TRUE DOLLAR JOURNAL

Any implementation of ActivityPub lets anyone publish content not only on one's host server but also on every server also that implements ActivityPub, which has a peering relationship. In the parlance of ActivityPub world, that peering relationship is known as a federation.

With ActivityPub, the user needs only one account somewhere in that federation to gain access to the content of others. 

You can have an account on gab.com. I can have an account on whatever.ca. We can follow each other, like and re-post each other’s posts. We can @mention each other. 

Likely, commenting systems like DISQUS or built-in ones like those found on YouTube will die.

Why comment to strangers, in effect, into the void, when one can have conversations about content with friends?

The Gab Effect on the Fediverse

With the addition of Gab to the Fediverse, the population of the Fediverse has grown 41.5%.

Outside of Gab's own development server, Gab ranks fourth in peer count (13,536), behind only pieville.net (87,296), develop.gab.com (68,920), and beehub.org (34,058).

By internal comparison Gab's users have the potential to generate three times the network effects of the next biggest instance, pawoo.net, a Nihonjin language service, and nine times that of mastodon.social, the instance ran by the coder of the open-source software Mastodon.

Note: The spreadsheet loads slower than usual

Foolishly, the seemingly immature 20-something creator of the open source software Mastodon, which the founder of Gab forked (in the parlance of programmers) tossed a typical Millennial, foot-stomping temper-tantrum over Gab joining the Fediverse.


In spite of Rochko's childish protest, Gab doubled the worth of the Fediverse upon joining and did so in the span of one day.

Thus, Gab exponentially improved the viability of the Fediverse as an alternative to global-scale corporations that have wrest control of the Internet from ordinary users, having done so between the years 2004 and 2012.

The rather dimwitted Rochko fails to see that by Gab joining the Fediverse, the importance of any fringy, mentally-ill user on Gab or any instance for that matter diminishes to nothingness owing to the significant increase in users and thus network effects. The voices of communists as well as fascists and all other totalitarians will disappear into oblivion.

Besides, with every user having the ultimate power to block any other user, no one has the power to foist an opinion upon anyone else.

Eugen Rochko should stick to coding. That suits his intellectual limitations. Others have minds, which let them see reality from atop Everest or Mount Godwin-Austen.

"Five years ago [edit: 2007], most social photos were uploaded to Flickr, where they could be tagged by humans or even by apps and services, using machine tags. Images were easily discoverable on the public web using simple RSS feeds. And the photos people uploaded could easily be licensed under permissive licenses like those provided by Creative Commons, allowing remixing and reuse in all manner of creative ways by artists, businesses, and individuals. 

"In the early days of the social web, there was a broad expectation that regular people might own their own identities by having their own websites, instead of being dependent on a few big sites to host their online identity. In this vision, you would own your own domain name and have complete control over its contents, rather than having a handle tacked on to the end of a huge company’s site. This was a sensible reaction to the realization that big sites rise and fall in popularity, but that regular people need an identity that persists longer than those sites do. 

"This isn’t our web today. We’ve lost key features that we used to rely on, and worse, we’ve abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the web world. To the credit of today’s social networks, they’ve brought in hundreds of millions of new participants to these networks, and they’ve certainly made a small number of people rich. 

But they haven’t shown the web itself the respect and care it deserves, as a medium which has enabled them to succeed. And they’ve now narrowed the possibilites of the web for an entire generation of users who don’t realize how much more innovative and meaningful their experience could be. 

The first step to disabusing them of this notion is for the people creating the next generation of social applications to learn a little bit of history, to know your shit, whether that’s about Twitter’s business model or Google’s social features or anything else. We have to know what’s been tried and failed, what good ideas were simply ahead of their time, and what opportunities have been lost in the current generation of dominant social networks."

The Technicals

ActivityPub works in the opposite way of RSS. With RSS, an app pulls (polls) a server at specified intervals to fetch content from a server.

With ActivityPub, an app, typically a Javascript-controlled web page in browser, retrieves messages (posts) from an inbox after those messages have been pushed (forwarded) by an AP-enabled service. 

Every user has an inbox and an outbox. The inbox contains the subscribed content pushed by others. The outbox contains created content to be pushed to others on a subscriber list.

With ActivityPub, anyone who subscribes to another, i.e., follows, will get in his or her stream (inbox), posts (messages) sent by the one publishing (messaging). After which, the subscriber (receiving user) can reply to a received post as well as share (forward) the post to all of her or his subscribers. All of this happens regardless of what entity hosts the data and provides the ActivityPub peering.

From the typical user's perspective, it is like having a continuous blog stream made mostly from the content of others to which anyone subscribes. 

In many ways, pushing content is akin to sending an HTML email to a email list of users. 

From a tech view, ActivityPub protocol has two parts. One part exists to for client-to-server request-response action for creating and updating content to an outbox as well as for retrieving and deleting content from an inbox.  The other part exists for server-to-server action for delivering notifications and content.