I just hope the last few people I follow on Twitter who I really enjoy following move over too. But unfortunately that's "Space Twitter", so we will see...

For learning ActivityPub specifically, the best meta-guide I’ve found is https://tinysubversions.com/notes/reading-activitypub/

I was lucky enough to live in a freshman college dorm (a music-focused dorm, no less!) circa 1997-1998 when Napster was still a thing right after MP3's were a thing, and that shit was amaaaaazing

I mean given how much people love music, I never had any doubt that MP3's would be revolutionary

These days it's a USB cable rather than a cinch cable, and vorbis/flac rather than mp3, but my PC has been my main music player for more than 25 years -- and the only pair of "game" speakers I've owned were positioned in the living room. Come to think of it, those speakers may very well have been the reason I was allowed a computer in my bedroom :)

Anyway... thank you for prompting that trip down memory lane, I enjoyed it.

To put a timeline on this: I also ended up buying one of those Empeg in-dash MP3 players.

I couldn't read a single word of Swedish or Russian, but my friends and I figured out how to navigate to the music downloads.

I remember my processor struggled so much even playing it, I basically had to just listen to the mp3 on its own. I eventually figured out I could play 96kbps mp3s without slowing things down too much. These were such amazing times for me, suddenly exposed to an entire planet of music there's zero possible chance I would have otherwise heard.

(Maybe you see the two at the same thing; I don't.)

So what was your original argument against this?

This contradiction flares up in many places. Most obviously, the existing community HATES all kinds of analytics, search, etc because they’re concerned they can be weaponized by trolls. At the same time, Mastodon has all kinds of unauthenticated APIs that make it trivial to slurp data. Mastodon doesn’t even let you post stuff to just your local instance!

I expect that the current post-twitter-collapse energy will result in ActivityPub 2.0, and that revision of the spec will make it easier to control where your posts go.

Ultimately I think the Fediverse will agree on the core protocol, splinter over activity vocabularies, and scatter over moderation standards. That Will Be Fine and we’ll have something clearly better the Web 2.0 local maxima we’ve been trapped in for the last decade or so.

I'd love it if my site's posts were ActivityPub posts, with ActivityPub replies being shown on the site as comments. I think that would be an amazing thing, but it's currently not very easy to do.

I guess I better get coding again.

I made my own thing, fetching an RSS feed and posting entries to an existing account. It makes the code much simpler, but is not practical if you have lots of feeds (you need yo create all accounts separately): https://sr.ht/~rakoo/rss2ap/

I have a thread going here https://hachyderm.io/@PeterBronez/109688815511361197

But the upshot is, get involved with:

https://www.w3.org/community/socialcg/

https://fediverse.party/en/post/fediverse-14-years-in-2022/

What’s the term you prefer for this stage of its growth then?

The jump to 7 figures of MAU in the wake of Twitter’s collapse seems like an important change to me. The idea might be 15 years old, but the dominant implementation (Mastodon) started ~2016, the modern protocol (ActivityPub) arrived in 2018, and the last four years seem to have been mostly a small community working out the kinks.

Now it’s going mainstream. It’s held up remarkably well so far, but there are significant technical, economic and governance challenges to overcome if Fedi is going to fulfill it’s potential as the dominant interoperability layer for online collaboration.

Fret not; when Sony released the first digital Mavica (the one that stored pictures on 1.44" floppys) I would have made a bet that digital photography will never take off.

My only lame excuse it that at this time it was just unfeasible imagining that one day in the not too distant future you'd be able to store terabytes of memory on a device the size of a thumbnail.

Still, not one of my best predictions.

They didn't have to worry about a set-top box + I believe MS helped them serve content from XBL servers.