Hackers' Pub

Liberating clients from servers, without throwing out baby with bathwater

Danyl Strype @strypey@socialhub.activitypub.rocks

"With targeted FEPs and pioneering implementations like Flowz, the Fediverse can break free of proprietary client APIs and monolithic client/server implementations and empower a new wave of social web innovation."

@stevebate

https://www.stevebate.net/activitypub-client-api-a-way-forward/

This is such a valuable insight! There are 2 extremes in decentralised social app dev, one where an app is just a dumb terminal for a particular server, and then the inverse, pure P2P apps with no server. But there is a middle ground. Apps can be a focus of UX development, and access different servers as needed to provide functionality that's impractical (if not impossible) to do with pure P2P networks.

I may bring an additional more top-down design perspective into consideration and to ideate on, but please let me know if that is better addressed in a separate topic.

What if we "Liberate people from clients, apps and servers"?

If the "fediverse facilitates online communication and social interaction between people", then the ActivityPub protocol specifies how to implement an abstraction on top of servers and clients in order to provide "a distributed network of addressible actors for the exchange of social activities". This abstraction no longer relies on the notion of servers and clients, though for certain social networking use cases you may opt to re-introduce them (.. but then they live as concepts in this higher level of abstraction).

Though conceptually the ActivityPub spec didn't prescribe this, the dominant abstraction for "joining the fediverse" in the present day involves "select an app, select a server that hosts your app of choice, and use a client that supports that app, to access it". In other words, currently fediverse offers a predominantly app-centric view of the world. But this need not be the only view that is supported, and I advocate a shift towards having a fediverse of mixed apps & services, and elaborate a service-oriented view e.g. as a compliant AP protocol extension.

In the service-oriented view - and in a paradigm shift towards app-free computing - there wouldn't necessarily be "Instances" as we have today, but parties that are positioned as fediverse access providers. You can compare this to the telecom sector, providing the plug in your house to deliver TV, phone and internet services at your doorstep.

When relating that to a good software with ActivityPub C2S support, I can envision that people after gaining access and becoming fedizens, can easily discover, obtain and wire services together in interesting ways that support their social networking use cases and needs. And dynamic UI/UX that supports that, based on service configuration and protocol (control) data exchange.

Syntax	Description	Examples
`"` keyword `"`	Finds the string within quotes, including spaces. Case-insensitive. (Escape quotes inside with `\"`)	`"Hackers' Pub"`
`from:` handle	Finds content written by the specified user.	`from:hongminhee` `from:hongminhee@hollo.social`
`lang:` ISO 639-1	Finds content written in the specified language.	`lang:en`
`#` tag	Finds content with the specified tag. Case-insensitive.	`#HackersPub`
condition condition	Finds content that satisfies both conditions on either side of the space (logical AND).	`"Hackers' Pub" lang:en`
condition `OR` condition	Finds content that satisfies at least one of the conditions on either side of the OR operator (logical OR).	`#HackersPub OR "Hackers' Pub" lang:en`
`(` condition `)`	Combines the operators within the parentheses first.	`(#HackersPub OR "Hackers' Pub" OR "Hackers Pub") lang:en`