Matt Muellenweg re-comits #Tumblr to support #ActivityPub & to join the #Fediverse:
"Tumblr is...not open source yet. But we’ve said it’s going to be & we’ve tried to make the data super open. So the API’s, you can put your Tumblr into WordPress very easily, you can export all your Tumblr content... then longer term, we want to support these new protocols like activity pub on top of… We’re gonna support #RSS so things are easy to get in and out."
https://hallwaychats.com/episodes/episode-161-a-chat-with-matt-mullenweg/
@tchambers It seems like #Tumblr will not be embracing #ActivityPub for awhile. The same could be said for open sourcing Tumblr too. If I was to guess, I would say ActivityPub by summer of this year, & open sourcing Tumblr by winter (at the earliest).
What makes you expect the delay for ActivityPub?
@volkris This quote right here:
“And then longer term, we want to support these new protocols like activity pub on top of… We’re gonna support RSS so things are easy to get in and out.”
Link for those wondering: https://hallwaychats.com/episodes/episode-161-a-chat-with-matt-mullenweg/
I believe Automattic is discovering that implementing #ActivityPub upon #Tumblr is harder than expected. #MicroBlog struggles with this as well, & to my knowledge so did #WriteFreely too.
I think a lot of people have been caught off guard by how resource intensive ActivityPub is, just based on design choices that went into the standard that maybe weren't fully analyzed in terms of scaling.
I wouldn't be surprised if large platforms like Tumblr started testing and quickly realized that it was getting out of hand for their size, and they need to figure out a way to reign that in before they can really proceed.
@volkris You are probably right. I wonder if Automattic looked at the code behind #Mastodon & assumed #ActivityPub would be easy to implement inside #Tumblr‽
Well to go on about this just a little bit more, when I read the ActivityPub standard It really jumped out at me that the standard required these exponentially increasing numbers of internet connections to be opened and messages to be passed.
It's not just about reading source code, it's just looking at the design of a system that requires an instance to contact so many other instances to transmit so many copies of messages, one by one, that scales questionably.
There's just a bunch of elements where factors multiply and multiply so that as the system gets more load it has to spend exponentially more resources to address the load.
Well it's not an answer to your question, but I don't know anything about development or future of ActivityPub.
I'm just sitting here in my armchair to say that the improvements I would want to see would probably represent a whole new standard not just tweaks to this one.
For example I really grumble that end-to-end encryption sorts of features were not core to the whole thing. I really think ActivityPub missed a chance to really empower users using PKI in its core but at this point it would have to start from scratch for a solution that I would really be into.
I'm not sure what they could do about scaling now. The decisions leading to those problems might be too far ingrained into the standard to really address them.
@volkris @darnell That's too bad. The idea of starting over after the progress Mastodon in particular has made isn't appealing. Unless the application in layered in such a way that ActivityPub could be replaced with minimal changes to Mastadon (but that seems unlikely)