This week Evan Prodromou is back to take us deeper into the Fediverse. As many of us reconsider our relationship with Twitter, Mastodon has been by-and-large the target of migration. They helped to popularize the idea of a federated universe of community-owned, decentralized, social networks. And, at the heart of it all is ActivityPub. ActivityPub is a decentralized social networking protocol published by the W3C. It is co-authored by Evan as well as; Christine Lemmer-Webber, Jessica Tallon, Erin Shepherd, and Amy Guy. Today, Evan shares the details behind this protocol and where the Fediverse might be heading.

Leave us a comment

Changelog++ members save 2 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

• Postman – Build APIs together — More than 20 million developers use Postman for building and using APIs. Postman simplifies each step of the API lifecycle and streamlines collaboration so you can create better APIs—faster.
• Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.
• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com

Featuring:

• Evan Prodromou – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, Website
• Adam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Jerod Santo – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn

Show Notes:

• ActivityPub - W3C Recommendation (23 January 2018)
• PeerTube
• Twitter says it’s intentionally blocking apps like Tweetbot
• Changelog.social
• Mastodon Roadmap
• The Changelog #257 with Evan Prodromou
• Medium embraces Mastodon

Something missing or broken? interviews-528.md">PRs welcome!

Timestamps:

(00:00) - This week on The Changelog(01:07) - Sponsor: Postman(02:22) - Start the show!(05:21) - What's the story of ActivityPub?(10:10) - Mastodon's relationship to ActivityPub(14:14) - What makes a social network sticky?(22:40) - Twitter's ads are the worm(31:29) - Mozilla and Tumblr support for ActivityPub(32:31) - What is Mastodon getting right?(38:16) - 4 out of 5 ActivityPub authors are women(43:25) - The promise of social networking(48:55) - The confusion of federated(55:04) - Implementing new features(58:09) - What's lacking?(1:03:32) - Where do noobs go?(1:07:51) - Let's talk scaling(1:11:36) - Where is the roadmap?(1:14:20) - Closing out the show(1:15:49) - Outro