It's all about the infrastructure

Happy Sunday! It's your favorite motley crew of pug aficionados who are back once again with the renegade master, D4 damager, power to the people.

Following last week's major milestones, we've been spending a bit of time planning what's coming up next. As with most projects, there are different phases of progress. Often you start with a "just try something" phase, followed by a "figuring it out" phase, frequently succeeded by a "fuck me, start over" phase, and then (hopefully) a "laying a solid foundation" phase.

Once the foundations are in, then the real problems begin — because what you have now is a really carefully and considerately designed hole in the ground.

So, this week we're going to talk a little bit about the building blocks of ActivityPub and its functional networking infrastructure.

What the hell is ActivityPub, anyway?

It's a fair question. A couple of weeks back we talked about what the benefits of ActivityPub are and how it can be used to create an open network where you can follow people and they can follow you... but what is it?

ActivityPub is an open "standard" — and a standard is really just a set of ideas that a group of humans have decided to agree on.

Some common standards you're likely familiar with: Most of the world has standardized on the Metric system for measuring things. All the appliances in your country share the same voltage. People drive on the same side of the road. Shipping containers all fit on the same trucks, trains and ships.

A standard is just a common set of rules or parameters. When standards work well, things generally become efficient and consistent; like how most of your devices now charge with the same USB-C cable. When standards work poorly, there's often frustration and friction because things that seem like they should work together simply... do not. Like ebooks, cookie banners, or the electoral college.

The web is a set of standards for displaying text and images on computers. Because the post you're reading is published using standardized HTML on our website, your computer knows how to display it for you to read in a browser.

This represents decades of humanity agreeing "here's the format we're going to all use to do shit on the internet" — and sticking to it, so that when new things are built, they're compatible with all our existing things.

So, HTML is a standard for displaying text and images on a computer. Email is a standard for sending and receiving messages privately. ActivityPub, then, is a standard for sending and receiving content publicly.

That's all a social network really is, for the most part: A way to send and receive content, publicly.

Not as exciting as you were hoping?

Standards and networks are rarely very exciting when they start out, because they don't have scale yet.

Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.

It was March 10th, 1847, and it had been a long day for Thomas. Working as an assistant to a prolific inventor was a pretty thankless vocation. Recently his boss had been yammering about a future where humans would communicate with one another all over the world, instantly, without even leaving their homes.

Moments later, Thomas was the recipient of the world's first phone call as Alexander Graham Bell demanded to see him from another room in the house.

In 1847 being able to transmit your voice to another room using electricity was remarkable, but it was no more useful than a centuries-old technology for communicating between rooms: Shouting. Which didn't even require electricity.

What Bell could see, though, was that this technology—if adopted by others—would make voices audible at distances that shouting could never reach, at speeds that written letters could never match.

In between his vision of the future and its ultimate reality stood significant obstacles. First, he'd need to convince everyone that they should have large, expensive devices in their homes. After that he'd have to convince towns, cities, and countries to run miles and miles of copper cables between every single telephone at enormous cost, to provide standardized infrastructure to make any of those devices function.

Some people were easily convinced that this invention was the future, but not everyone was so certain.

Rutherford Hayes, the 19th president of the United States, reportedly mused "That's an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one?" While the Chief Engineer of the British Post Office was succinct in his rebuke: "The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys."

When you hear people talking excitedly about the Fediverse in 2024, what you're tuning into is the collective energy of a group of people coming into contact with an invention which, if it can overcome non-trivial barriers to adoption, has the potential to once again transform the way we interact with one another.

But infrastructure takes time to develop and evolve before its value is obvious. In the late 1800s that sort of invention looked like this:

While today, in the early 2000s, that idea — every bit as primitive — looks something a little more like this:

Where's this all going?

So far, we've been collectively making a lot of calls from room to room inside the same house. We have some very early products that are difficult to use, and limited in utility compared to existing alternatives. Like shouting.

If you look closely, though... if you squint slightly and tilt your head to the side just so... you might just catch a glimpse of a future that's much more than that.

ActivityPub is a shared idea that's catching on.

The technical engineering required to make it all work will always be a major topic of conversation, but the way to truly understand ActivityPub is to examine the idea, not the technology. It's a way for people to interact without algorithms, independently, at scale.

If that isn't something worth fighting for, I don't know what is.

At the very least, now you'll have a good answer the next time one of your friends says "ActivityPub? What's that? Like Mastodon or something?"

"It's nothing, Dorothy! It's all just a construct! A set of concepts projected onto the infinite canvas of a spacetime continuum with absolutely no regard for reality, absent any value other than that which we collectively project upon it. AcitivtyPub is everything and nothing all at once. It is you, it is me. It is whatever you want it to be, whatever you imagine it could be, and whatever you can convince everyone else it is. It's a revolution that exists only as much as you believe it does. Like did you hear about that time when the 19th president of the US went full MKBHD?"

We'll get back to covering the technical underpinnings of how we're adding wires to our drywall next week, with more tangible information. This week, we just wanted to send you a note to say, from the bottom of our hearts:

Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.