Dot Social

ActivityPub and the End of Walled Gardens, with Evan Prodromou

Nov 28, 2023

Evan Prodromou, creator of ActivityPub, explains how the protocol enables open-source social networks in the Fediverse. They discuss the importance of interoperability, the adoption of ActivityPub, decentralized innovation, and the role of advertising in the decentralized network.

53:09

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Episode guests

Evan Prodromou

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Quick takeaways

ActivityPub enables a decentralized social media experience, fostering innovation and shifting from centralized platforms.

ActivityPub offers the potential to unbundle features from walled gardens and explore innovative ideas on the Fediverse.

Deep dives

The Birth of the Fediverse and Activity Pub

The podcast episode discusses the emergence of the Fediverse, a decentralized system of interconnected servers, and the importance of Activity Pub protocol in making it function. Activity Pub allows for moderation to be distributed, giving users more control over their experience and deeper engagement with communities. The hosts highlight how the Fediverse offers a more open social media experience, fostering innovation and bringing about a shift from centralized platforms. The episode also explores the history of Activity Pub's development, its authorship, and its role in enabling the persistence of relationships and the potential for advertising in the future.

Introduction

4min

Timeline and Co-authors of ActivityPub

2min

The Importance of Social Software and Connections

9min

Activity Pub Adoption and Decentralized Innovation

3min

The Importance of Interoperability and Choice in Social Media Platforms

2min

Building Relationships and Decentralized Innovation

19min

Advertising in the Fettiverse

11min

Ways to Follow the Speaker's Work on the Social Web

3min

There was a time where people couldn’t email each other unless they were using the same email client. That changed when developers came up with a protocol that made it so it didn’t matter if you were using AOL or CompuServe or Prodigy — it just worked.

The same analogy explains how things work in the Fediverse, an open-source system of interconnected, interoperable social networks. The Fediverse is powered by a protocol called ActivityPub, which provides an API for creating, updating and deleting content across several platforms.

What does ActivityPub unlock for product builders and tech entrepreneurs? How will social networks without walled gardens change our relationship to content and to each other? Why does any of this matter?

In this episode, host Mike McCue talks to Evan Prodromou, one of the co-authors of ActivityPub. Evan is an entrepreneur, technologist and advocate of open source software. He’s also the Director of Open Technology at the Open Earth Foundation.

Highlights from this conversation include:

the history of the W3C and ActivityPub
why the protocol is so important to Evan
what’s surprised Evan most about its adoption
why this work is so consequential
what it will unlock for innovation

🔎 You can follow Evan at https://evanp.me/ and on Mastodon.

✚ You can connect with Mike McCue on Mastodon.

💡 To learn more about what Flipboard's doing in the fediverse, sign up here: https://about.flipboard.com/a-new-wave/

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Dot Social

ActivityPub and the End of Walled Gardens, with Evan Prodromou

Episode guests

Podcast summary created with Snipd AI

Quick takeaways

Deep dives

The Birth of the Fediverse and Activity Pub

The Role and Relevance of Activity Pub

Unbundling and Innovating on the Fediverse

The Future of Activity Pub and the Social Web

Remember Everything You Learn from Podcasts