Technology

I legitimately believe that if ActivityPub services had gained traction before the dotcom bubble, they would be the default today, and twitter/bsky/reddit etc would have to go above and beyond to convince people to used their siloed platforms.

Strong agree. Email is prolific because it is the proto social network infrastructure, and it has interoperability at its core. You have someones email, you can write them. Theoretically it doesn't matter what email you send it from, you can send an email to any address in the world. There are limits to this these days, because of things like DMARC, DKIM, and SPF, which have been introduced because of shortcomings in the open protocols, but in its purest form, there are no barriers.

If ActivityPub had been around at the same time as email, it would be considered infrastructure the same way email is today. The online world would look different, but don't neglect that industries are still finding ways to make money from email. There might not have been platforms like the social media silos we have today, but there might be an industry trying to milk ActivityPub for money.

I’m hoping this is the phenomenon that is the best chance for the fediverse’s future, because every time one of the platforms dies off some small percentage of the userbase switches to a fediverse alternative. And a protocol won’t fail like a private service will. So over time, the more often private services fail, the more users find the fediverse, the larger it gets, and the more people notice that it’s the most dependable way to go. It might take 100 years for a critical mass of people to figure it out, but I think in the long term, the fediverse will eventually be seen as “old reliable”.

I too subscribe to this hope. I always end up writing emails to people I haven't been in touch with for a long time, and aren't sure about which phone number, social network, or physial address they are currently reachable on. Which reminded me of this post:

https://my-notes.dragas.net/2023/09/25/25-years-later/

Email just (still) works. Can't ask for more than that.

Yeah, but the network effect isn't really the cause of the problem I'd say. If people wouldn't just run to the next best thing and think about things, they could come to the conclusion to use Mastodon.

Probably will never happen and I don't see a solution for this, but it's still just demoralizing.

I keep seeing this analogy and unfortunately that's not how email servers work so it never really helps honestly. The servers are the To: fields, not the From: fields.

Okay, I know that the sender of a mail can be faked to a certain degree, but if stuff is setup correctly on both ends, you can verify that an email actually is from where it is saying it is.

Even if anyone could use any email-address to send from, the point still kind of is the same: You don't have one single mailserver, where the people are required to be on that server in order to message other people on that server, but you can send messages from a different server to that target-server, where the user is residing on.

And there's also no real analogy about privacy. With most email providers the intent isn't that everyone reads everyone else's email.

This is true, but it isn't the point either with the example

So frankly I really don't know what insight this is supposed to provide if it doesn't behave like email.

The point is that with Twitter, Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, every one of those platforms is closed to the outside (even tho I think Bluesky is or was thinking about opening to ActivityPub?), you create an account on Facebook and you can use Facebook, message everyone on Facebook.

With Mail, if you want to write Mail, you need a mail account from any provider, like Google (Gmail), Microsoft (hotmail?), or can host it yourself on a server of yours. Then you can write a mail to anyone who also has a mail account (which your server hasn't blocked and whose server hasn't blocked your server, which happens for example when your server is misconfigured and is allowed to send malicious mails).

It's the same with Mastodon/ActivityPub, if you want to message someone on ActivityPub, you need to choose any provider (Mastodon/yada yada/..) or can host a server yourself (which in turn can block other servers and can be blocked by other servers).

Of course there are technical differences and mail usually is 1-to-1 (there exist mailing lists though, which is basically 1-to-many/all), encryption is handled differently, but the key in the argument is that you need to choose one provider out of a list or can host yourself and after that you can message (mostly) anyone on other providers.

And there's a big safety difference. With something like Bluesky you have to trust the server admins to behave. With ActivityPub you have to trust each and every user of the service.

Why do you have to trust every user? Because they can send illegal content? Users can also do that with Bluesky.

Which is why server admins get shirty about whether they will forward messages to or from other servers. That whole situation doesn't really exist with email.

I'm probably not understanding the example you want to make. If you are really talking about the example I made above, as I already said, on any service you can send malicious/illegal content.

It's not like you have create a Hotmail account because Gmail has decided to defederate with Google or whatever.

I wrote about this above. Mailservers can actually be blocked by other mailservers, this happens quite frequently, as written above, when a mailserver is misconfigured or also when a usually "small" mailserver is suddenly sending many mails out, for example because the admin/owner is sending a newsletter to many users or invites to some event or similar.