ActivityPub Rocks!

ActivityPub reaches Proposed Recommendation status!

2017-12-08T00:00:00+0600

A little over one year later after reaching Candidate Recommendation status we're pleased to announce that ActivityPub has now reached Proposed Recommendation status! (We actually moved to Proposed Recommendation status on Tuesday but... sometimes getting out news is a slow process.) This means that as far as the Social Working Group is concerned, the group is confident that ActivityPub is ready to become a real specification. Now we wait and cross our fingers for the W3C Membership and W3C Management to approve. Assuming all goes well, that would mean moving to Recommendation status sometime over the next couple of months.

In the meanwhile we're seeing the number of implementations of ActivityPub to be growing. What exciting new ActivityPub-using projects are on the horizon? We hope to see you submit your implementation to the implementation reports page next!

Test suite up, implementation reports page up... let's get more reports in!

2017-11-06T00:00:00+0600

I'm happy to announce that the ActivityPub test suite is up and running. Likewise, so is the implementation reports page!

As it turns out, these go hand in hand. If you go through the test suite, it'll generate an implementation report that you can easily submit. At the time of writing we have three implementation reports up, but we could really use more! Are you working on an ActivityPub implementation? Please submit one! Not only does it help ActivityPub get through the last leg of its standards process (we need to wrap up over the next few weeks!) but don't you want to look cool by showing up as an implementation on the implementation reports page? ;)

Note that it's perfectly acceptable to incrementally submit reports... if it turns out that your implementation doesn't pass as many items on the implementation report as you'd like, it's okay to re-submit later. (At the time of writing, my own implementation Pubstrate has a number of items marked as not passing that I'll be getting passing over the next few weeks!)

One note is that the test suite has two components: some of the tests are automated, and some of them prompt the user to manually test something and confirm/deny that it is passing. We would like to have full automated coverage in the future, but the working group agreed that since time is limited and interoperability is already being demonstrated externally through federation etc, this would be good enough for now. But it would be good to get more automated!

Anyway, we're in the last mile of getting ActivityPub out the door. And if you're an implementer, you can help us get there. Submit implementation reports, and help us, the world, ActivityPub's standardization effort, and your project's own vanity by getting an implementation report up there!

Mastodon launches their ActivityPub support, and a new CR!

2017-09-10T00:00:00+0600

Greetings! Big news this week, from multiple directions!

Mastodon and ActivityPub, together at last!

First of all, Mastodon has launched version 1.6 with ActivityPub support! This is a huge piece of news. While Mastodon is not the first implementer of ActivityPub, they are by far the largest existing implementation, with approximately 850k registered users. We're excited to have them on board!

A new Candidate Recommendation!

This week we published a new Candidate Recommendation (aka "CR") of ActivityPub. This release contains two major changes:

Follow requests are now explicitly replied to with either an Accept or Reject.
publicInbox is now renamed to sharedInbox and in addition to being used for distributing and reading public posts, it may also be used to deliver posts to followers to reduce the number of HTTP requests made on followers-only posts between federated servers.

These changes are normative, so update your implementations!

The Candidate Recommendation is the period in which we try to stabilize the standard and get enough implementation to make it to Recommendation status. We don't take normative changes lightly, but sometimes we such changes are found to be necessary in this stage... in this case, we found that both of these changes were necessary for Mastodon, and projects the size of Mastodon, to adopt ActivityPub.

What's next?

We've quietly launched the test suite... very quietly, because not all test suite functionality is added yet! Only the "client-to-server server" section is yet working. However, we're working on the rest of it and hope to have it up sometime within the next few weeks.

That's it for now. Happy implementing, everyone!

New tutorial, new logo!

2017-05-09T15:10:00+0600

A new Candidate Recommendation of ActivityPub has been released, and this one includes a really nice new feature... a tutorial! It includes some very nice illustrations by mray:

Not only that! mray has also done us the honor of designing us a sweet new logo:

Thank you mray for making ActivityPub look good!

Help submit implementation reports!

2017-04-09T00:00:00+0600

This was done a while ago, but I forgot to update the website. Oops!

We're happy to announce that ActivityPub is now open for implementation report submissions! In order for ActivityPub to transition from being a Candidate Recommendation to being a Proposed Recommendation, we need submissions showing that people are using the standard, and help identifying which features are used. (Filling in the implementation report has an added bonus: alongside following the standard, it's a helpful checklist to make sure you're implementing all the things you meant to!)

A huge thank you to Benjamin Goering for adding the implementation report template, which has helped tremendously! You rock, bengo!

What's coming next? The test suite should be out as soon as possible! So if you start implementing now, you'll be able to run against the test suite very shortly!

ActivityPub reaches Candidate Recommendation status!

2016-11-17T00:00:00+0600

We're thrilled to announce that ActivityPub has officially reached Candidate Recommendation status! This is a huge milestone, signaling that ActivityPub has moved to a point of stability where we're no longer planning major revisions and would like to see as many projects move to implement as possible.

In other words, now's a great time for YOU to start implementing! Head on over to the standard and start building!

We're also planning tools to test your implementations soon, and submit implementation reports. There's a lot to do, but we're on track towards being a proposed recommendation to the W3C!

activitypub.rocks launches!

2016-11-14T08:45:00+0600

Today marks the launch of activitypub.rocks, the very website you see before you. This will be a combination of an advocacy website for ActivityPub as well as tooling to help test and collect feedback on implementations.

There should be more news soon. Hopefully we'll be heading to Candidate Recommendation status shortly, and this very week the W3C Social Working Group is having another face to face meeting in Boston. So there will be hopefully more to report! In the meanwhile, if you're hungry for news, you may enjoy this post on the MediaGoblin blog about the last Social Working Group face to face meeting.

Onward and upwards towards standardized, federated, decentralized social networks!