What is Hackers' Pub?

I have actually critiqued ActivityPub and the fediverse a lot! I have kind of never stopped critiquing it, ever since the spec was released. There's a lot that can be improved!

I have even gotten criticism from AT LEAST ONE ActivityPub spec author for critiquing AP-as-deployed but I do anyway

"Where are we going with this Christine?"

Well you could have just read the blogpost but 3 more sections remain, we are approximately 2/3 there

I know, bear with me, what is left is:

- What should the fediverse do?
- Preparing for the organization as a future adversary
- Conclusions

I have returned, with tea

I am still not reading notifications. Well, I have seen a few fly by on the fediverse which is blipping and blooping nonstop in the Mastodon UI so people are clearly reading it there

Bluesky says "30+". How big is the +?? I will resist temptation to look and assume "31"

Here is your recipe for making the "Correct Fediverse IMO (TM)":

- Integrate ocaps, which is possible because actor model + ocaps compose
- Content addressed storage!
- Decentralized identity (notice the *y*, I did not say DIDs) on top of ~mutable CAS storage
- Petname system UX

(cotd...)

One thing we have already discussed so, before I will say anything else, I will repeat: content addressing is really good, and I'd like to see it happen in ActivityPub, and it's *possible to do*, I even wrote a demo of it https://gitlab.com/spritely/golem/blob/master/README.org

Bluesky does the right thing here, AP should too

ActivityPub left giant holes in the spec around two things which sound the same but which are not the same: Authentication and Authorization

Trying to mix these two, you accidentally get ACLs, and then you get confused deputies and ambient authority, plagues of the security world

Actually something that is funny about ActivityPub is that there's "ActivityPub the spec", which I think is pretty solid for the most part, and "ActivityPub-as-deployed"

Many of the critiques I'm about to lay out we left holes in the spec for which I hoped would be filled with the right answers

Alright you've heard enough critiques of Bluesky for a bit and I SAID I was gonna critique the fediverse and I am a WOMAN OF MY WORD

So let's get into it!

For this reason @blaine says of both ActivityPub done right and Bluesky done right, "they're the same picture" (The Office meme goes here, yes)

To a large degree, I think @blaine is right

The other time I wrote about ActivityPub + ocaps was in a proposal to, yes, Twitter's Bluesky process in 2020 with Jay Graber titled... "ActivityPub + OCaps"! https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/2535398

I think that document laid out all the right ideas for *the fediverse* (not saying bsky, the fediverse)

Actually with this and several other things I am going to bring up, I actually made sure there was space to do things right: there was a push to make ActivityPub "https-only"

I pushed back on that, I didn't want that requirement, and it was exactly for this reason: enabling content addressing

End of an era for me: no more self-hosted git

Link: https://www.kraxel.org/blog/2026/01/thank-you-ai/
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46969751

Spec-wise in ActivityPub, I think it's possible. The ecosystem, as deployed? I think the ecosystem can and will only do part of it, if we really get everyone excited, maybe the content addressed storage and decentralized identity parts, in which case the fediverse will also survive nodes going down

(cotd ...)

- Better anti-spam / anti-harassment using OCapPub ideas
- Improved privacy with E2EE ("encrypted p2p" even a better goal)

Whew! An improved fediverse?

"Uh, Christine, this sounds like a lot, do you think the fediverse can take this on?"

GLM5 Released on Z.ai Platform

Link: https://chat.z.ai/
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46974853

The ocap stuff, I tried getting fediverse implementers excited about this and tbh, it's pretty hard to design into a Ruby on Rails or Django style framework and mindset. Backporting the right designs to existing systems is a real challenge.

Especially ocaps need to go bottom-up.

Let's leave the ocap stuff to the side for now, then. Let's focus on what Bluesky and the fediverse have to learn from each other.

- The fediverse should adopt content-addressed storage and decentralized identity
- Bluesky should adopt real, actual federation and decentralization

The reason I bring up the proposal here is that I think it has all the right analysis of *what the fediverse should do*, if it was going to rise to the challenge of fulfilling its true potential

So let me lay out what the things in that proposal were:

Of course, adapting an existing system as deployed isn't easy.

I will say though that I think if Bluesky were to become *actually decentralized* it would look a lot like ActivityPub in terms of having directed messaging. This will also introduce similar challenges around eg replies, etc.

The fediverse and Bluesky, at great effort, could learn a lot from each other in the immediate term.

In the longer term, neither is implementing the ocap vision I think is critical for the big vision, and in a way, I think maybe neither can be easily rearchitected to achieve it. Well, not yet.

To the end of the fediverse, perhaps I sound bitter, "they didn't adopt ActivityPub the way *I* saw it!"

The truth is that Mastodon didn't, but Mastodon also saved ActivityPub. It then painted a vision of the future that wasn't, at least, what Jessica Tallon and I expected of it. But it saved AP.

When I laid out the ideas of OCapPub to various fediverse developers, the response was "this sounds cool but I have *no idea* how to retrofit a Rails/Django app for this kind of actor-oriented design".

And they were right.

Remember when I said Conway's Law flows in both directions?

So too does the social structure flow from the tech. It does on Bluesky, and it does on the fediverse.

I won't elaborate further on this, I actually would like you to pause and think about it. In which ways are tech and social systems bidirectional, here and otherwise? It's important.

The vision laid out for the fediverse, both independently in my writings and even in Jay Graber and I's joint proposal... well, it's a big lift.

@spritelyThe Spritely Institute would like to see if we can retrofit our version onto ActivityPub. Time will tell if that's a separate thing.

And perhaps this is all my *massive* Cassandra complex speaking. I won't deny that I have one, for better or worse

Still, despite all I have said about both Bluesky and the fediverse technically, it is because I want a hopeful direction for all of us. Secure collaboration. More important than ever.

Spritely is built by people who know and understand decentralized (social) networks and their strengths and weaknesses today very well: @tsyesikaJessica Tallon and I, two co-founders (and the first two working on Spritely's engineering) are both co-authors of the ActivityPub spec powering the fediverse!

Unfortunately it's not feasible or easy to do everything we'd like in decentralized social networks today... not on the fediverse nor anywhere!

The vision of Spritely is "secure collaboration". Finding how to do it was a four-year research project before the Spritely Institute even launched!

I laid out a strong critique, but let me end on a call to empathy.

Bluesky is built by good people, and the fediverse is built by good people. Neither reflect the designs I presently would like to see today, but ultimately these are built by humans trying their absolute hardest.

One of the things I'm most proud of about the fediverse is that it owes its success to a lot of queer people working on it. This lead to the fediverse being very queer itself. I'm proud of that.

Maybe it's weird to say, but that seems to be happening again with Spritely.

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새 마시는 물

写真部展は好きな写真を好きなように並べて自己満足の世界に浸ってほしい。展示のハードルくｓｓｓっそ低いので。

家具チェーンがチューナーレスのテレビを発売していることが話題だけど、IODATA とかのディスプレイでも同じことができる気がするけども・・

みっみ〜​​

너무나 게을러서 2026년에도 이걸 일일이 끄고 있는 자들에게 부지런해지기 귀찮아요 상을 드립니다

WiFi切れたと思ったらこんなの出てきた

양치 열심히…..라기보단 적당히….하는데 왜 새로 썩은 이가 생겼지

微ブレをノイズ追加で誤魔化す・・・

커미션 작업 했습니다.

どうかメンタルお大事に…🍵
（ストレス性脱毛経験おじさんより

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저는 그냥 술마시는 saekki