The tech industry is abuzz with a new standard for social networking that is more open, more user-centric, and potentially more powerful than Meta and X(Twitter).

The hottest new thing in social isn’t vertical video, and it’s not AI-driven algorithmic feeds. Instead, it’s a little-known, years-old protocol called ActivityPub that could help rewire the entire social fabric of the internet.

ActivityPub is a decentralized social networking protocol based on the ActivityStreams 2.0 data format. ActivityPub is an official W3C recommended standard published by the W3C Social Web Working Group. It provides a client-to-server API for creating, updating, and deleting content, as well as a federated server-to-server API for delivering notifications and subscribing to content.

ActivityPub is a standard that allows different web applications to interact so that users can pool their information and collaborate across instances (websites, applications), even ones running different software.

In recent months, several tech companies have thrown their resources into ActivityPub and what’s now known as “the Fediverse.” Tumblr is working with ActivityPub, as are Flipboard, Medium, Mozilla, and even Meta(We know what they had built).

And, of course, there’s Mastodon, the ActivityPub–powered platform that has become a haven to Twitter Quitters all over the internet. But I personally believe that the future isn't Mastodon.

ActivityPub supports common social network activities like following, liking, announcing, adding, and blocking. For example, if you have an account on a Mastodon instance like mastodon.social, you can follow someone on a WriteFreely instance like Lemmy and receive updates whenever they have a new post.

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What is Mastodon?

It’s a technology through which social networks can be made interoperable, connecting everything to a single social graph and content-sharing system. It’s an old standard based on even older ideas about a fundamentally different structure for social networking, one that’s much more like email or old-school web chat than any of the platforms we use now. It’s governed by open protocols, not closed platforms. It aims to give control back to users and to make sure that the social web is bigger than any single company. ActivityPub is not a perfect protocol, and there’s a lot of work left to do to improve it.

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For the last two decades, social media have just been like a walled garden. If you are inside one garden(for eg: Facebook), you can't interact with your social circle on X (Twitter). To interact with each other all your friend circle should be on the same platform or in the same garden. There hasn't been any significant work in the direction of connecting all these gardens in the past decades. We have seen just many new isolated gardens coming up. TikTok’s explosion changed the landscape, but then everything turned into TikTok anyway. We see that all major social media platforms have shifted toward shorter video format which was introduced by TikTok.

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ActivityPub is an effort to tear down the walled garden of social media monopoly. You can view ActivityPub as the paved pathway which connects two walled gardens or social media. In simpler and hypothetical words, It can be said that users of Facebook can directly like, share, and comment on a post made on X (Twitter) without even changing the platform. This prevents the monopoly of one company that tries to monopolies the whole social sphere.

Email is the best example of how this system works, we all have different email domains such as gmail.com, yahoo.com, outlook.com, etc., but we are free to choose among any of the platforms and even contact any of our friends and social circle who have chosen any of the other domain.

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You can watch the below video to get a better idea of what this fuzz is all about and understand this topic in a much deeper way.

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