@danieldekay

Filip from Brnosaires reached out with some questions. Here’s my long answer:

Meanwhile, I have a few questions that haven’t been answered in your blog post.

1. Why did you decide to go with ActivityPub over Nostr or over Matrix?
2. Deciding on ActivityPub, why have you chosen Friendica over Mastodon or Pixelfed? 
3. Is it possible to log in with an existing fediverse account? For example, does someone have an account on Pixelfed, Mastodon, etc., server?
4. How do you plan the promotion to get people from FB to the fediverse?

Great questions! I will answer 1, 2 and 3 below.

Why ActivityPub over Nostr and Matrix?

When I was researching options, the protocol was never in focus. It was the core use cases for tango: Events, Connections, Groups, Sharing, Photos.
Additionally, we only have a social network that really worked once-upon-a-time on Facebook, and not on Twitter or Telegram or Instagram (even though some regional communities are here more, or a younger audience — for some weird reasons, because most of the Facebook features are not there).

So essentially I was looking at alternatives to Facebook — either as a one-stop-shop, or a collection of tools that can be aggregated.

The core guiding principles in my search were:

• FOSS (Free Open Source Software)
• No single source of failure: ideally a decentralized approach which could put different actors into play but keep everything running together due to agreed upon protocols and standards.
• It should offer permissions (who can see what I post?), and some level of privacy, but doesn’t need to be a full all-cryptography solution
• Easy and cheap to host — because funding will be limited and people don’t want to pay/donate (or do they?)
• Based on something that exists, is mature, and needs minimal extra work, with an active and experienced developer base.

There a few commercial options (e.g. Mighty Networks), or open-source solutions (Humhub, BuddyPress, JomSocial, or even Discourse …)

But essentially: nothing is perfect, and compromises will always need be made somewhere. Some we can handle, others, like “we need to put in 100s of hours of development work” can’t be handled by volunteers on their free Saturday.

With these requirements there are basically not many options left. Decentralization and Federation are key. The first allows for anyone to say “Hey, let me run my own ***-server”, and the second says “great, I don’t need to move, but I can play with you”.

Why ActivityPub?

ActivityPub and the Fediverse allow for that — and the idea and core technologies are more than 15 years old, and still evolving. There are different niche apps that can interop, and anyone could participate at least partially, no matter where they have an account. By the way, ActivityPub is a W3C standard, and also not the only protocol that exists in the Fediverse (Friendica has it’s own: DFRN, and Hubzilla does, too, ZOT, and then there is also Diaspora.). Friendica and Hubzilla are actually capable to talk to all using bridges, and there are even more bridges between ActivityPub and (BlueSky, Twitter, Nostr, …)

And since it is a W3C standard, and many people are leaving the “enshittified” corporate social media, more attention is put on ActivityPub, and more and more apps and platforms are starting to support it. For example, any WordPress site can now also become a Fediverse-Actor, and you can follow and interact with it. Try it on this blog! And the “Event bridge for ActivityPub” plugin for WordPress turns a Tango Calendar like Rhein-Neckar-Tango into a Fediverse-ready event platform!

Why Friendica?

In this world of apps, Friendica, Hubzilla, Streams and now Forte are the three “Social Networking Platforms” (more like Facebook), whereas Mastodon is more like Twitter, Pixelfed more like the Photo-oly Instagram, PeerTube is like Youtube, etc. And you can still interact with apps like Tumblr, Flipboard, Threads, WordPress, Discourse, and many more through ActivityPub, RSS and more.

Nostr is an interesting protocol, very young and dynamic – but it’s much more like a Twitter successor, just like BlueSky. What does that mean? No events, no groups, no permissions. You could build all of that on top of the protocol, but you need to do it, and maintain it…

Matrix is more a chat platform with deep encryption, and since it should work real-time, it also has higher demands on resources. I could see it as an add-on to a Tangoverse, but not as the core driver.

The core app for Tangoverse should, in my view, support most of what the tango network needs, globally: Events, Groups, Connections, Sharing.
The candidates for that are: Friendica, Hubzilla, Streams, Forte — in that order. Friendica is the oldest of them, Hubzilla the most powerful, and Streams/Forte are children of Hubzilla with features removed — maybe not yet ready for prime time.
There is one more candidate on the horizon, called “Bonfire”, but so far it is too young, too beta, and doesn’t have a big enough user base or maturity to start with. It will federate via ActivityPub, also.

Personally, I find Hubzilla “nicer”, but also much more complex than Friendica, which in many ways is much closer to Facebook. A new theme for Friendica makes it even more “look alike”, at least to “the good old” Facebook.

Photos and Videos… that is a different story for a later post. In short: there are no Photo apps out there that scale “AI-based image tagging” like Facebook did in their prime time. And even they have turned that basically off, probably due to privacy and legal reasons. Additionally, photo storage is not cheap on a tango network scale, video storage even more so.

What does Federation mean?

What does it not mean: It is not single-sign-on.

This means: with your account daniel@me.social i can log in to my account on me.social, but not on mastodon.world, and not on events.ai.
But I can follow anyone from there, and when they post something, I can read their post in my feed on me.social, and I can like it, or reply/comment, and the other side should be able to see it, if they chose they want to see what I am sending.

This is important to understand. In a decentraliced tango-specific sub-set of the Fedivers we could have multiple tango-servers. One could be tango.photos, and another tango.mastodon, and another tango.friendica. Everyone would see a different experience based on their platform, but everyone could communicate.

What about Identity?

On Facebook you usually have one account which is your identity. It might be under pseudonym, but your tango people will find you, and be able to share and communicate with you.

In the Fediverse this is a bit different, because there is no global database of users. And users could have different accounts on different servers. I do that — for example I have daniel@friendica.tangoverse.org which I want to have as my tango account, but I also have danieldekay@masto.ai, which is use for non-tango related things. Etc.

I have thought and searched long, and there could be an opportunity here to create a central “tango people directory”, which acts as a searchable “tango phone book”, but also acts as an OpenID provider, allowing for single-sign on to different apps in the Fediverse. But: a) it would be a single-source of failure, b) collect a lot of data, so legal requirements are higher, and c) will create technical issues that also need to be solved.

What about Messaging in the Fediverse?

In this case Messaging = Chat: We already have so many different chat apps, from Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Signal, Whatsapp, Threema, etc – that adding one more would not help anyone.

Maybe a Tango-Matrix server or network of servers could emerge, but I don’t see this as urgent or important before we have other things in place.