Notices by Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@octodon.social)

Interesting that they just changed the article title from "ActivityPub is the next big thing in social media" to "Can ActivityPub save the internet?"

The Verge has a new article about ActivityPub. And it's pretty damn good: https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/20/23689570/activitypub-protocol-standard-social-network

There's a number of quotes from me in there. I enjoyed being interviewed for this: David Pierce was a very thoughtful interviewer.

I have more comments than that, but I'll put them in a followup in this thread. In the meanwhile, go read the piece. It's nice to read some well informed journalism.

Twitter's advertising revenue down 89% (yes, 89%!!!!!) since Musk joined https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-30/twitter-s-revenue-drops-amid-advertisers-concerns-over-elon-musk

okay this new policy on Twitter of not allowing promoting other social networks is really good

naturally this means I *have* to be banned so I'm being an accelerationist

If you have a Twitter account please RT what I hope will be my final post and help me get banned from twitter for co-authoring activitypub https://twitter.com/dustyweb/status/1604542605638909954

I guess I should re-introduce myself. I'm Christine Lemmer-Webber, I'm co-author of the ActivityPub specification by which you are probably reading this message right now.

I'm also CTO of @spritelyinst https://spritely.institute where we're a 100% FOSS nonprofit building the next generation of decentralized networked technology for communities. It's cool shit.

High level intro to ideas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8uqHCo10I8
Tech tour: https://spritely.institute/news/blast-off-spritely-institutes-tech-tour.html
Donate: https://spritely.institute/donate/

Chief cassandra complex haver of the internet. I like lisps and programming in them. Etc etc etc.

I'm also a queer translady. Don't forget that the queers largely built this place.

I almost ran Twitter's Bluesky project. Got very close. Had interviews with the then CEO (Jack Dorsey) and CTO (Parag Agrawal) at the time. Can you imagine?

Pre-transition. Pardon the deadname. But I found the slides. Here you go, lol https://dustycloud.org/tmp/spritely-bluesky.pdf

I guess it's not surprising. Overexcited nonbinary weirdo waving their arms so excitedly about what the future *should be* and telling everyone point-blank what they were doing wrong. Oh well.

This is all pre Spritely Institute. *Not* getting this is largely what lead Randy Farmer and I to start our own nonprofit: https://spritely.institute

So hey. Maybe it's for the best. FWIW they suggested maybe Jay Graber (who did get it, and is great) and I should connect and see if we wanted to work together, and we did, but Jay and I agreed that Spritely was trying to be more ambitious than her vision and should be its own thing.

At any rate, I was quiet about this for a long time but it's an interesting piece of history so... there you go.

FOX NEWS AT 11: Elon Musk's Twitter sabotaged by transgender hacker activists using "ActivityPunk" technology to build dangerous "fetishverse" network

A lot of people contributed to ActivityPub, but I'm going to give a breakdown of the authors and what they did:

- Evan Prodromou designed the core prototol, derived from the federation API of Pump.IO (itself a "lessons learned" from his experiences co-authoring OStatus, ActivityPub's predecessor)
- @erincandescent converted Evan's set of notes into the spec format and language style
- @tsyesika was the first major editor of the spec once it was being standardized at the W3C
- @rhiaro separated out client-to-server support from server-to-server support and made many, many edits
- And I carried the spec through probably the majority of the bureaucratic process and tried really hard to get inter-project buy-in on its ideas. And most importantly, I wrote that "Overview" tutorial at the top of the document, which is the part I'm most proud of!

Often times people ask me, "But how do I learn about how ActivityPub works? Where do I get started?"

Friends! The ActivityPub spec itself is here to help you! There's a really lovely story-driven tutorial about ActivityPub right at the top of the spec in the "Overview" section! https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#Overview

Give it a read! I tried really hard to make it easy to follow, and it has beautiful illustrations from @mray!

I don't think the fediverse, as it is, is really prepared for this moment in history. But it's better prepared than anything else is, probably, and I believe it can be improved to meet the challenges we must face.