So what is ActivityPub?
It’s a technology through which social networks can be made interoperable, connecting everything to a single social graph and content-sharing system. It’s an old standard based on even older ideas about a fundamentally different structure for social networking, one that’s much more like email or old-school web chat than any of the platforms we use now. It’s governed by open protocols, not closed platforms. It aims to give control back to users and to make sure that the social web is bigger than any single company.
For most of the last 15 years, the social web has felt like a settled market. Facebook and Instagram won, Reddit and Snapchat were around, and everything was shifting toward algorithmic entertainment anyway. TikTok’s explosion changed the landscape, but then everything turned into TikTok anyway. If you want to use the internet to keep up with your friends and interests, you’ve been stuck inside the walled gardens of closed social platforms for a long time.
“Decentralized social networking” is a heady concept, and it’s quite different from the way the internet works now. But here’s the simplest way I can think to explain it: to decentralize social networking is to completely separate the user interface from the underlying data. Any time you sign up for a new social app, you won’t have to rebuild your audience or re-find all your friends; your whole following and followers list come with you. Those things should be part of the internet, not part of an app.
Email is the best example of how this system works now: it’s based on open protocols that lots of services tap into, so while there are many email apps with different features and quality levels, your contacts carry over and will always work. (Can you imagine if you needed an Outlook address for your Outlook-using colleagues and a Gmail address for your Gmail-using friends, and then a Hotmail account just to talk to your aunt Gertrude? Well, that’s currently how social works now.)
Facebook is an even more helpful counterexample. Your friends on Facebook are your Facebook friends. You can’t export the list to use it in another app or easily follow all those same people on a separate platform. If you want to read Facebook posts or create your own, you have to do it on Facebook.
But if our current social system was decentralized, you’d be able to post a picture on Instagram and I could see it and comment on it in the Twitter app. Your friends could read your tweets in their TikTok app. I could exclusively use Tumblr, and you could read all my posts in Telegram. Different apps would have different strengths and weaknesses, different moderation policies and creator tools, but you’d have the same set of followers and follow the same accounts no matter which platform you use. There would be no such thing as “Facebook friends” and “Twitter followers.” The social graph and the product market would split completely.
ActivityPub has been a finalized standard since 2018
But ActivityPub is a protocol, and you can’t download a protocol.
One possible future for ActivityPub and the Fediverse is that a single platform becomes the default, the way Gmail is not the only email provider but it’s the one you go to if you need a new address
Until now, companies like Facebook (Meta) have owned the social graph, but ActivityPub’s promise is a way to build a variety of services across this new social layer.
“The thing that’s really powerful about ActivityPub [the protocol powering the Fediverse] is it’s a W3 standard. It’s not attached to crypto, it’s not attached to encryption — it’s really trying to solve one problem, which is just a common social graph and a common namespace that people can use to effectively be in an open social web,
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