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1. Nextcloud News (unofficial) (ncnews@libranet.de)'s status on Thursday, 25-Jan-2018 13:31:11 UTC Nextcloud News (unofficial)
   ActivityPub: the new standard for decentralized networks
   
   Today, the World Wide Web gained a new standard: ActivityPub. https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ The recommendation has been published by the responsible W3C workgroup after 3 years of work, started in no small part by Christopher Lemmer Webber, founder of the Mediagoblin project. Nextcloud uses ActivityPub, implementing it to handle Activity federation between servers, crucial for our Global Scale architecture. https://nextcloud.com/globalscale

   And indeed, you may already be using ActivityPub now without realizing it.

   –Christopher Lemmer Webber
   
   

   Nextcloud and ActivityPub

   
   
   Nextcloud implements ActivityPup to inform users about changes to their files, new calendar and so on between users on different Nextcloud servers since Nextcloud 12. This makes ActivityPup part of what makes Nextcloud Global Scale work! https://nextcloud.com/globalscale
   
   The Activity app which implements ActivityPub will continue to be improved, as its role has expanded over the years to inform users about a lot of things beyond file changes. Its core developer, Joas, blogged earlier about his todo list for the year, https://www.schilljs.com/2018/01/10/nextcloud-2018.html including changes to the Activity App.
   
   
   Illustration of how ActivityPub works from W3.org
   
   

   What is ActivityPub

   
   
   The origins of ActivityPub trace back to microblogging technology StatusNet, the former Laconia which was first widely implemented at identi.ca. Identi.ca has since migrated to pump.io, the successor to OStatus and the protocol it implements is essentially the base of ActivityPub. Evan Prodromou, the original author of Laconia and pump.io, designed the new protocol to use Activity Streams for commands and transfer data via a simple REST inbox API. The best place to get started to learn more about the protocol is on the W3.org website. https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#Overview
   
   Christopher Lemmer Webber wrote a guest post https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/victory-for-libre-networks-activitypub-is-now-a-w3c-recommended-standard on the Free Software Foundation blog explaining some history and features of the protocol. It provides a server-server protocol for federation and a client-server protocol for users to connect to a server. The core idea of ActivityPub is to bring together decentralized social networks, gaining critical user mass while keeping data on separate servers.
   
   The popular Twitter alternative Mastodon is a prominent user, same goes for Mediagoblin which aims more at sharing photos and videos. And, then, Nextcloud of course!

   ---

   https://nextcloud.com/blog/activitypub-the-new-standard-for-decentralized-networks/
2. Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@octodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 23-Jan-2018 15:59:09 UTC Christine Lemmer-Webber

   ActivityPub is a W3C Recommendation! Yes! At last! Finally!

   Let your social networks be free! https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/6785 https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

3. Yuri Volkov (yvolk@loadaverage.org)'s status on Thursday, 12-Oct-2017 06:57:54 UTC Yuri Volkov
   @cwebber@octodon.social Thank you for reply to the #ActivityPub issue at https://github.com/w3c/activitypub/issues/260
   I followed the discussion there plus copying my follow-up below:
   1. Let's go step by step. Explicitly stating that Actors and Users are different entities is a good way forward.
   BTW the confusing phrase "users are represented as "actors" here" should also be changed to "users are mapped to actors" with addition, how (you suggested wording...)
   Where can we see current draft for review how it looks now? You are too quick to state that the issue is resolved :-)
   2. Let's check if the statement is valid:
   * ""user" is technically an entity outside the protocol"
   2.1 First of all the term is used tens times in the document, which describes the protocol: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
   2.2. The term "user" is used for two different things, actually:
   * for "natural person from a real world"
   * and for "user's account at a Servetr" (my interpretation).
   The second meaning is definitely "inside protocol". Just look at these phrases, from many available, for example:
   * "This protocol permits a client to act on behalf of a user."
   * "Client to server interaction takes place through clients posting Activities to a user's outbox"
   My conclusion is that a User in the second meaning "user's account at a Server" is definitely a part of the protocol description.
   3. As now we agreed on separation of an Actor from a User, let's look again, what we read in the document.
   3.1 You know: there are many places, where the word user(s) should be replaced with a word Actor(s), e.g. here {again, one of many examples):
   * "The Follow activity is used to subscribe to the activities of another user."
   Attributes of a User are presented as attributes of an Actor in examples...
4. Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@octodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 22-Aug-2017 20:20:06 UTC Christine Lemmer-Webber

   New ActivityPub CR out today https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ all non-normative changes, normative changes happening soon

5. Yuri Volkov (yvolk@loadaverage.org)'s status on Tuesday, 15-Aug-2017 05:28:33 UTC Yuri Volkov
   Suggested correction to https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
   1. I noticed an inaccuracy in section 6.9. "Undo Activity"
   "The undo activity and the activity being undone must both have the same author."
   "author" should be changed to "actor" here so it will read:
   "The undo activity and the activity being undone must both have the same actor."
   2. Actually, the "author" property is used (informally ?!) in examples of this document, but I didn't find _any_ reference to such a "property" in https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/
   the latter documents uses "actor" instead.
   Looks like autor should be replaced with "actor" in examples also to avoid confusion and incompatible implementations...
   ?!
6. Yuri Volkov (yvolk@loadaverage.org)'s status on Sunday, 14-May-2017 07:32:14 UTC Yuri Volkov
   Yesterday I was implementing #Mastodon API in #AndStatus. Comparing AndStatus with #Tusky client at some point I noticed that Tusky shows me a new post, which mentions myself. But I couldn't find the same post in any timeline that AndStatus feeds from the Mastodon server.
   It appeared that in addition to Twitter/GNU Social-like timelines Mastodon has something conceptually similar to an "Activity stream" that is called "Notifications" here and, as other parts of the API, is "hand made" :-)
   Actually, this is a good sign, showing that ideas of #ActivityStreams (currently represented by the #ActivityPub standard https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ ) are growing in the heads of the Mastodon developers. I would go one step further and formulate all timelines and actions as activities and activity streams...
   It's interesting that these ideas are growing in _my_ head also :-) - I decided that internal AndStatus model of notifications will be based on ActivityStreams too. I.e. each individual notification will have an Actor, an Action and an Object/Content e.g. "Peter posted 'I met a friend'". Having notifications in such a structure, we will be able to show them to a User in any needed form: in the Android Notification bar or as a timeline.
   Currently AndStatus shows mostly "mentions" only in its "Mentions" timeline...