I’m excited to say that I turned in my manuscript for the ActivityPub book for O’Reilly Media today. I started working on it in September of 2023, with a lot of interim checkpoints and deadlines since. In April 2024, I finished the first draft of the manuscript. Over the month of May, I’ve been working on improvements suggested by the technical reviewers who agreed to look over the book, and from my own re-read.
In total, my TODO file for this month has about 250 changes to be made. Some are small — just changing a word or two — but one required adding a whole new chapter, and many required multi-paragraph sections.
I took the last week of May off from my work at Open Earth Foundation to concentrate on making changes. My team was really supportive, which I deeply appreciated. I went to our country house in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, and I spent the week writing, editing, drawing and thinking.
Now, the next stage of book making starts: production. The production team at O’Reilly will be copyediting, indexing, and laying out the book. Their designers will be taking my UML diagrams and turning them into professional-looking illustrations. We have two rounds of quality control on code samples and fact checking on content.
In September 2024, the final e-book will be available for sale. I’ll have a link here for the pre-sale version when it comes out. If you’re eager to read the book, I highly recommend reviewing the early release version.
Thanks so much to my friends, family and colleagues who’ve made space and time for me to do this work. It has meant a lot to me. I hope the final product helps more developers create cool projects using ActivityPub.
Some of the areas where I am most critical of #ActivityPub are areas where it is clear that the design is focused around how to represent the world rather than how a healthy system behaves.
Basically the focus is almost entirely on "how do I describe what humans are doing?" Sometimes in great detail, but very little emphasis is on "what is required for a set of health distributed nodes to talk to one another successfully."
Interesting thing is that everything seems to be functioning as intended with #ActivityPub and the #PersonalReader module which provides a Mastodon like setup for reading things. but I still can't follow or be followed.
I am stumped on this subject. I THINK that maybe there is an issue with NGINX config maybe, or something else. Just don't know.
I could use some advice from anyone who has used or can help me troubleshoot the #ActivityPub module in #Drupal. I just can't get the thing to work. I ever redid the system to try and ensure I got proper permissions on the keys.
So, I still haven't figured out the #ActivityPub#Drupal issue. It SEEMS to be functioning as it should in my side some, but any attempt to actually get it to do ActivityPub related functions seems to fail.
The Readme file isn't too clear on what I should do, but it was indicating I should be able to search a user name at least so. I don't know currently.
In the words of Fatboy Slim, "we've come a long long way together." Here, @miaq breaks down Flipboard's federation journey so far.
"We could [federate Flipboard] with a quick flip of the switch but we’ve chosen to act more intentionally," she writes. "We’re taking measured steps to test, learn, and ensure that everything we’re doing stays true to our values and those of the fediverse. Maintaining quality is top of the list."
Bluesky has been independent from the start, but it took six months of negotiation in 2021 to set it up that way, and from the outside during that period it looked like the project was going to remain vaporware forever. Very glad we are alive today — it very easily could have turned out otherwise.
but you could have helped grow #ActivityPub instead. it was proven. make an alternative but compatible version of #Mastodon more similar to Twitter with ads if you wanted. I don't get it.
@jay.bsky.team@bsky.brid.gy your goals seem very sketchy tbh.
Your company saw #ActivityPub and thought "instead of using a protocol that already exists, let's make our own, call it decentralized, but nobody is REALLY in control except us" and thought that was a good, correct business strategy?🤨
Created a document explaining the different kinds of identifiers used by the ActivityPub-speaking Fediverse, linking to some related literature. Will link more and write more in the future.
I really hope Threads eventually comes through on their promise to fully federate without this "opt-in" bullshit they have now where you have to teach every individual a lesson on Fediverse before they MIGHT see it's positives...
Current implementation leaves a lot to be desired unfortunately...😬
I'm just a humble country chicken admin, but I've been thinking a lot about the cost of the fediverse and how we can improve it for all of the instances... in a coop kind of way
The cost of handing all of the media is THE major problem for me atm.
One thing I want to point out about https://pubkit.net is that I know a service like this could be easily abused!
This is why you will have to verify ownership of servers you want to test against
It can be a text file or DNS record, and in special cases, I can make exceptions for devs who want to test against instances they can't publicly verify
The point is, PubKit will be opt-in, and won't require a fediblock, services like these can be done right 😎