So, it’s my birthday on Monday, which means I’m going to do a birthday inventory, as I do every year at this time. I try to do a comprehensive evaluation of where I am in life, what’s going well and what’s not. This year, Maj and I are travelling to Crete for a week-long trip, so I’m trying to do the inventory a little early to avoid spending my entire trip in the hotel room. (UPDATE: I failed at this. I got part of it done in Charles de Gaulle Airport waiting for our flight to Herakleion, and now I’m on our hotel room balcony in Chania at dawn on the day of my birthday, watching the sun come up over the harbour and typing away.)

• Health. So, this one has been rough this year. I got hit by a truck at the end of June while crossing the street in Healdsburg, California. I had many broken ribs, smashed up my face real good, and also snapped one of the bones in my wrist when I hit the ground. I was in the hospital for a week, then groaned on my family’s couches in California until I was allowed to get on a plane to fly home.
  Three months later, I’m… kind of OK. I am off pain medication for my ribs, and my wrist is healing well. I do occupational therapy and acupuncture and, with luck, I’ll be back to lifting weights at the gym with Stavro in a month or so.
  The whole incident has made me consider a lot about my health — how it affects people around me, how resilient I can be, how the body keeps the score. Most of all, it reminds me of what a deep bench of social support I have — a big family that takes good care of me. It makes me feel rich.
  • This all said, my physical health is not where I want it to be. I’ve got a BMI of 31, which is heavier and thicker than I like to be. I have not yet figured out how to find my way out of this corner; I hope a birthday or a new year gives me the impetus to start exercising more and eating more carefully.
  • Mentally, I’m really over-committed with work and school. It makes me testy and irritable. The accident also has me considering a lot of important issues with relation to my body and my age. I’ve been meditating regularly for almost a decade, but I’m also now taking time for therapy sessions. Together, I feel like this is keeping me on the right track.
• Family. My little kids are growing up. Maj and I are transitioning to empty nesters, and I think we’re both comfortable with it. It feels more like a phase transition than the end of anything; we’re parenting in different ways.
  • My daughter Amita is 19 and still figuring out where she’s going to go to university and who she wants to be. Since this summer, she’s sublet her own apartment in our neighbourhood in Montreal — when she wasn’t travelling to Martha’s Vineyard or Brooklyn. I think she’s happy and fulfilled, and I’m proud of the person she’s become. I am also very excited for her university opportunities as a bilingual student and dual citizen. Quebec, rest of Canada, USA, France — these are all open doors for her. I’m probably more aware of the opportunities that close down the longer you wait than she is, which is a cause of tension between us.
  • My son Stavro is 16 next month. He has really blossomed in the last year; his love of music has him playing guitar and drums constantly — at home, school, and separate music lessons and studio. For his birthday last year, I got him a membership at our local gym, and we’ve been going to lift weights together since — up until the car accident. It’s a great way to connect and it’s the major milestone I hope for in my recovery. He’s also become more socially aware and engaged.
  • My wife Maj and I are doing well together. We’ve hit the point where we have stopped begging the teens to come with us to do things we enjoy, like hiking or museums, and we just go and enjoy them ourselves. It’s been a nice change, and a glimpse into the life we’re going to have over the next few decades. Our trip to Greece for our 20th wedding anniversary is a nice celebration of this change.
  • My extended family has been closer this year than expected, because of the accident. I was unable to fly home to Montreal for the first few weeks after getting out of the hospital, so I split my time between my brothers’ houses in the Bay Area. Although I was in a Percocet haze most of the time, I got to be part of their households in a way I haven’t before, spending time with kids and parents. I also got to spend some extra time with my parents in Half Moon Bay. It was a great windfall from the accident.
• Work. Work has been great over this last year. My team at Open Earth Foundation has been working on a new product, CityCatalyst, an Open Source tool for tracking and managing a city’s greenhouse gas emissions and climate change risk. I’m now managing a team of 10 people, from data engineers to full-stack Web devs to AI apps developers. It’s a challenge, but I’m really happy about the impact we’re having. This summer, we landed a project to develop climate plans for 50 cities in Brazil — a big jump up from the 5 pilot cities we had up until that point. We’re on the upslope on the rollercoaster, and it feels like we’re on our way to product-market fit. Our ability to execute on this project will determine whether we can leverage it to hundreds or thousands of other cities, or if we sag into mediocrity and failure. It’s a really crucial time, and I’m nervous and excited about it.
• Life’s Purpose. What’s developed since last year, even more, has been my work on the Fediverse and ActivityPub. I helped create this protocol in the 2010s, and since 2022 I’ve been actively working to maintain it and develop it. The surge of interest in distributed social networks since Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into X has made this work seem extremely important.
  • In the last year, I’ve been a big part of the Social Web Incubator Community Group at W3C, which manages the protocol spec. I’ve been maintaining the documents as their editor, as well as helping new reports on AP to get out. I’m pretty excited about the direction of this group; it’s really taken shape during this time.
  • I’ve written the O’Reilly book on ActivityPub, ActivityPub: Programming for the Social Web. This is the first book I’ve ever written, and it’s been a huge part of my life over the last year — taking up almost all of my scant free time. It was a challenge to structure the text to help developers learn the protocol, as well as writing clearly about the practicalities of developing for the modern Fediverse. I’m really proud of the result — I even had in-person and on-line book readings when it came out in September.
  • With co-founders Mallory Knodel and Tom Coates, I started the Social Web Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to making a bigger, better Fediverse. We engaged many of the stakeholders in ActivityPub and have started a number of projects to focus on people, policy, protocol, and plumbing.
  • It’s hard to believe that Tom and I also managed to work on a Summer of Protocols project to develop end-to-end encrypted messaging over ActivityPub. We got to participate with other protocol developers in a variety of fields and discussed protocol theory with them. It was a great experience; I hope to be a part of the SoP project from here out.
  • I continue to work on CoSocial, the social network cooperative I helped found in 2023. I lead the trust and safety team and sit on the board. I stepped back from the board presidency this year, and I’m hoping I can dial down my active trust and safety role and turn over the team to others.
• School. All this work on ActivityPub took a hit on the other parts of my life, especially exercise and sleep (see “Health”). Another place that I took a hit was in my graduate school classes at Georgia Tech. For the first semester that I was working on the ActivityPub book, I got credit as part of a “special projects” program, but the next two semesters I had to withdraw to concentrate on writing. This fall, I considered withdrawing more permanently, but I feel like getting my master’s degree in computer science is a personal goal that I don’t want to give up. So I’m back in classes, taking “Database Systems: Concept and Design“. It means reading, lectures, and homework every week, but I feel great that I’m making forward progress on my degree. The question remains, though, whether I’m going to be able to maintain this level of work — main job, ActivityPub, and master’s degree — long enough to finish the program. It seems almost impossible.
• Home. I was away from our house in the Eastern Townships of Quebec for months in the crucial period of early summer this year, and it hurt my gardening and vineyard. My grapes grew wildly out of control, and even when I was back to the house it was hard for me to tend to them with my broken wrist and ribs. Surprisingly, they did well anyway, and we had our first harvest of wine grapes in September. Stavro, Maj and I picked, cleaned and squeezed the grapes, and if all goes well we’ll have a case of white wine in spring to drink with Easter lamb.
  • Our home in the city of Montreal is doing great this year, too. We replaced our dishwasher with a new one, and we’ve been slowly replacing other twenty-year-old wedding gifts that are at their end of life. The fact that we are three instead of four in the house is also making it feel less crowded.
• Travel. I’ve done so much travel this year — I went to California in summer, London last winter for an ActivityPub event, Argentina in spring for a work retreat, Maine at the end of summer, and now Greece with Maj for our anniversary. It’s been a real blessing, and one of the major joys I get from life. I’m trying to remember to appreciate the places I’m going to as I’m there — hard to do when so much of my travel is for work.
• Friends. Ah, the constant refrain. I’ve been bad spending time with friends this year — maybe worse than in previous years. My online connection with much of my friend group is through Facebook, but I’ve been putting more of my life and thoughts into the Fediverse and Mastodon than on other networks. But I have also had good times in person with people in Montreal. I’ve also been re-energizing my friendships in the standards community, which has been a good step forward. As someone who is putting so much time into social networks, you’d think I’d have a better story here.
• Finances. This year has been OK for finances. Maj is doing well at work, I’ve been doing great at OEF, and I’ve had some additional funds come in from work on the book and on the Summer of Code. Unfortunately, working so hard makes it hard to concentrate on savings, and traveling means lots of expensive meals out and hotel rooms. Altogether, I feel better about our finances than I have in a while, but looming college tuitions are going to be a big lift, regardless.
• World. Oh, the world. Last week marked one year of devastating war in Gaza — worse than I even imagined it would be in my last birthday inventory. I have tried to do my part to end or at least minimise the suffering with donations, protests, and online discussions, but I can’t help feeling that the runaway war machine has become unstoppable without a major change in the world structure. I hope that we as a world community find our way to that change. I am holding onto hope that the presidential election in the US reconfigures some part of the machinery so that Gaza’s war winds down

The sun is almost over the horizon here, and the harbour is starting to wake up. I’m going to finish the inventory at this point, although I’ll probably add or amend over the next few days as ideas pop up. Thanks for reading this far.

https://evanp.me/2024/10/14/birthday-inventory-2024/

#birthday

My book ActivityPub: Programming for the Social Web is on its way to the virtual printers tomorrow, which means it will be available for purchase from all your favourite e-book stores at various points during next week. I will be taking this opportunity to have an online reading and book-signing party. The event is on September 30, 2024 at 9PM ET. You can follow this meeting link to join.

I’ll do a reading from parts of the book (the parts that are very accessible to everyone, not the code samples!) and a Q&A. I’ll also be doing a book signing for people who have already bought the book (or who buy it during the event). How do I sign an ebook? Simple: you show me proof that you bought the book, and I’ll post a note on the fediverse with whatever text you want and tag you in. It’s an instant collectible.

I’m looking forward to having more people read the book, and I really hope it helps more people write programs for the social web. Please feel free to join!

https://evanp.me/2024/09/19/book-signing-party-30-sep-2024/

I’m excited to say that I turned in my manuscript for the ActivityPub book for O’Reilly Media today. I started working on it in September of 2023, with a lot of interim checkpoints and deadlines since. In April 2024, I finished the first draft of the manuscript. Over the month of May, I’ve been working on improvements suggested by the technical reviewers who agreed to look over the book, and from my own re-read.

In total, my TODO file for this month has about 250 changes to be made. Some are small — just changing a word or two — but one required adding a whole new chapter, and many required multi-paragraph sections.

I took the last week of May off from my work at Open Earth Foundation to concentrate on making changes. My team was really supportive, which I deeply appreciated. I went to our country house in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, and I spent the week writing, editing, drawing and thinking.

Now, the next stage of book making starts: production. The production team at O’Reilly will be copyediting, indexing, and laying out the book. Their designers will be taking my UML diagrams and turning them into professional-looking illustrations. We have two rounds of quality control on code samples and fact checking on content.

In September 2024, the final e-book will be available for sale. I’ll have a link here for the pre-sale version when it comes out. If you’re eager to read the book, I highly recommend reviewing the early release version.

Thanks so much to my friends, family and colleagues who’ve made space and time for me to do this work. It has meant a lot to me. I hope the final product helps more developers create cool projects using ActivityPub.

https://evanp.me/2024/06/03/i-turned-in-my-manuscript/

#activitypub #book

My friend Evan Henshaw-Plath wrote recently about some concerns with ActivityPub. I want to go over his concerns one by one and give some assessment of how accurate and important I think they are. Rabble’s words in italics; my responses in just normal text.

• User identities are tied to a server. This is only partially true; your user identity is tied to a domain, not a server. But most servers only handle one domain, and most people don’t move their domains between servers. We have a section on domain portability between servers on the ActivityPub Data Portability report.
  Using domains is also how much of the Internet works. Email addresses are tied to a domain; Web sites are tied to a domain. You can move the domain between different implementations transparently. It’s a really robust architecture that has stood the test of time for almost 50 years.
• Users can’t migrate between servers. Partially true. Rabble covers the essentials; you can move followers and not much else. It’s also possible to move your “stuff” between identities; that’s most of what our Data Portability task force is working on.
• On a single server, it is impossible to change your username! Somewhat true. ActivityPub identities are URLs like https://social.example/user/vtles1XgZkPUEulBsFmRX . That identity URL is immutable; you can’t change it. Some implementations include a username in that url, like https://other.example/user/evanp. With that kind of server software, it’s true, you can’t change the username.
  Also, we use a standard called Webfinger that maps an identity string like username@domain to an URL. You can read about it in the ActivityPub Webfinger report. Some servers use that string, instead of the ActivityPub ID, as the unique ID for a remote user. That’s discouraged, but if someone does that, changing your user ID will make you no longer findable for those other servers. I think as we stabilize our use of WebFinger, some of these usages are going to get better.
• Fediverse servers have total control over your account and data. True. This is the “federation” part of the fediverse. It’s how Web sites and email work. Don’t use a fediverse server without a good trust relationship with your server admin; ideally someone you have a business relationship with, or your employer, or your university. Same goes for email!
  It also means that if you control your own server, you have total control over your account and data. That’s a feature, not a bug.
  Another option is using a cooperative server, like cosocial.ca or social.coop. A cooperative is a legal structure in which members pay for and manage their own service. I think cooperatives are awesome.
• The fediverse is a network of fiefdoms, each server admin having total control over their users. This seems about the same as the previous statement, but OK. I think the key strength of the fediverse here is that we can have dozens of different models for server governance — coops, enterprises, city libraries, family servers, individual servers. That level of experimentation is a feature, not a bug. Governance is not baked into the protocol.
• Each kind of fediverse server is isolated. This one is just plain wrong. ActivityPub is based on an open data standard called Activity Streams 2.0 (AS2) which models social data. There is an extensive standard vocabulary that can represent Web content like text, images, video and audio, and the social graph, but also well-known social interactions like check-ins, events, and groups. More importantly, Activity Streams 2.0 is extensible, meaning you can add properties to existing types, or whole new types of objects or interactions. And every ActivityPub server is built to handle AS2.
  What is true is that we have had a lot of servers that only handle a subset of the AS2 vocabulary, and reject content they don’t know how to handle. This is mostly due to mimicking the siloed social networks; we’ve gotten used to thinking of different social networks for different kinds of content. I think this is changing, especially as new kinds of content hit the network. Developers are just learning how to effectively handle extension content with fallback representations. I look forward to this improving over time.
• The fediverse has no privacy; there is no system of end-to-end encrypted messaging. The first part is false; you can mark your posts as followers-only, or directed to a single person, or a group of people. Servers enforce this privacy. You can also mark that you don’t want your public posts to be indexable or your public account to be discoverable.
  However, the second part is true; we don’t have end-to-end encryption. So, if you send a private message to someone on another server, you message can be read by both your admin and their admin. It’s stored in the clear on both servers. This is also how email works, as well as most direct messages on commercial social networks. However, it’s something worth working on. I’ve sketched out an architecture for end-to-end encryption over ActivityPub, and I’ve got a proposal out to work on it for Summer of Protocols. I think it will be good to level this up!
• The fediverse has no system for micropayments. This is true. The fediverse is also first and foremost for social networking — connecting to friends, family, colleagues and neighbours. Most of these interactions are not mediated by payment; in fact, payment cheapens those interactions.
  However, there are other relationship types on the fediverse — supporting creators, journalists, or publishers. The main way to do this today is with paid subscriptions; for example, you can subscribe to [email protected] to get access to premium content I publish. You have to send me US$5 out-of-band or I won’t approve the follow; that’s the state of play right now on the fediverse.
  I think in-band payments are kind of cool for this kind of work, as well as for marketplaces — buying and selling services or goods over the fediverse. I think the easiest structure is adding payment URLs like a PayPal account, or blockchain wallets like a Bitcoin Lightning address.
• Lastly, and most importantly for me, the culture of fediverse server admins and developers is vindictive. I don’t think this is the case; I love the culture of the fediverse, which is playful, conversational, and collaborative.

I think there are a plenty of good points in Rabble’s critique, but there’s one way that I think he’s extremely wrong. There is still a lot to do in the ActivityPub ecosystem, but we have the architecture and extension mechanisms to make them possible. It’s totally not required to go start a whole new social protocol to build those things in from scratch. In fact, it’s a real mistake; it’s far better to work from the existing standard and build on it. Open standards like ActivityPub have a legitimacy that ad hoc systems like Nostr can never have, and it’s the reason that there is so much interesting development going on in the ActivityPub world.

https://evanp.me/2024/04/14/responses-to-rabble-on-activitypub/

#activitypub