Evan is one of the most stand up guys I met in my life. Always thinking for the group rather than himself.

I wish them well but ActivityPub feels to me a bit like XMPP: makes sense at a "techie's abstraction" level, but unless you can drag whole communities away from their favourite walled gardens, it won't get enough traction.

My advice would be to target the teens. They seem to switch social nets at the drop of a hat (speaking as the father of one). Get a bunch onto your network, then let them experience the fact they can still speak to their mates on another network. Then the penny might drop and you'll soon get them proselytising about the benefits of federation.

Did anyone ever create a good open-source library that apps can use, so they can build Fediverse features (sending posts, receiving posts, etc) into pre-existing web apps without having to implement the protocol from scratch?

I know the protocol looks fairly simple at first glance but it takes about 2 man years to build a decent implementation, which frankly just means it's too complicated. Sending text ultimately should not be that hard. One huge point of friction I found with the protocol was the failure to just make things type-safe. You have lots of object properties that are "Sometimes a string", "Sometimes an array", etc. That makes all your models super ugly and all your marshaling super ugly.

By comparison, Nostr proved you certainly can avoid all the complexity. Nostr got it right. Nostr kept it simple. And Nostr is censorship resistant unlike the Fediverse which is full of politically motivated admins who love to maintain "block lists" to be sure no "Other Viewpoints" (that disagree with their own) are allowed to proliferate. Admins were having their entire servers blocked simply for saying something nice about some POTUS candidate for example. That just creates a very toxic environment, from all the people who of course claim they're fighting toxicity.

I'm not sure if the Fediverse is the right solution, but it is definitely the right direction. Corporate owned social media has given us the same information control issues that corporate owned news media has: censorship and narrative control. Coupled with Citizens United, it's destroyed journalism and trust in government. The only way we regain trust in both is to make it transparent and put it in a non-profit status. Here's hoping it works.

Evan is amazing. I’m so grateful he keeps pushing an open internet forward.

They just need to focus some dev resources on signed posts, and the ability to move those signed posts between nodes. That should be their number one priority imho.

I believe that in order to successfully and safely move posts between nodes they need to be immutable and signed. Because you're essentially creating a new history on a new node.

pay attention to this space. the puck is moving to this direction (finally!!) and like wayne gretzky and steve jobs famously related it's good to skate in the direction it is going to be.

Evan Prodromou, the creator of StatusNet, the OStatus protocol, and co-author of ActivityPub, is launching a dedicated nonprofit for the purpose of advocating for and supporting the Fediverse.