And amazingly, I'm not the only one who realizes this! There are slides (near the 40-min mark) in Cory Slep's presentation that address a need for mobile federation!

I looked for a go-fed library equivalent written in Swift, and didn't find anything. I have yet to dig into what the official Mastodon iOS app is doing, although I've bookmarked it's repo:

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-ios

...I didn't see anything in the list of acknowledgements.

6/x

Essentially, this *kind of thing*, connecting people, their interests, their activities, is always what I saw the internet as *for*. With ActivityPub, it feels like we’re getting close! But Mastodon is just the tip of the iceberg! IMO, we need this kind of thing for more than just hot air. Every kind of software needs this. Mobile apps need this!

5/x

I'm not sure how this is going to turn out, because supposedly quote-toots aren't a thing, but it was actually this toot that sent me down this rabbit hole earlier today:

"It warms my stupid little nerdy heart it does! It seems like a promise of the web, properly decentralised sharing for everyone, is finally coming to life."
https://mastodon.social/@john@sauropods.win/109326066704273380

I definitely share this sentiment.

4/x

I went looking for libraries that implement just the ActivityPub interactions without an app "on top" of them, and the only one I found was go-fed, a library written in Go.

https://go-fed.org/

I ended up watching this entire talk about the author of the library, given as part of ActivityPub conference 2020:

https://conf.tube/w/jqu23ke8Px9mFpCztZTTqw

(Incidentally, let me know if there are other libraries out there. I've definitely barely scratched the surface here so far.)

3/x

The first thing I looked at, I suppose, was https://activitypub.rocks/

There's lots of basic info on there, including links to the w3.org pages for ActivityPub:

https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

and ActivityStreams:

https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/

...the protocols that drive the whole "fediverse".

2/x

Spent several hours today researching ActivityPub and related technologies.

Some background: I "gave up" web development approximately 14 years ago when I moved to full-time iOS work. (I had been a PHP programmer for 5 or 6 years before that.) But I've never stopped believing in the web and it's power to transform humanity.

This will be a thread. 1/x

I couldn't find any info on the amazing image in that last boost. There's an attribution, but I'm assuming the image was generated with Midjourney or one of the other AI apps. Maybe @AmitaiCo will see this and be willing to say more?

Anyway, I think it rather effectively dramatizes the twitter to mastodon diaspora. 😂