Scott M. Stolz

I am an entrepreneur, small business owner, author, and researcher. I am also working on an open source project called Neuhub.

I am posting from Hubzilla with Neuhub via ActivityPub.

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  • 23 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: January 14th, 2025

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  • For those on traditional social media, I just say “What if Facebook and Twitter and YouTube could all talk to each other? People on Facebook could follow people on Twitter and people on Twitter can follow people on Facebook.” Then they usually reply “that would be neat” and then I tell them “yeah, that’s what we are building over here in the fediverse.”

    It usually is easier to give them an analogy related to something they are familiar with.


  • You also have to consider that some servers are very politically-oriented, and if your political beliefs are not aligned with the administrator or community, then you are likely to get banned or if not banned, made to feel unwelcome. This applies to the left, right, up, or down on the Nolan chart. It is their right to do so, since it is their server, but the result is usually echo chambers that repeat the same talking points. If you like to debate policy, then these are not the communities for you.

    If you want to discuss different points of view, you need to find a community that actually wants to debate the issues. Or run your own server and find like-minded friends to talk with.



  • A marketplace of apps is actually a good thing. Not everyone wants something based on Twitter (i.e. Mastodon, and similar). Not everyone wants Reddit (Lemmy, Mbin, etc.). Not everyone wants a traditional forum (NodeBB). Not everyone wants a blog (WordPress, Hubzilla, etc.). Not everyone wants Facebook (Friendica, Hubzilla, etc.).

    One of the goals is to build increased compatibility between apps so that you can choose which experience you want, yet can still talk to anyone else on the fediverse. Some big players will certainly emerge, but I think that there will always be hundreds of compatible apps.





  • Federated logins make sense for forums and websites where you have access to content such as PeerTube.

    For forums, logging into the forum with your fediverse account would actually be ideal since you can use a forum-style interface to navigate the topics, which would be easier than trying to navigate the same topics on Mastodon. Same thing with PeerTube. You may want to watch videos on PeerTube and comment right on their website without creating a PeerTube account. With federated single sign on, you can post with your existing fediverse account.

    We have that on Hubzilla and it is called OpenWebAuth. We can log into other instances and comment directly on their instance as ourselves after logging in.





  • @Daemon Silverstein ActivityPub is mostly about sending posts and articles.

    One relatively easy way to integrate ActivityPub might be to have the snippets be stored in some database on your website, and then have the option to create a post or direct message telling someone about the snippet. If the snippet is short, you could include a code block in the post, or you could provide a link back to the snippet on your website.

    If you used something like Hubzilla, you could set permissions, controlling who can see the snippet or post. And, although not really designed for code snippets, Hubzilla does have webpages, articles, and wiki page that support code blocks. Although, now that you mention it, we probably could create an addon specifically for storing code snippets.

    If you wanted to sync snippets or import between servers or accounts, that would require more advanced techniques, some of which are not really available over ActivityPub.








  • I agree that there needs to be some more “killer apps” for the fediverse for it to really take off. Luckily there are some people working on that. Loops and Pixelfed seem to be some recent highlights and are growing fast. And there are other apps that are being worked on that could change things.

    One of the problems is that ActivityPub is somewhat limited to what Mastodon has implemented. A lot of other platforms want to implement some cool features, but none of those are supported by Mastodon. This limits the rest of the fediverse since they have to cater to the lowest common denominator.

    It is one of the main reasons why Hubzilla still uses Zot6 as its primary protocol, and uses ActivityPub to communicate with everyone else. Hubzilla has features that the rest of the fediverse does not support, such as nomadic identity, privacy, and access control. And related to that, Bluesky also has features that ActivityPub does not support, or if ActivityPub does support it, is not implemented by the larger platforms.

    I think this is the primary reason why the fediverse is falling behind. People look at what Mastodon has implemented and think that ActivityPub is weak compared to Zot6 or AT Protocol.