ActivityPub was basically written to support everything any social network could do, so there aren’t really well defined ways to do anything. An example is that there’s no standard markup language for notes. They can be text, HTML, markdown, whatever. It was the first W3C spec I read through, and I’m used to reading IETF specs. Maybe I’m just not used to how W3C does things, but the spec left me with a lot of open questions. It’s ambiguous about how things work in a number of areas. Especially about what things are allowed in other things. There are parts where you get the impression that something can only be an array, but then later it’ll show an example where it’s a single item not inside an array.
It was also supposed to be both a server and client protocol, so that any server should be able to talk to any client, but they don’t cover at all how to actually authenticate the client to the server. Oauth is the standard, but there’s no standard way to add your client to any given ActivityPub server. So you just have to code for whatever server you want to talk to.
So essentially what I mean is that you can’t build functioning software just by reading the spec. You must look at existing implementations to see what they do before you have any hope of working with them. To me, that means ActivityPub is an incomplete spec. I hope they remedy that with an update.
I’ve heard of Nostr. It looks really great on paper, but in reality, it’s filled with spam and cryptobros. It’s not moderatable, which makes it a target for spam and scams.
I’d recommend something like SFTP or WebDAV. They’re incredibly well defined and very useful to have an implementation of your own. I’ve written my own WebDAV server called Nephele, and it was really fun once I got it communicating with other software. Now I use it on my own server and I back up all my computers to it.
A long time ago I wrote an XMPP client which was really fun. I wouldn’t say it’s as useful as the others because not many people are on it, but it’s a great protocol.
ActivityPub was basically written to support everything any social network could do, so there aren’t really well defined ways to do anything. An example is that there’s no standard markup language for notes. They can be text, HTML, markdown, whatever. It was the first W3C spec I read through, and I’m used to reading IETF specs. Maybe I’m just not used to how W3C does things, but the spec left me with a lot of open questions. It’s ambiguous about how things work in a number of areas. Especially about what things are allowed in other things. There are parts where you get the impression that something can only be an array, but then later it’ll show an example where it’s a single item not inside an array.
It was also supposed to be both a server and client protocol, so that any server should be able to talk to any client, but they don’t cover at all how to actually authenticate the client to the server. Oauth is the standard, but there’s no standard way to add your client to any given ActivityPub server. So you just have to code for whatever server you want to talk to.
So essentially what I mean is that you can’t build functioning software just by reading the spec. You must look at existing implementations to see what they do before you have any hope of working with them. To me, that means ActivityPub is an incomplete spec. I hope they remedy that with an update.
I’ve heard of Nostr. It looks really great on paper, but in reality, it’s filled with spam and cryptobros. It’s not moderatable, which makes it a target for spam and scams.
I’d recommend something like SFTP or WebDAV. They’re incredibly well defined and very useful to have an implementation of your own. I’ve written my own WebDAV server called Nephele, and it was really fun once I got it communicating with other software. Now I use it on my own server and I back up all my computers to it.
A long time ago I wrote an XMPP client which was really fun. I wouldn’t say it’s as useful as the others because not many people are on it, but it’s a great protocol.