So, I used messaging here in the broad sense. One possible application for it is instant messaging, which there are ActivityPub implementations out there doing that. But it can also be used for statuses or pretty much anything else that gets federated.

It’s not, the demo video actually shows that being one such use case. There’s nothing stopping anyone from writing a chat service in ActivityPub. But this can also apply to statuses, media, all kinds of other stuff.

Yeah, it was kind of an obscure project to begin with. Still, it struck me as an excellent way to prototype federated services that all hooked into a singular identity.

Hopefully, it inspires future work.

Nope! The main thing going for a distributed ledger would be global consistency, but there are some very negative downsides. It’s slow, scales poorly, puts a massive burden on admins operating instances, and the blocks would be effectively immutable…meaning that if the contents of each activity were fully nested inside of a block, edits or deletions would be impossible. We already see problems with CSAM showing up in various blockchains, and a Fediverse blockchain used for social purposes would be no different.

It’s just not the right tool for the job when it comes to social networks. There were a few early experiments in this area, such as Twister, which tried to build a Twitter clone on top of a blockchain using DHT. It has a huge list of limitations, though, and development stopped around 2020.

To be clear: that’s for the entire application. The ActivityPub part is here: github.com/TryGhost/ActivityPub

There’s still development, but a lot of it is writing test units, updating dependencies, and optimizations. Still good stuff, but all we can really see is side-effects of their development plans, not really much of a roadmap itself.

Silverpill might not like me making this comparison, but its form and function are shockingly similar to OnlyFans.

OpenCollective is a pretty solid open source contender in my experience. It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely workable.