ActivityPods: Federated Solid Pods

submitted by Sean Tilley

wedistribute.org/2024/04/activitypods-federated…

ActivityPods is a wild project that's bringing the architecture and data capabilities of Tim Berners-Lee's Solid Protocol to the Fediverse. We dig in to what it is, how it works, and what's currently possible with the framework.

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Otter

What ActivityPods effectively provides are automated mechanisms. They constantly check the contents of the Solid pod, and are notified whenever a change gets made.

Let’s say you’ve just made a post with your Fediverse app: a document representing a post is written in the Pod, then a dispatch mechanism acts as the user’s outbox and sends the activity out. Meanwhile, the corresponding inbox mechanism waits for replies.

What this could mean in practice is that editing a Fediverse post may be as simple as editing a corresponding file, while a mechanism pushes out an Update activity through your Outbox to make changes on the network.

I think I need an even more higher level explanation of Solid & Solidpods, but so far that sounds cool!

Would the data still live on your instance's server or on user devices? If it's the latter, how would it work if some people have really slow connections, or lose internet all together.

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mosiacmango , edited

The data lives in both places. Your pod is all of your data held in one place. The interaction is a copy of that data sent in and out to the various social networks.

I would expect that you could adjust how much context to save around your comments. Maybe it pulls down the while thread on whatever service, or maybe just the comment you replied to with a url.

This is a bit of a deviation from the initial "Solid" concept, as that was a fully standalone controlled data warehouse that you allowed social media to access only during using the service. It was a way to have control of your data because you hold the data instead of social networks.

With the fediverse's replication between different hosts, there wouldn't be a way to gate this data, so the concept looks like it was adaptived. A big advantage for the fediverse? Your account is actually on you pod, not someone elses server. The data is replicated via the servers is all. You would basically be "federating" your identity with a server, not depending on it.

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Dame

I don’t understand. What data do you mean for an instance?

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thegreekgeek

I think in this case the pod is your instance and you'd be interacting with it like you'd interact with an alternative frontend for Lemmy.

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Alice

Interesting

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