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===============================================
ActivityPub and the federated social networks
===============================================
I believe a lot of people here care about Free Software, and I guess
that a number of those also care about freedom in general computing,
which nowadays involves more and more things running on computers that
we can't control.
Today I'm talking about one of those things: social networks.
They are a pretty useful thing, enabling an egalitarian access to
communication, and by stretching a bit the definition to include email
one can claim that they are involved in enabling the existence of
projects like debian itself.
They are also, sadly, a great way to attract people to one's platform in
order to squeeze every bit of sellable personal data out of them.
If this was about showing ads to make people choose between two
equivalent brands of, say, pasta, it wouldn't be a big deal, but that
data has already been used to manipulate elections and it has been
leaked multiple times and made available to criminals.
On the topic of why social networks as a business model are toxic and
a cost on society, I'd recommend reading Cory Doctorow's article “Zuck’s
Empire of Oily Rags”, which is much better written than I could do.
Free Software has been offering technical tools to solve this for a long
time, by developing federated, self-hostable server software to allow
people to have the advantages of social networks while keeping control
of their data and experience; like email, except designed in the current
millenium.
The first such projects I know of were StatusNet in 2008, Friendica and
Diaspora in 2010, so federated social networks have been available for
more than 10 years.
When I say networks, plural, of course I mean that there were a few
incompatible protocols, none of the platforms were completely mature,
and the kind of community they attracted meant that the federated social
networks back then were a great place to find people who were interested
in talking about federated social networks. I was there, I was happy
with it, but I'd be the first to admit that something like that wasn't
going to help more than a tiny minority of people.
Since then, things have improved. Helped also by the policy changes of a
few centralised platforms, the number of people, and most importantly
the variety of people on the fediverse, and specifically mastodon have
grown.
The raw numbers are still low compared to the centralized platforms, so
you're not likely to find your old school mates on it, or any other
specific person you already know, but it's a great place to get to know
new people that share your interests, no matter what they are.
One day I've even stumbled on somebody who posted about soccer!
something that in the early, nerd-biased days would have been pretty
rare.
The mastodon community also developed a set of community rules and
expectations about moderation which helps managing the social
interactions between instances with wildly different content rules.
As for the technical part, in January 2018 the World Wide Web Consortium
released the ActivityPub standard which, while not perfect, has given a
big boost to interoperability between different projects.
This was followed by the summer of activity pub, when the ecosystem
grew significantly with the birth of many projects, often centered on
specific usecases, such as pixelfed for pictures or peertube for videos.
Having such a standard also gives a platform for experimentation: new
projects can interoperate with all of the existing fediverse users,
helping them overcome the network effect in favour of existing
platforms.
For the fediverse to work as designed, however, it is important that it
remains composed of many small instances rather than having a few big
ones that control most of its users, and here Debian could help.
Having packages in debian for a federated server would help people
install and maintain their own server
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