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A comment on ActivityPub: a federated social web standard.

Re:ActivityPub: a federated social web standard by j4pe on Thursday May 25, 2017 @12:26PM (#14418292)
I really like the idea of a social web standard.

This seems like a very constricting protocol, though: the one-to-one correspondence between a user and a server means I need to individually post my activity to the "inbox" of everyone who wants to read it (or they poll my "outbox" - I'm not sure). Not a recipe for an efficient system. It's called ActivityPub, so this was clearly a design decision to meet the goal of being decentralized.

But I probably wouldn't implement this standard in a project unless I modified it a bit so that many clients could share a server.

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Re:ActivityPub: a federated social web standard by paroneayea on Thursday May 25, 2017 @12:31PM (#14418328)
There's a public delivery mechanism where if many people are on the same server, and its a public post (eg Twitter style messages, etc) it can be delivered to a shared public inbox https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#public-inbox-delivery

That way the receiving server can only get POST'ed to once and distribute to the appropriate followers.

Of course, for more limited distribution posts, you still have to distribute individually, but that's no different than how email works.

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Re:ActivityPub: a federated social web standard by epeus on Thursday May 25, 2017 @02:36PM (#14419160)
Have a look at the related w3c spec WebSub that is designed to deal with this issue: https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/
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Re:ActivityPub: a federated social web standard by detaro on Thursday May 25, 2017 @02:41PM (#14419198)
Which many may know as Pubsubhubbub, with only minor changes and a new name. (Which is a good thing: no need to make up a new protocol if there is already one in the wild that works)
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Re:ActivityPub: a federated social web standard by clacke2 on Sunday May 28, 2017 @11:38PM (#14437264)
WebSub literally does the same thing, except ActivityPub cuts away the middle layers, removing some redundancy on the way. It makes ActivityPub less of a protocol hodge-podge than OStatus, which has the same drawbacks and benefits as any introduction of a dependency into a protocol or software.
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Re:ActivityPub: a federated social web standard by Jaruzel on Thursday May 25, 2017 @12:28PM (#14418306)
There's JSON examples that include following/followers lists. I'm guessing that you could POST to that list, and the backend server takes care of forwarding it on to your followers.
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