That's right. Hello, people.
I am Christine Lumberwebber, executive director of the Sprayley Institute. This is Jessica Talon,
founding technologist at the Sprayley Institute. I hear a lot of people talking about the
company pub thing in the room. People seem pretty excited about it. Anybody explain to me what
activity pub is? It's like email. Anyway, sometimes it's a little bit hard to get some talking
and with Jessica, but I'm going to do my best. I just remembered, actually, we spent a few
years working on activity pubs. We're co-authors, co-editors. We're excited about activity
and we're glad that people are clearly excited about the Fediverse as a few users online.
But I think we're happy with that. There might be a little bit more to do.
Maybe it's done. Maybe what else could we do? People worry about their sights going down.
They might have to move somewhere to appear. That's one clear one. There's this whole thing about
if you read the activity pubs back, there's this authentication, not the
authorization thing and it kind of goes like, it just kind of stops there.
The W3C at the time was like, don't do that. It's not ready.
We did our best. We spent a lot of time thinking since then about what we might do.
There's things like moderation. It's tough for people who work on things.
You know, like instance administrators get tired. They're like, I've walked this whole instance.
But we also want people to self-host as much as possible.
But if people stare at self-host as much as possible, then I guess you're just
walking individuals at that point. That might be a problem.
At one point, I wrote up this thing called OCab pub.
One of the things I think we really loved about activity pub is that it's an
actor model system. Who here knows about the actor model?
Okay, about 30%. It's great. It's all about sending messages like email.
But it turns out you can do all of computing this way.
It works great for asynchronous systems.
One of the things that Jessica and I loved about activity pub is that it's an
actor model system. There's so much you could do with it.
We're kind of doing the decentralized version of this major web 2.0 site.
The centralized version of that major web 2.0 site.
That's about good enough.
Maybe there's some more rich interactions.
What is social? What does it mean to be social?
We think about social as these kind of constraints.
You're sending a message to somebody.
The actor model, you can do things.
The turns out that people really want software where you can do things.
Maybe why can't all software be social?
And in fact, once something like Google Docs appears, it's really hard to convince people
to use something like LibreOffice.
Once you end up getting to the point where you can make something
collaborative, then it's really great.
We do more of it. We make it more peer-to-peer.
It's an actor model system.
We can send messages. It doesn't matter where they live.
This is really great.
When I was writing up OKPub, I'm like, yeah.
There's this whole great security model.
We left out that authentication and authorization.
There's a way to do things that we can understand.
It's called capabilities security.
I started writing this document called OKPub towards networks of consent.
People read it. They're like, yeah.
It's a problem domain.
You're explaining the things.
It's really exciting.
It's like, it gets to the part where it's like, how do you do this?
It just kind of stops.
And the reason why it just kind of stops is that I tried talking to a bunch of people who
were doing whatever its implementation.
So like, yeah, this sounds great.
How do I do it on Ruby on Rails?
And actually, Ruby on Rails is a pretty interesting thing.
Ruby on Rails in Django and stuff like that.
They did something wonderful, right?
Like, in kind of the web 2.0 era, they kind of provided.
They didn't just make it easy to write these kind of web 2.0 applications.
They kind of taught you how to do it, right?
They kind of taught you how to do it.
But right now, writing peer to peer applications,
writing really distributed secure applications.
We can do things.
We can live.
We can interact.
It's pretty hard.
You kind of have to be an expert.
It's like photography is complicated.
The security stuff that's difficult to think about.
How do you know whether or not a person can do it?
Think that just capability stuff.
It seems like it can do it.
It seems like it could do it.
But it's just really hard to write this, right?
But wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
Wait, wait.
What if we did the thing, the thing that happened with Django and
Rails and stuff like that, we make a new software foundation that
makes it so that's a default thing you get.
And it walks you.
It doesn't just, it doesn't just make it easy to think.
It teaches you the default way to be able to write peer to peer applications.
And you're doing it.
We can do that.
Or we should even do that for a few years.
Oh, it's called goblins.
You're doing that for a few years now.
It's called goblins.
And it's after model based in the teaching, it makes peer to peer
to distribute applications.
It's the default thing you get.
Well, I forgot about these things sometimes.
Oh, we're also doing a fundraiser.
You can donate to us by the way.
But also.
But also, we have this other protocol.
Oh, shit.
I'm going to get in trouble.
It's probably talking about activity pub.
I'm going to talk about this other protocol called O'Captain.
Well, it's pretty cool.
It's distributed garbage collection.
Why?
You can leave that.
It's like really fast and efficient.
It, like, has this capabilities.
The security can some antics.
And it's pretty cool, right?
Actually, Jessica wrote the specs documents for this new stuff.
If you go to O'Captain.org, you can check it out.
So are we abandoning activity pub?
Okay.
No.
Okay.
We're not abandoning the air pay to be.
I kicked out from this room for abandoning activity pub.
No.
We're not going to do it.
Because activity pubs after model.
The same way that we can do O'Captain.
As, like, this stuff can do the same thing where at the perimeter,
we're sending messages back and forth between actors.
Except instead of just doing social media things,
they'll be able to do all sorts of things.
But we can use O'Captain.
And the other things we want to direct communication.
We want to have distributed garbage collection.
I think we can do this.
And in fact, actually, I think we are doing this.
And we've actually been building quite a lot of stuff.
And things are actually starting to get to the point where,
you know, activity pub.
There's about four, like, longer than four years.
We're like, I would try to explain to people what we're doing.
And people were just kind of like, and then, you know,
when people use it, they're kind of like, whoa, this is amazing.
Right?
So I think we're starting.
There's just baby steps.
Instead of territory.
Or maybe people can start to experience it and kind of explore it.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Because, because this is a lightning talk.
There's two minutes left.
And probably less than that.
Because actually, it doesn't tell you to be passive perimeter.
So I think I'm going to stop right here.
But I think the real exciting thing about all of this is that
it's not only possible, but actually there's all this research.
And at the end of activity pub, you know, we spent a few years.
This was a solo project of like, what's next for the Fediverse?
But then we started this nonprofit when it got to the point where, you know,
it's actually possible.
And we've been doing it.
And it's happening.
Fuck yeah.
Yeah.