ActivityPub

Chapter 6. Far Horizons

So far in the book, I’ve talked about ways of interacting with ActivityPub that already exist—either as defined in the ActivityPub and AS2 specifications, or in the implementations that exist in the world. In this chapter, I want to point a little further afield and sketch out potential uses for ActivityPub in areas so far unexplored or lightly explored.

I hope this chapter inspires you by offering ideas and thoughts that take you in new directions. If you find here a discussion that you’d like to follow up on, or a way to use ActivityPub in an area of technology that you work in, I encourage you to reach out to other practitioners to start sketching out an extension as described in the previous chapter.

The abstract model of the ActivityPub network is robust. Every ActivityPub object is addressable over HTTPS (at least). ActivityPub actors are activity emitters and receivers. They create and modify addressable objects based on the type and properties of the activities they receive. The ActivityPub network uses a push notification model, so that new activities generated in the network are delivered to their addressees in near real time. ActivityPub has a built-in publish/subscribe model (with followers and following), and the most likely future uses will leverage that model, but other modes of interaction can be added too.

Many of the applications I discuss in this chapter have been experimented with or discussed publicly, but most are not widely used or ...