare data and systems to be interoperable. We'll see how that goes, but I do believe our country would have the appetite for a similar set of laws. The equivalent of HIPAA & FIHR for our digital lives. The CCPA is a start, and perhaps a state level version of a national digital identity HIPAA like law. The second half, FIHR like standard, could easily have a convincing case made for it and I see little opportunity for a case to be made by these companies that would be able to sway their users the other way. Pretty sure everyone would absolutely love a world like that.

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