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ActivityPub Conference 2019

In September of 2019 the first conference devoted to ActivityPub took place in Prague, Czech Republic, and while I did not attend it I was fortunate enough to find videos of the talks posted online. Since I think anyone who follows my stuff will be likely be interested in this, I want to give my reviews of these videos and pass along the things I find significant. Perhaps you might read this and want to check out one or more of these videos yourself. As you might have gathered from what I have written previously in this series I think ActivityPub is an important step taking back the Web from the companies that seek to control it to their own benefit while they sell us out.

If you want to see all of the videos, they can be found at https://redaktor.me/apconf/

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Opening Keynote 9/7/19: “ActivityPub: past, present, future”

Christopher Lemmer Webber Video of talk Christopher Lemmer Webber (@cwebber@octodon.social ; https://dustycloud.org/) is the co-editor of ActivityPub, and a core developer of MediaGoblin. ActivityPub is built on a client-server model in which actors perform activities on various objects, and the messages needed to do this use email-like addressing. An Actor could be an application, group, …

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Is ActivityPub Paving The Way to Web 3.0?

This is a short talk by Marie Axelsson (aka Malocki) that you can access at Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/apconf-talks/Talk2_Maloki_compressed.mov. Malocki is a former project manager at Mastodon. Since then, among other things, she is part of a group that has forked the Mastodon code to create FLORENCE (Fediverse Loves Open Responsible Ethical Networks for Communicating with Everyone). …

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The Semantic Social Network

This is another ActivityPub talk, this time by Pukkamustard. You can find it at https://archive.org/details/apconf-talks/Talk3_Pukkamustard_compressed.mov. The idea of a Semantic Network is that the various kinds of data are linked. The model he uses has subjects linked to objects via predicates. There can be multiple objects for any subject, or multiple subjects for any object. …

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Keep unwanted messages off the Fediverse

Serge Wroclawski discusses techniques to mitigate SPAM and abuse in the Fediverse. The video for this talk can be found at https://archive.org/details/apconf-talks/Talk4_Serge_compressed.mov. These problems of SPAM and abuse can be found in all online social media, but in a federated, decentralized system there are particular problems because no one is in charge. Serge’s talk was …

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Decentralised Hashtag Search and Subscription in Federated Social Networks

This talk by Trolli Schmittlauch can be found at https://archive.org/details/apconf-talks/Talk5_Schmittlauch_compressed.mov. He is a computer science student at the Technical University in Dresden. This talk is organized around some work he has done as a student, and is more of a proposal for discussion than a finished piece of work, though he has worked out a …

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OSS compliance with privacy by default and design

This talk by Cristina DeLisle can be found at https://archive.org/details/apconf-talks/Talk6_Cristina_compressed.mov. She is a data protection officer at XWiki SAS. This talk starts with a discussion of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) passed by the European Community in 2016. She pointed out that GDPR was searched for on Google in 2018 more often than Beyoncé …

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Advice to new Fediverse administrators and developers

This talk by Luc Didry can be found at https://archive.org/details/apconf-talks/Talk1_Luc_compressed.mov, and you can get his slides at https://frama.link/ap-conf-2019. Luc works for Framasoft, a French non-profit organization that bills itself as a “digital emancipation network” and hosts a Mastodon instance and is the developer of two Fediverse projects, PeerTube and Mobilizon. Its purpose is the promotion, …

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The case for the unattributed message

This talk is by Caleb James DeLisle, and can be found at https://archive.org/details/apconf-talks/Talk7_Caleb_compressed.mov. He starts off by noting that his topic is a bit provocative, and that is by design. As Frank Zappa once said, “Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible,” and Caleb is clearly in that camp. As he says, to …

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Federated Blogging with WriteFreely

This talk by Matt Baer can be found at https://archive.org/details/apconf-talks/Talk8_Matt_compressed.mov. Matt is the founder of a company called Write.as, and is the lead developer for WriteFreely. WriteFreely is a minimal, federated blogging platform made just for writing. It has no ads and no distractions, you just write. It is built around plain text, but you …

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I don’t know what I’m talking about: a newbie’s introduction to ActivityPub

This talk by Michalis Demetriou can be found at https://archive.org/details/apconf-talks/Talk9_Michael_compressed.mov. This is his story about starting as a newbie to implement something using ActivityPub. It is highly technical, and probably only of interest to developers. Since I am not a developer, it mostly went over my head.  Save as PDF

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Architectures of Robust Openness

This talk by Mark S. Miller was the keynote talk for Day 2 of the ActivityPub Conference 2019. You can find the talk at https://archive.org/details/apconf-mark. Wikipedia describes him as : “He is known for his work as one of the participants in the 1979 hypertext project known as Project Xanadu; for inventing Miller columns; as the co-creator …

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