Thank you for this opening keynote!
It’s a great moment to share and learn about the history behind the screens.
I was surprised about the passage about corporate memberships around ~21:15 that received no words of response. Yet I think it’s an important point: ActivityPub was made by the grassroots, was it not? This is the history of ActivityPub, and it shows in its main community of early adopters.
One other thing that becomes transparent is how much infighting there was going from a variety of different approaches to converge, get along, talk to each other, and finally come up with ActivityPub. But years of benevolent dialogue beat most – but not all – of it.
@cwebber briefly hinted at content-addressing – nudging @pukkamustard with the work on ERIS.
Finally my prime takeaway from this panel, that I deem very important: It may be time to focus on #activitypub:c2s, especially if we can make a single ID compose posts going to several server implementations (e.g., text goes to Mastodon, video to Peertube, image to PixelFed, sound to Funkwhale…) so that a completely different experience from proprietary platforms can arise. Chris concluded on a discussion he had with Evan regarding the “borrowed assumptions” from corporate platforms: indeed, free software is in a different position when it comes to its objectives, and some (or many) assumptions of surveillance capitalists simply do not match the requirements for freedom. I think it’s critical to think why we do things, and the ActivityPub community has been quite aware of this for a long time, e.g., with the demise of showing follower counts and other quantitative, addictive markers that do not participate in sociality but in keeping people separate from each other. Pursuing this self-awareness work may be key to continuous success of the Fediverse.
Hey @rhiaro and @cwebber: what’s up with the gloves? Do you both have carpal syndrome or is it some (C2S) secret society?