Ghost has made ActivityPub available to all of its Pro subscribers.

Interesting how they name and describe it:

"Social Web - y/n
Federate your site with ActivityPub to join the world's largest open network"

https://activitypub.ghost.org/content/images/size/w1600/2025/03/activitypub-beta-1.png

Who are the finest #community builders in the #activitypub ecosystem, in your opinion?

Has anyone successfully uploaded images to a Shakey instance running locally in Docker?
I’ve been unable to get it to work. Any advice or solutions would be appreciated!

Written awhile ago but still valid. Why Mastodon, ActivityPub and the Fediverse Will Change Social Media Forever https://flip.it/saQbdd #Fediverse #activitypub #mastodon #socialweb

I am creating a #ActivityPub minimalistic implementation of a badge system similar to Credly, built using #dotnet and leveraging the #Fediverse

I have issued a first badge, the idea is to decentralize the verification systems, and allow organizations to self-certify. It is incredible that organizations like Microsoft or Non-Profits pay thousands of dollars to companies like Pearson to just provide "verified" badges. Similar to mastodons installed in social-dot-something, thinkg of badges<dot> mozilla<dot>com , certifications<dot>myschooldistrict<dot>com. Or even a podcast emitting a badge for its guests, with the verification in the domain.

ActivityPub already offers a secure way to sign artifacts and interact between actors. The fediverse already have people with profiles, a social graph as @mike says, ready to use. Think of how LetsEncrypt disrupted that market of few actors selling certificates for websites.

I have a functional poc,
@fediverse is not a mastodon, pledora or blog, it is an actor in a badge system, but you can follow it in Mastodon. Its badges will show in #mastodon but they are not notes or articles. If you want to learn more, follow me, I will be sharing the progress here. Or follow the github project here: https://github.com/tryvocalcat/activitypub-badges

Who wants a badge of early adopter?

I've been playing with the experimental GitHub Copilot agent mode in vscode. I've asked it to start from an empty directory and create an #ActivityPub server in C++, directed only by prompts (no human coding). So far, it has created a C++ project and implemented WebFinger, resource persistence, resource retrieval and a decent set of unit tests. At this point, Mastodon is able to discover our actors. The AI is currently implementing Follow processing. I'm curious to learn how far I can push this.

The #fediverse is a fascinating place. I was using #nostr and came across a post by @cstross but I couldn't reply to it on Nostr and I couldn't find it on #mastodon

I suppose technically this isn't a fediverse issue as it isn't really related to the way #activitypub works, but rather more related to the way bridges work.

Now I'm guessing this occurred because the post in question was deleted by Charlie (though I saw nothing untoward about it) or because it was a very good imposter on Nostr.

If it's the latter , it doesn't explain why the post seemed to come from Mastodon, albeit not from Charlie's usually address.

If it's the former then that is more understandable but maybe worrying, because it means deletions on Mastodon are not respected elsewhere.

Now Charlie being charlie, there's no way he isn't already aware of this, but I think it might be worth spreading the word to others.

Saddling small sites with the same duties as huge platforms means many will shut down in a hammer blow to net plurality.

We'll be left with the Sophie’s choice of monopoly services; the incubators of online harms.

URGENT: The UK government must change the Online Safety Act to protect safe, non-commercial blogs, forums and fediverse.

Write to your MP to #SaveOurSites

https://action.openrightsgroup.org/save-our-sites-write-your-mp

In the @newyorktimes:

"#ActivityPub has also led to a wave of start-up efforts such as #Mastodon, a microblogging service that now has more than 14 million accounts connected by a network of over 14,000 host computers, as well as start-ups like #Pixelfed and #PeerTube, distributed services that offer features similar to #Instagram and #YouTube."

A Long-Shot Bet to Bypass the Middlemen of #SocialMedia

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/06/technology/mike-mccue-surf-browser-decentralized-internet.html

So many people in Denmark now talk about building a Danish/European social media platform (I proposed it 12 years ago and was laughed at) They want to start from scratch, but I keep saying we can build it on the ActivityPub protocol (alternatively Bueskys but I don't trust that in the long run). Anybody here who has experience with that? And know of other countries having done that? Contacts to people who could help build it? #activitypub #socialmedia @mastodon

#Smithereen now allows you to transfer your followers between servers.

Shoutout to #FediMeteo @admin and @stefano for the #RSS and #ActivityPub #federated #weather service. Finally, a reliable weather tool across platforms.

A week or so ago I reached out and they added my community. Every time the new weather report post or RSS feed comes through, I appreciate it so much.

Thanks again! #WX #Fediverse

Will the last small site turn off the lights?

The UK Online Safety Act imposes the same duties and penalties on blogs, forums and fedi instances as huge platforms.

Many small, safely moderated sites will shut down or block UK users.

Crushing competition is the last thing we need for a safer Internet!

Act now before 17 March

#SaveOurSites

https://action.openrightsgroup.org/save-our-sites-write-your-mp

Little known fact: @evan and I worked at a startup in 2020 that never launched. It wasn't a great experience for me, but I loved the team we had hired, including Evan. I didn't know much then about #activitypub or the social web.

I went back to @Flipboard in 2021 and in 2023 I started to learn about #federation because of @mike's vision. Fast forward to 2025, Flipboard + @surf are organizing #SXSW's first #FediverseHouse. Evan was one of the first people to sign on, which created a snowball from there, which helped the event be a success.

This week, we got to meet IRL for the first time! So when I think about "the purpose" of that hard 10 months at that startup, I now know what it was.

I know why people do not switch to the Fediverse, or why they do not switch to secure messaging services, outside the reach of corporate and government oversight.

It is more convenient not to do so.

A lot of these free, open source developments, target geeks. Congratulation, if you're reading this, you likely have already put in more effort that it takes to sign up and use something else.

NO - Never - Get the idea out of your head, people will not give up convenience for better privacy. It is not in human nature and 30+ years of corporate and government oversight, should make that obvious. If it is not convenience, it does not matter how private and secure something is. Sorry, not sorry, those are just the facts. It is a hard pill to swallow, but swallow you must, so people can start focusing on making these many things, convenient.

I sometimes, although I cannot prove it, believe some of the developments behind better privacy and security, intentionally keep things hard, by design. That perhaps the FOSS world was infiltrated years ago, and that is why there has always been the pushback, on making things idiot-proof, graphically please, and simpler.

Mastodon and Misskey, for example, both use Activity Pub, but I should not need to copy and paste someone's username and manually search for them, to follow. It took years, for Mastodon, to make it easy for me to just stumble over a profile, and click a single button to follow.

If it is not simple, and easy, you're wasting everyone's time. Go code something else.

#Privacy #Security #InfoSec #InfomationSecurity #WhatsApp #Signal #Foss #OpenSource #Development #ActivityPub #Mastodon #Misskey